DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI is finishing up its late winter/early spring retrospectives, which means it’s time for another group of repertory series to take their places, and three excellent new collections get underway this weekend to last us until July. One is the annual series offered by the theater to honor that year’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner. This year, that honor went to multi-talented writer/director Mike Nichols. (Of note for fans of Tracy Jordan’s quest on 30 Rock to win the elusive EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), Nichols is one of a dozen people who have actually managed that amazing feat.) The AFI’s nine-film tribute covers films from all five decades in which the director has worked, including his first screen effort in the classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf through his most recent, 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War.
Michael Caine is an actor who seemingly never met a script he didn’t like; or at least, never a script that he wasn’t willing to make for a paycheck. That sort of mercenary career approach might have ruined the reputation of a lesser actor, but somehow Caine has managed to maintain his image as a talented performer even when doing the most schlocky stuff imaginable. Famously, Caine couldn’t show up to collect the Academy Award he so richly deserved for Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters because he was in the Caribbean shooting Jaws: The Revenge at the time; which is about as succinct a summary of Caine’s career as I can imagine. Coming up with a short list of representative movies from his filmography is a daunting task; with that in mind, the AFI seems not to have constrained themselves as much as with the Nichols series, as there are 20 Michael Caine films on display here, featuring many of the different personas he cultivated over the years: early tough guy roles in The Italian Job and The Ipcress File (including all three of the original Harry Palmer movies that Ipcress initiated); leads in comedic relationship films like Alfie and Educating Rita; costume epics Zulu and The Man Who Would be King; and latter-day sage supporting turns in The Prestige and Children of Men.
Lastly, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese filmmaking titan Akira Kurosawa, and the AFI is marking that occasion with a two-part series that will run far into the rest of the year. The first part of the series concentrates on the director’s early work, with a selection of ten films made between 1946 and 1957. This covers early post-war dramas (many of which dealt indirectly and indirectly with the war) like No Regrets for Our Youth, One Wonderful Sunday, and I Live in Fear; samurai films best known to American audiences such as Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, and Rashomon; also in this collection is the first of Kurosawa’s many western literary adaptations, his sprawling version of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
All three retrospectives open tomorrow at the AFI. and run through late June/early July.
