DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Disappointed with the snow non-event this morning? Thinking that this winter has been great and all, but couldn’t we have more snow, more cold, more extreme and life-threatening weather? North Face might just satisfy your apparent lust for frostbite. The film chronicles the attempt of a pair of German climbers who, before the 1936 Olympic Games, attempt to become the nation’s athletic pride by becoming the first two men to scale the dangerous North Face of Switzerland’s Eiger peak. The film attempts a love story and some political commentary with limited success. Where it is wildly successful is up on that mountain, as director Philipp Stölzl creates the most breathtaking mountaineering film since 2003’s Touching the Void. Stölzl’s film is more than worthy of comparison not just to that, but to the iconic German mountaineering films of decades ago. The director orchestrates a thrilling high wire drama on Eiger’s icy, unforgiving face that makes the drama in the village below pale in comparison.
My full-length review of this film is available here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and the Avalon.
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Global Glimpses: Best Foreign Film Academy Award Nominees
Another round of special screenings of Academy Award-nominated films opens this week, joining the continuing screenings of Oscar-nominated shorts at E Street. National Geographic is showing all of the Best Foreign film nominees this weekend, starting tomorrow night with the Argentinean crime drama The Secret in Their Eyes. That’s followed on Saturday by Israel’s Ajami, which we mentioned last week, and my pick for best film of last year, foreign or domestic, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. On Sunday, it’s the last two nominees, first with White Ribbon‘s biggest competition for the prize, the gritty French mafia epic A Prophet. Then, rounding out this particularly dark roster on a very grim note, The Milk of Sorrow, a Peruvian film about the fear-ruled aftermath, manifested in one young woman, of the violent atrocities committed against Peruvian women in the 80s, when that country’s government responded to a violent terrorist organization by giving military security forces license to deal with anyone they deemed associated with the uprising in any way they saw fit; license which apparently covered torture and gang rape.
Friday through Sunday at National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium. See their site for the complete schedule. $8 per film, or $35 for all five.
