Photo courtesy West End Cinema.D.C. used to be the home for a wealth of small, independent cinemas, scattered all over the city. But look at the current movie listings: you’ll find but six theaters within the city showing first-run movies, and only one of those — The Avalon — isn’t part of a chain. As of tomorrow, though, you can add one to each of those tallies, as the old Inner Circle Cinema — one of the latter casualties of the near-extinction of the city’s smaller movie houses in the 80s and 90s — is reopening as the West End Cinema.
The co-founders of the re-birthed venue at 2301 M Street NW, Josh Levin and Jamie Shor, are looking to provide the city with something it has, to some extent, lacked since all those small art houses closed: a venue for lower-profile, limited-distribution independent, foreign and documentary films. Sure, D.C. has a multitude of festivals which screen that sort of fare, while the Avalon mixes lots of one-off screenings of off-the-beaten-track films into their programming and E Street covers higher-profile foreign/indie/doc movies — but there’s really no place dedicated to the type of first-run programming the West End is going to offer. They’ll even be doing some classic retrospectives for those who find the relatively short trip up to the AFI to be too much of a chore.
The first week of programming bears that out, with three films that are opening exlusively at the West End: Howl, the James Franco-starring Allen Ginsberg biopic; Gerrymandering, a documentary on the upcoming post-census redistricting battle; and Budrus, about non-violent protests in a Palestinian border town, which we reviewed when it played at Silverdocs this summer. Somewhat more mainstream is the Friday and Saturday midnight movie choice of Let Me In, the American remake of the moody Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. Weekend midnight screenings will be a regular feature at the theater, but programming won’t necessarily be focused on cultish films: they’ll be experimenting to see what works best for their audience.
