DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI’s annual showcase of European film is consistently the best sampler of concentrated cinematic goodness that D.C. sees all year. Not a festival in the traditional sense, the showcase cherry-picks the best and most celebrated films from other festivals world wide and foreign box-office hits, resulting in a sort of best of collection of films from the continent. This year’s program is no exception. The showcase opens tonight with the acclaimed French hit I’ve Loved You So Long, by Philippe Claudel and starring Kristen Scott Thomas. This weekend’s showcase feature, A Christmas Tale (pictured at right) is a dysfunctional holiday tale starring Catherine Deneuve and upcoming Bond bad guy Mathieu Almaric. Other features include Closing Night film Eldorado, Belgium’s Academy Award submission about a road trip undertaken by a vintage car dealer and a young junkie thief in a ’79 Cadillac, the latest film by Polish Legend Andrzej Wajda (Katyn), and acclaimed Swedish horror flick Let the Right One In, which is primed for an upcoming theatrical run in U.S. indie/art house theaters. In all, the showcase has 35 films from 25 countries.
View the trailer for I’ve Loved You So Long, tonight’s opening film, or the trailer for A Christmas Tale, Saturday’s centerpiece screening.
Opens tonight at the AFI and runs through November 25.
—
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Hollywood’s King of Quirk and Prince of Precious, takes his first turn behind the camera to film what is perhaps his most ambitious and thoroughly thought-out script. Synecdoche, New York focuses on an awkward and self-defeating regional theater director (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in a masterful turn) who embarks on an outsized biographical stage project following the departure of his wife and daughter and the unlikely awarding of a MacArthur Genius Grant. Hoffman’s play, staged in a life-sized New York City built in a giant warehouse in New York City, is in rehearsals and rewrites for decades, as the play becomes a mirror of Hoffman’s own life. Eventually there are actors playing actors playing actors playing Hoffman and the “real” people in his life, in ever farther removed models of the city in nested warehouses. It’s like a living, breathing, stage-based Russian Matryoshka doll. The intricacies of Kaufman’s script are a wonder to behold, even if his nascent directorial skills are not always quite up to the task of bringing it to the screen.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, the AFI, Bethesda Row, Shirlington, and Fairfax’s Cinema Arts.
