DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A still from The annual D.C. Environmental Film Festival is a massive collection of films, this year swelling to a total of nearly 140, with screenings at literally dozens of venues–places you’d expect, like E Street, the AFI, and the Avalon, but also a number of embassies, think tanks, libraries, and live theater venues. If they can set up a screening room, the D.C. Environmental Film Festival is probably having a screening there. The festival has a simple mission, highlighting global environmental issues through just about any film with an environmental theme of any sort. This year’s special concentration is on films in which earth’s oceans play a significant role.
With such a staggering number of films, it should come as no surprise that there’s something (and usually more than one thing) here for everyone. Documentaries, kids programs (animated and otherwise), feature narratives, shorts, classics, works in progress, you name it. There’s a screening of Azur & Asmar, which we loved last year. There’s the D.C. premiere of Academy Award-nominated local filmmakers Sean & Andrea Fine‘s latest, Built for the People: The Story of the TVA. And most exciting for this writer, the festival is featuring an 11-film retrospective of the films of Werner Herzog, a director whose man-in-an-unforgiving-environment films have defined his career. The featured films include not just obvious choices like the classic Kinski collaborations Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and documentary masterpieces like Grizzly Man and the stunning Gulf War doc Lessons of Darkness, but also genuinely obscure titles from the director’s past, like his 1991 Donald Sutherland-starring Reinhold Messner collaboration, Scream of Stone.
The festival kicks off next week with a festival pre-screening on Tuesday at the Warner, of Sharkwater (the title is self-explanatory), a number of kids’ programs at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on Wednesday during the day, and more than a half dozen films at various venues on Wednesday night alone.
March 10 through March 22 at dozens of venues in and around D.C. See the full schedule (or PDF brochure) for details.
—
It should have come as a surprise to no one that the final slot in the Motion Picture Academy’s annual In Memoriam section at the Oscars was given to Paul Newman. Newman had a rare combination of qualities for Hollywood: matinee-idol good looks, impressive acting skills that came from a dogged commitment to his craft, and a flinty work ethic. He also practiced a humanitarianism that was more than just talk, and was generally considered to be a nice, down to earth guy. We’ve been looking forward to the inevitable AFI retrospective ever since his sad passing, and they’ve come through with a two-month, 19-film collection that covers the impressive breadth and length of this movie giant’s career. This week features the need-no-introduction classics Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke, as well as Newman’s excellent late-career performance (which earned him his last lead-actor Oscar nomination) in Nobody’s Fool. And mark your calendar for April 5: on that day, you’ll be able to do a double feature of Newman’s two performances (separated by 25 years) as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler and The Color of Money.
View the trailers for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke.
Opens today at the AFI, and runs through April 30th. See the schedule for full listings, dates, and times.
