DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The 1940s were unkind to Orson Welles. He started the decade with the opportunity to direct his first feature film for RKO and ended up making one of the best motion pictures ever made. Of course, critical opinion was still a couple of decades from coming to that conclusion, and Citizen Kane was just the first in a series of box office bombs for Welles that resulted in control of his films increasingly being in hands other than his own, when he was given the opportunity to make films at all. By the end of the decade, he fled Hollywood for Europe, and appeared in a number of films in order to finance his own low-budget, largely independent projects.
One of the first of these films was Black Magic, based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, in which Welles stars as a conniving entertainment hypnotist who studied at the hands of Dr. Mesmer himself. Welles’ “Count Cagliostro” gains fame across the continent before attempting to use his powers of mind control to enter into a plot with some gypsies to put an imposter in place of Marie Antoinette. If it sounds pretty outlandish, it is, and despite word that Welles himself directed some scenes, general consensus is that Black Magic is exactly the B-movie it appears to be. Regardless, this is a rare movie to be able to see at all, and Welles was such a magnetic presence onscreen that it’s almost always worth checking him out, even in campy junk like this.
No trailer, but here’s a quick scene to give you an idea.
Friday night at 7 p.m. at Films on the Hill. $5.
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Oscar Catch-up Programs
With just ten days left until the Academy awards, area screening rooms are awash with chances to get the leg up on your office Oscar pool. In addition to the short film programs that have been running at E Street, there are a number of Oscar-related series coming up in the next week and a half. The National Archives presents the most comprehensive set. Starting on Wednesday with a screening of Man on Wire (one of the best films we saw last year), the Archives will screen every single nominated documentary and every short in all three of the short film categories (E Street’s collections skip the documentary shorts). Meanwhile, over at National Geographic, you can catch all five of the Best Foreign Film nominees, one tomorrow, and two each on Saturday and Sunday. And if you still haven’t gotten around to the higher profile Best Picture nominees, on the day before the ceremony, AMC theaters is screening all five in a row for $30 for the whole day (including a bottomless bucket of popcorn) at a half dozen local AMC theater locations in the area.
