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

King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis

As it does every year on Martin Luther King Day, the AFI is screening Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz’s sprawling MLK documentary. The two directors began putting the film together not long after King’s assassination, pulling together as much newsreel footage as they could find about the man. That includes plenty of well known moments like his “I Have a Dream” speech and Nobel prize acceptance, and, with a running time of three hours, lots of seldom seen footage as well. They enlisted the services of celebrities including Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Burt Lancaster, and Charleton Heston, among others, to narrate the piece. As has long been the case, there is still no home video release of the film, making the AFI’s annual screenings one of the few venues to see the full, uncut film. This event (like all of those in this week’s Popcorn & Candy) is free, and tickets can be obtained on Monday at the AFI box office.

View a clip from the movie.
Monday at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. at the AFI. Tickets are free, and only available at the AFI box office on the day of the screening, limit four per person.

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Celebrating Chekhov on the Russian Screen

This weekend, in celebration of the 150th birthday of Anton Checkhov, the National Gallery is presenting a series of seven films taken from the plays and stories of the Russian writer. They’re also keeping things strictly native: while Chekhov has been adapted on the screen in quite a few countries, they NGA series is only screening Russian language films. This weekend there are two, starting Saturday with 1974’s An Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, which is loosely based on Checkhov’s play Platanov, but which also includes elements from a couple of short stories. The film examines 19th century Russian society via a country retreat that reunites friends and former lovers. This is followed, on Sunday, by Ward No. 6, a new film by director Karen Shakhnazarov (who will be in attendance for the screening). This is based on the Chekhov story of the same name, about inmates in a psychiatric hospital, but updates the original story to a more modern setting.

Ward No. 6 plays Sunday at 5 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Unfinished Piece for Player Piano is Saturday at 4 p.m. Free.