DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Distributors seem to be marketing Ken Loach’s latest as a rare comedy from the normally serious-minded director, long the chronicler of the lives of the British working classes. Reviews indicate that calling it an outright comedy might be overstating things a bit, given that Loach’s typical themes are balanced somewhat by a touch of magical realism and whimsy in Paul Laverty’s script. In any case, it may be one of the director’s more accessible works, with an unusual fantastical twist for a director normally associated with straight-faced social realism. Steve Evets (one of the many former bassists to pass through the revolving door of perennial British post-punk band The Fall) stars as Eric, a postman who is hitting some serious personal difficulties after renewed contact with an estranged ex-wife, and his son’s involvement with the mob. When he meditates to try to clear his head of all the noise, he’s visited by another Eric: his hero, soccer star Eric Cantona, who led Manchester United to a string of championships in the 1990s. This hallucination of one of Eric’s heroes helps guide him as he attempts to get his and his family’s lives back on track.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Not Just Bollywood: A Look at Indian Film
This isn’t a screening, but rather what sounds like a fascinating discussion for anyone who loves, or is curious about, the diverse array of films coming out of the Indian Film industry. The Smithsonian has enlisted two experts to lead a discussion on not just the Bollywood musicals that first come to mind when thinking of movies from India, but the entire spectrum of Indian film. One of the speakers, Tom Vick, is the film programmer at the Freer and Sackler Galleries and author of Asian Cinema: A Field Guide. Lalitha Gopalan is a film scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, and is the editor of 24 Frames: Cinema of India, a collection of scholarly analyses of 24 important films from this massive industry.
Tonight at 7 p.m. at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center. $20 general admission, $15 for Smithsonian Resident Members.
