DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
AFI Festivals, Retrospectives, and Special Events
There’s enough great material on tap at the AFI in the coming week to practically fill an entire column, so we’re just going to pack it all in one blurb. For singular screenings, we’ll start tomorrow night with a SILVERDOCS sponsored local premiere of the new White Stripes documentary, Under Great White Northern Lights, which documents the band’s tour through every province of Canada at the end of 2007. On Saturday, the theater’s brief sports cinema series continues with the underseen 1969 ski racing film, Downhill Racer, featuring Robert Redford as a brash American skier looking to prove himself to the Europeans, his own team, his family, and pretty much anyone he runs across. This film includes some thrilling point-of-view downhill footage that is made all the more impressive when you consider how heavy the ’60s era equipment the cameraman had to carry while bombing down the hill was.
There’s also one festival and two retrospectives getting underway this week, starting tonight with the New African Films Festival, which screens nine films from the continent in the next five days. Then there’s Archival Gotham, which has four New York-centric features and a series of shorts over the next week, including the silent East Side, West Side, which will be accompanied by live music, and Taxi Driver. Also opening over the weekend is a collection of five British film noirs, starting with the Graham Greene adaptation Brighton Rock, and concluding with The Third Man.
View the trailers for Downhill Racer, Under Great White Northern Lights, and a clip from Brighton Rock.
See the AFI web site for schedules and showtimes.
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The Atlas Performing Arts Center is making a return to film screenings with a two month-long series in conjunction with the national Opera in Cinema program, which allows U.S. audiences to see some of the best European operas on a big screen. (Don’t search for the D.C. screenings on the national web site; they haven’t been updated there.) There are 10 programs in the series, starting this weekend with a performance of Verdi’s La Traviata from Teatro alla Scala.
Every Wednesday and Saturday from this week through the middle of May at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with a different opera program every week. $20 per program, or $160 for a series subscription.
