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

Brother From Another Planet / Return of the Secaucus 7

The National Gallery continues presenting programs from the excellent traveling UCLA Festival of Preservation this weekend with a double feature of early films by John Sayles. He’s a director who has spent his career demonstrating that the line between B-movie genre movies and personal, socially conscious independent cinema isn’t necessarily as easily defined as one might think. While the MacArthur “Genius” Grant committee probably looked more at his work as a novelist and his acclaimed first directorial effort, Return of the Secaucus 7 when awarding him one of their prestigious grants, that doesn’t mean that his “for hire” work isn’t worthy of high praise. His smart writing and refusal to relegate formulaic monster movies to second class status is what has made cult titles like Piranha and Alligator such enduring non-guilty pleasures.

No film blends these qualities, the trashy and the meaningful, better than the first film of the Sayles double feature this weekend, Brother From Another Planet. In telling the story of a mute alien who crash lands in New York Harbor and ends up in Harlem, pursued by a pair of aliens looking to return him to a life of slavery on his home planet, Sayles creates a poignant allegory on racism that is also hugely entertaining. The second movie on tap is the aforementioned Secaucus 7, a precursor to reunion movies like The Big Chill, or The Decline of the American Empire, which focuses on seven friends, radicals in their student days, coming together for a weekend of reminiscing. Sayles deals frankly with this group of baby-boomers as they struggle to reconcile their increasingly staid lifestyles with the freewheeling, free loving, young adults they once were.

View the trailers for Brother From Another Planet and a clip from Return of the Secaucus 7.
Saturday at the National Gallery of Art. Brother begins at 1 p.m., Secaucus at 3:30 p.m. Free.

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American Indian Museum Holiday Programs

Looking for a family outing for the holiday weekend? The National Museum of the American Indian has a weekend program that combines animation and live musical performance, which will run on both Saturday and Sunday. The films on the program are episodes of a stop-motion animation series from Canada called Wapos Bay, about a group of kids in a rural native community in Saskatchewan. These will be interspersed with live performances by native musicians from somewhat warmer climes, the Hawaiian trio The Aloha Boys.

Saturday and Sunday at the National Museum of the American Indian. Programs begin at 11:30 a.m. Free.