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

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

To go along with the Hirshhorn’s current retrospective on the long career of Louise Bourgeois, the AFI is offering a number of screenings of Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach’s 2008 documentary on the nearly 100-year old artist. Fifteen years in the making, the directors don’t set out just to tell Bourgeois’ story. With a career 70+ years in the making that touches upon a number of major twentieth century artistic movements, any kind of linear narrative would be a daunting — and likely tedious — prospect. Rather, they interweave extensive (and sometimes contentious) interviews with the artist done over the course of their years watching her work in and around visual examinations of the work itself. Rather than trying to guide the film, they let Bourgeois herself play ringleader, letting her talk at idiosyncratic length about the inspirations for her powerful and highly emotive works, and letting her paint the picture of why she has become such an iconic figure for surrealists, modernists, feminists, and just plain artists.

View the trailer.
At the AFI tonight at 7 and 9:15 p.m. and Sunday at 5:05 p.m.

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Jazz in the Spring at the Nation’s Library

Every Wednesday in April, the Library of Congress presents a documentary on jazz history and personalities, curated by the museum’s jazz specialist, Larry Appelbaum, one of the area’s most talented jazz pianists in his own right. This week’s film is The Jazz Baroness, a new BBC documentary (that actually doesn’t air over there until later this year) about Baroness Panonnica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. Heiress to the massive Rothschild fortune, “Nica” (as she was called, and as she was remembered in song multiple times) became a huge patron of the New York bebop scene in the 50s and 60s, even giving Thelonius Monk — of whom she was a particular fan — a home during the final years of his life. The film is a video version of a radio documentary aired last year and directed by the Baroness’ great niece, Hannah Rothschild, with Helen Mirren giving voice to the title role.

Wednesdays at 7 p.m. throughout the month of April at the Library of Congress. Free, call 202-707-5677 to reserve a seat in advance.