DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Late Spring and 35 Shots of Rum

Yasujirō Ozu’s 1949 film, Late Spring, marked the start of a late-career string of work that solidified his status as one of the great directors, an innovative storyteller with a keen eye for the detail of everyday life. Claire Denis has demonstrated a similar penchant for elegantly peering into the lives of normal people. It seemed wholly appropriate, then, for Denis, 60 years later, to take on a loose remake of Late Spring, with her own 35 Shots of Rum.

The Freer Gallery, as part of their “Paris, Asia” series, is presenting both of these films this weekend, providing an excellent opportunity to view the two side by side (with a couple of days for reflection in between). Both films are keenly observational pieces on the relationships between a father and an adult daughter who lives with him and is in no hurry to either go out on her own or to marry. The setup is the same, as are many of the tonal elements. But Ozu and Denis approach their stories very differently, reflecting the different times and cultures in which they were made: the father in Ozu’s story takes an active, and even deceitful role in trying to marry off his daughter, while Denis’ father seems less eager to face the loneliness of an empty apartment. Both films are quiet masterpieces.

View the trailer for 35 Shots of Rum, and a collection of clips from Late Spring.

For a lengthier discussion of Denis’ film, you can find my review of 35 Shots of Rum here.

Late Spring screens tomorrow at 7 p.m., and 35 Shots of Rum screens Sunday at 2 p.m., both at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium. Free.

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AFI Latin American Film Festival

Every year at this time, the long-running Latin American Film Festival takes over most of the programming at the AFI for three weeks. This year’s festival has over forty features from all over Latin America, plus Spain and Portugal. The festival showcases titles that are award-winners and hits in their own countries but usually missed out on U.S. release, allowing local audiences to see the cinema of these regions without the filter of American distributors. This year’s slate includes a number of highlights, including one of the lesser-known titles that was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar last year, the a quietly harrowing Peruvian film, The Milk of Sorrow. There’s also a pair of features, and a collection of shorts from the rising star of Portuguese cinema, Miguel Gomes. Next week’s opening night film combines the talents of ten top Mexican filmmakers, called together to direct a series of shorts, put together in the omnibus collection, Revolución, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that nation’s own revolution. The collection was commissioned, in part, by the actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, who also contribute films of their own to the effort.

View the festival trailer.

Opens on Tuesday, and continues through October 13th at the AFI. You can find the full details of all the films showing in the festival, along with the schedule and ticket information, in this brochure.