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

Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Made in U.S.A.’

Godard in the Sixties

The first retrospective offering from West End Cinema is a three-film selection of titles from French New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard’s fertile 1960s heyday, the opening seven years of his career, during which he made a staggering 15 features — most of which are the most accessible, narrative-based films that he made. Two of these are oft-screened chestnuts: Godard’s landmark first film, 1960’s Breathless, and Contempt, his 1963 critique of the compromises inherent in commercial filmmaking, couched, in truly Godardian fashion, within Godard’s only somewhat commercial film, which he also had to compromise to get made.

The third, however, is a film that has never before screened in D.C. Made in U.S.A. comes from 1966, near the end of that impressive 15-film run, and is where formal experiments and strident political statements that would become more and more a part of Godard’s work began to show through. The story is the same kind of pulpy crime noir base that Godard had an affinity for on a number of occasions early in his career. This was Godard’s take on a movie like The Big Sleep, though the plot was somewhat lifted from a Donald Westlake novel; a lawsuit from the author was what kept the film from seeing U.S. release for over forty years. Anna Karina, in her last role for ex-husband Godard (they’d only just recently divorced), plays a Bogart-esque detective who has to investigate the death of her lover — and from this basic, familiar framework, Godard launches into a self-aware, vivid Technicolor attack on capitalism, consumerism, fascism, and the intersection of the three.

View the trailer for Made in U.S.A. (do not adjust your speakers: the sound is supposed to cut out like that).
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

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Making the Dream

The students at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts are currently engaged in a production of the musical Dreamgirls (tonight, Tony-award winner Jennifer Holliday of the original Broadway production will actually join the kids onstage). Part of the purpose of the flashy show was to help raise money for the school to close a budget shortfall of $1 million. As they mounted the production, the students also filmed the process, and have produced an accompanying documentary called Making the Dream, which, in addition to giving audiences a backstage view of the making of the show, also takes on some of the reasons it was put on in the first place: namely, the lack of arts funding for D.C. Public Schools.

Friday at 6:30 p.m. at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.