DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
After a decade of being largely recognized only in his native Japan, Akira Kurosawa’s coming out party on a more worldwide scale was a monumental achievement. Rashomon‘s influence reaches far beyond just film, its name having long ago become synonymous with the idea of differing perspectives on a single event, which is the central point around which the movie revolves. It would have been a fitting entry in the Hirshhorn’s recently finished Cinema Effect exhibit, challenging the nature of reality not only in our individual perceptions of it, but also in film’s ability to distort that reality on its own.
The basic story is so slight it might barely fill out a short film: a samurai’s wife is raped in a grove, and the samurai is killed. From this simple event, Kurosawa spins out a complex web of misdirection and ambiguity. When a woodcutter finds the body, the witnesses are gathered to give their version of events: the woodcutter, the bandit accused of the crime, the wife, and the dead samurai himself (who appears via a psychic medium). Predictably, each account is radically different. Further confounding the accuracy of events is the fact that the witness’ accounts are, in turn, being recounted after the fact by the woodcutter and a priest who was on hand in a separate framing story yet another degree removed from the events in question. Kurosawa’s navigation around the labyrinthine permutations of the different accounts, and their overlaps and divergences, is a wonder to behold. It’s as breathtaking in its interlocking narratives and subtle manipulations as a well-choreographed action sequence. The director ends the film without ever tipping his hand as to the “reality” behind these accounts, instead leaving this open-ended while tying up his framing device with an ending that gives emotional import to what could have easily been an academic exercise in lesser hands.
View the trailer.
Tonight through Tuesday at the AFI, with one more screening as part of the Montgomery College Film Series in two weeks on September 24.
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After going deadly serious with last year’s stunning return to (and surpassing of) their former brilliance, the Coen brothers strike while the iron is hot with a follow-up less than a year following the release of No Country for Old Men. But they’ve also left behind the Cormac McCarthy-esque bleakness, with a madcap crime romp that looks to be in the spirit of The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona. John Malkovich, whose deadpan comic abilities seem made for the Coens’ sensibilities, plays a (forcibly) retired CIA operative whose estranged wife (Tilda Swinton) leaves a disk containing his secret-spilling memoirs at the gym. Brad Pitt, who appears to be channeling a youthful Jack LaLanne, is a physical trainer who finds the disk and embarks on a plot to blackmail Malkovich. George Clooney appears in his third Coen collaboration as a Department of the Treasury agent who is having an affair with Swinton. Hilarity, we’re sure, will ensue. And since our fair city is the setting for much of the movie, there will be plenty of opportunity to play the old spot-the-error-in-geography game in between chuckles.
View the trailer.
Now playing at theaters all over the area.
