DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A still from Valery Todorovsky’s ‘Hipsters’, tonight’s opening night film for FilmFest DC.The 24th annual FilmFest DC gets underway tonight with an opening night screening of Russian filmmaker Valeriy Todorovskiy’s, Hipsters, a brightly colored musical comedy piece about a group of jazz & western-culture obsessed youths in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. The festival continues for ten days, with over 80 local premieres of international cinema, as well as a couple of titles (The Secret of Kells and The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights) that have already played locally, giving you a second chance if you missed them the first time around.
There are a few specialized series being offered with the festival. “Justice Matters” offers a series of films about issues of social justice. Another, “Bel Cinema!”, has a concentration on recent Italian films. Meanwhile, “The New Romanian Wave” concentrates on works from the current renaissance in Romanian cinema. That latter series features a comedic portmanteau film about urban legends from the Ceauşescu regime, with one segment directed by perhaps the most celebrated Romanian new wave director, Cristian Mungiu. A few other selected highlights:
- Air Doll, a manga-inspired Japanese film about a sex doll that develops a soul and consciousness, from director Hirokazu Kore-eda (After Life).
- Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy, a Swiss-produced documentary about the jazz bassist.
- From Christian Carion, nominated for best foreign film last year for Joyeux Noël, comes Farewell, about a KGB agent working from the inside to bring down the Soviets during the 80s.
- Harry Brown, a British mobster film featuring that most enduring of British tough guys, Michael Caine.
- I Am Love, an Italian film starring Tilda Swinton as the Russian wife of an Italian textile magnate.
- Looking for Eric, a comedy from a British filmmaker not usually known for his lighter side, Ken Loach.
- Two in the Wave, a documentary about the contentious relationship between the two biggest personalities in the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
Opens tonight at Mazza Gallerie and continues through April 25 at nine venues. See the full schedule for films and showtimes.
