DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The words “animated” and “documentary” are not two one expects to see describing the same film. In fact, the combination seems to have confused Academy voters, who left Waltz with Bashir, a film that quite a few critics hailed as the best of last year, out of both of those categories in this morning’s Oscar nominations. The Academy did manage to agree that it was a foreign film, though, and it took a nomination in that category. The film is a bit of therapy for its director, Ari Folman, who took part in a bloody battle at the age of 19, when he was in the Israeli Defense Force. Unable to remember the specifics of what happened, he meets another man plagued by nightmares connected to the same experience. Folman begins interviewing others who were there, trying to piece together the reality from his own memory and that of others. The animation is a combination of roto-scoping (a la Waking Life) and Flash-based computer animation, and, as in Waking Life, the use of the animation technique helps to blur the lines between reality and dreams.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Shirlington.
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The Goethe-Institut sponsors, for the 17th year, its annual roundup of the best in German-language cinema, from not just Germany, but Switzerland and Austria as well. They’ve got some pretty heavy hitters in this year’s lineup. The biggest is Wim Wenders’ 2008 Cannes submission, Palermo Shooting, with a cast that includes Dennis Hopper, Milla Jovovich, and Lou Reed. It stars Campino, the singer from German punk band Die Toten Hosen, as a photographer looking to leave his life behind and start anew by moving to Palermo. Tomorrow’s opening night feature (to be followed by a reception) is Christian Petzold’s Jerichow, a noir-ish thriller about a German soldier back from Afghanistan to find himself dishonorably discharged and riddled with debt; he takes a job with a Turkish businessman that involves driving and providing some muscle, but in true noir style, when the woman enters the picture (in the person of the businessman’s wife), things fall apart.
Tomorrow through Thursday at E Street. See the Film Neu site for a full schedule and descriptions of all the films.
