DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Anyone with any familiarity with Bill Maher through his HBO talk show or its previous, less profane incarnation on network TV, Politically Incorrect, probably already has a sense of whether or not they’ll enjoy Religulous. Maher has made no secret of his views on religion and what he sees as its incongruous place in a 21st century world of scientific reason. Those who find his tirades about the ridiculousness of religion to be mean-spirited, smug, and disrespectful of other people’s beliefs aren’t likely to be swayed by a film that stretches those rants out to feature film length. And with Borat/Curb Your Enthusiasm helmer Larry Charles directing the proceedings, don’t expect Maher’s tendency to mock to be restrained. And if you’re the type that tunes in to his show every week, chances are you’re squarely in the target audience.
The best measure of whether Religulous will have any appeal beyond that target is how well Maher and Charles get it across that their film is an agnostic one and not an atheistic one. As the host has made clear over the years, and has been reiterating in the interviews for the film, he finds disbelief just as distasteful as belief. It’s the certainty about something that can’t be proved or disproved that irks him, but time has shown him to be much harder on—or at least snarkier toward—the believers than the non. Whatever the case, it seems reasonably certain that Maher’s film is destined to fill the divisive gap left in a year without a film by Michael Moore.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI and a number of other theaters throughout the area.
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By some estimates, half of all the world’s languages could be facing extinction within the century. Linguists are in a frenzy to try to preserve records of these tongues before their last speakers are gone, and this is the subject of The Linguists, tonight’s opening night film for National Geographic’s brief All Roads Film Festival, which just runs tonight through Sunday. Now in its fifth year, the festival encompasses not just film, but photography and music as well, all highlighting the stories of indigenous cultures throughout the world. While the festival schedule is short, they pack in a lot of diverse material, by keeping largely to collections of short films centered around a particular theme or geographical area. And if you’re still on the fence after checking out the programming, we should mention that there are few nicer places in D.C. to see a film than National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium, one of the finest public screening rooms in the city, and well worth checking out with a great program of films to see in it.
Tonight through Sunday at the National Geographic Society. Tickets are $9 per program or $56 for a four day festival pass, though a number of events are free of charge; see the schedule for details.
