DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Want a surer sign of the coming end of winter than how sunny it is when a pudgy rodent gets rousted from his hole? Just look to the AFI calendar, which is habitually devoid of anything but Oscar-hopeful December holdovers throughout the month of January. But come early February, they get their retrospective machine cranking again, which can only mean that weather more conducive to going out to a movie — instead of huddling under a blanket on your couch — must me just around the corner. To that end, the theater has four retrospective series beginning this weekend:
>> Alfred Hitchcock Retrospective: Part I: Sure, you’ve seen all the Hitchcock Hollywood classics, but how many of his early British work, going back to the silent era, have you caught? The first part of the theater’s Hitch series concentrates just on that pre-Hollywood work, charting his course through 14 movies that took him from his early silent films through to the last feature he made before fame in the California sun.
>> Backward and in High Heels: This summer would have marked the 100th birthday of Ginger Rogers, and in celebration, the AFI has collected a whopping 22 films together in this series, including all 10 of the features she made with Fred Astaire, as well as films made with other collaborators including Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Billy Wilder and Jimmy Stewart.
>> Hollywood Modern: Film Design of the 1930s: In keeping with the largely pre-war bent of most of these retrospectives, this series is also focused on that era. Presented in collaboration with the National Building Museum‘s Designing Tomorrow exhibit, this is a collection of ten films, including classics like Grand Hotel and Trouble in Paradise, that exemplified the forefront of fashion, style and design of the era.
>> Screen Valentines: Lastly, there’s the annual February collection of romances, the only one of these series to really feature any titles from past 1950. There’s a nice even spread, in fact, with one film from each decade from the 1930s through the 2000s, beginning with 1938’s Bringing Up Baby (pictured, with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn), through 2003’s Love Actually.
All of these start tomorrow or Saturday, and run for varying lengths of time over the next couple of months at the AFI.
