DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The words “Best movie of the year so far” don’t usually mean much in the first week of February. But in the case of Andrea Arnold’s gorgeous and gritty study of a teenage girl living in a housing project outside of London, that designation may just hold for quite a while. Built around magnificent performances from newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, a sullen 14-year-old delinquent and hopeful hip-hop dancer, and Irish actor Michael Fassbender (Hunger, Inglourious Basterds) as her negligent mother’s charismatic boyfriend, Arnold’s second feature film is a raw piece of prototypical British social realism. Like most young women in this situation, Mia is looking for a way out. Arnold, in the unforgiving fashion of the genre, doesn’t offer her any easy roads.
My full-length review of this film is available here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.
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The Secret to a Happy Ending
“The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits,” goes the line from the Drive-By Truckers’ song “A World of Hurt.” Which is a fair description of the state DBT front man Patterson Hood was in at the 9:30 Club show six years ago when local filmmaker Barr Weisman approached him with his pitch to make “a love letter to rock and roll, starring your band.” Weisman didn’t know he’d end up chronicling the Athens rockers’ near-demise, or that his shoot would stretch on, intermittently, for three years, until the Truckers had found their way through the valley of the shadow and lived on to do their best work.
The result, The Secret to a Happy Ending, makes its local premiere tomorrow night at the AFI. Weisman, Hood, and fellow Truckers Mike Cooley and Brad Morgan will be on hand for Q&A after the (sold out) 9:15 show. The film doesn’t have a distributor yet, and its only other currently scheduled screening will be at this year Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco. So if you love this band &mdash and if you don’t, what the hell is wrong with you? — get in on that witching hour cine-action. And tune in tomorrow for our interview with Hood about the film.
Tomorrow night only at the AFI, at 9:15 p.m. (already sold out) and midnight. Director Barr Weissman and the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Brad Morgan will all be on hand for the screenings.
