DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Danny Boyle’s award season joyride, courtesy Slumdog Millionaire, has landed him an AFI retrospective of all of the director’s films, and this week the theater screens his 1994 feature debut. The movie introduced not only Boyle to the world, but also Ewan McGregor, who made the leap from British television and bit movie parts to a his first starring role. McGregor plays a cocky young newspaper writer who shares a flat with two other young professionals (an accountant and a doctor), who together are perhaps the most brutally sardonic flatmates to ever find one another. The hilarious cruelty of their interviews of applicants for their empty fourth bedroom is is enough to recommend the film on its own, but the real attraction here is the dark Hitchcockian turn the movie takes when the trio suddenly find themselves in possession of a huge pile of cash. It’s theirs if only they’re willing to dispose of the (already dead) body that comes with it.
Dismembering and burying a body is bound to have different effects on different personalities, and the accountant (a brilliantly psychotic turn by Christopher Eccleston) begins to fall apart from the guilt and paranoia, not unlike the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Meanwhile each member of the group begins to question the motivations of each of the others until it’s every man for himself. Shallow Grave features the same creative team behind Boyle’s next movie, Trainspotting, and while it’s never as flashy as that film, it’s every bit as good.
View the trailer.
Tonight, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at the AFI.
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Ana Sofia Joanes’ wants to motivate you. Joining the ranks of a bunch of recent documentaries that exhort us to think about where the products we buy come from rather than buying them blindly, Fresh looks at the damage done by factory farming, to the land and to our health. The film isn’t just polemic, though: Joanes presents a possible alternate future, celebrating farmers and businesses that are seeking to make more sustainable farming and food production the norm rather than the exception. The documentary is currently touring the country, and comes to D.C. next week with a screening at the Avalon, to be followed by a panel discussion with Joel Salatin (Polyface Farm), Will Allen (Growing Power), Bernadine Prince (Freshfarm markets), and Katherine Ozer (The National Family Farm Association). Allen and Salatin will also be at a reception before the film at the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church, where attendees can enjoy family farm raised/grown foods and fair trade coffee and chocolate with the farmers. It will be held from 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m. at the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church (http://www.chevychasepc.org), 1 Chevy Chase Circle
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Avalon. $15. Pre-screening reception from 6-7:30, $15 donation requested. If you’d like to attend the reception, you should RSVP by email to lisa@nffc.net or by calling 202.543.5675 today.
