DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

The Return of AFI Retrospectives

It’s been a long, bleak January for area residents accustomed to getting their repertory film fix at the AFI. The theater has been new-releases-only since the New Year, apart from a couple of one-off special events, taking a breather from its usual schedule of retrospectives. At least you had a chance to catch up on your Netflix queue, right? As if making up for lost time, they’ve got four month-long series to occupy your time starting this weekend.

It being February, of course one of those series is devoted to Valentine’s-appropriate fare. They’ll be covering the classic heartstring-pullers of old (It Happened One Night, An Affair to Remember) and new (Moulin Rouge, Say Anything), as well as quirkier fare (Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The most screen time is devoted, of course, to the biggest one of all, Bogie and Bergman’s WWII date movie for the ages, Casablanca. That one will show nearly a dozen times starting Saturday; also starting this weekend is Frank Capra’s Depression-era screwball romantic road comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

On the less romantic side of things is a look back at the work of David Fincher, timed to coincide with all the Oscar slobbering over Benjamin Button. Ironically, the only romance in his oeuvre, Button, gets no screentime here (not that I’m crying over that), though every other feature with Fincher’s name on it gets a turn. Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, and far and away the director’s crowning achievement, Zodiac. This week, however, they’re opening with the one film here on which he’d probably rather not have his name. His first feature following his rise to fame as a music video maker was the much-derided Alien 3, a film that 20th Century Fox famously hijacked from Fincher after numerous production difficulties, and which Fincher to this day barely acknowledges as his own.