DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Berlin’s annual film and media festival, The Berlinale, celebrated its 60th anniversary this year. The festival is the largest in the world, selling nearly a quarter of a million tickets to nearly 400 films, and that doesn’t even get into the film trade show that’s part of the event. To wish the festival a happy birthday, the Goethe-Institut is running a two-month, once-weekly retrospective, assembled by Berlinale creative director Dieter Kosslick, of what he considers to be seven of the best films that have been honored at the festival over the years.
It’s an impressive list, and one that, this being the Goethe-Institut, skews heavily German, with selections from giants like Herzog and Fassbinder in the mix. The lone American film is this week’s opener, Sidney Lumet’s tense jury-room drama 12 Angry Men, which won the Golden Bear in 1957. It was an impressive debut for Lumet, working on his first feature after an early career spent working in television. Reginald Rose’s script also had its origins on the small screen, then becoming a stage play, and finally adapted for the big screen by Lumet, who kept the production bare-bones, keeping all but a few scenes in the claustrophobic jury room as the titular jurors debated the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of killing his father. A guilty verdict will result in an automatic death sentence, and tensions rise with a life on the line. A talented ensemble cast, including Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, and led by Henry Fonda, combines with Lumet’s lean, taut direction for riveting viewing.
View the trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. Their Berlinale series continues every Monday until July 12. $6.
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Strictly speaking, this is Baltimore, not D.C., but the Maryland Film Festival is typically among the best in the area, with nearly four dozen features and a number of shorts programs stuffed into just four days, starting tonight and running through Sunday. The Festival concentrates mostly on new films, but does do a series of older favorites picked by prominent Marylanders as well. Among them are John Waters (who presents Paul Greengrass’ United 93), Dan Deacon (picking Schwartzenegger in Total Recall), and Bill Callahan (Cassavetes’ Faces). Highlights of new films on the schedule include Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about his friend, the late monologist Spalding Grey, called And Everything is Going Fine; American Jihadist, Mark Claywell’s documentary looking at the roots of militant Islam, via D.C. native (and Madam’s Organ bouncer) Isa Abdullah Ali, who has fought in Muslim conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Bosnia over the past two decades; mumblecore favorites the Duplass brothers get an A-list cast including Marisa Tomei, John C. Reilly, and Jonah Hill in their comedy Cyrus; and the closing night film is Rodrigo García’s Mother and Child, an ensemble piece about adoption with Naomi Watts, Annette Benning, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Tonight through Sunday at a number of locations around Baltimore. See the festival site for tickets and a full schedule.
