DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The National Gallery opens a three-film series this weekend, screening films about the Risorgimento, the period in the 19th century when the various Italian states coalesced into the single country we know today. The biggest title of the bunch screens this weekend, Luchino Visconti’s lush, epic The Leopard. The film stars Burt Lancaster as a prince, the head of an aristocratic family that is impacted by the coming changes in Italy. Lancaster, of course, doesn’t speak Italian, but Visconti’s producers insisted on an international star if they were going to pony up the lira for the production. The film has existed in a number of different cuts over the years, and often two versions of each: one in Italian with Lancaster’s dialogue dubbed, another in English with his voice and everyone else dubbed.
Even with that bit of awkwardness, the film became a classic, and Lancaster’s performance — even when you don’t get his voice, hailed for its depth. If you’re familiar with the film, you may still want to check it out this weekend. The version being screened is a newly restored cut that runs to 201 minutes, very nearly the length of the original version that Visconti screened at Cannes in 1963 before it went through a series of cuts for international distribution.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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In partnership with the TransAfrica Forum and afrikafé, the AFI is once again presenting the New African Films Festival, the series’ seventh iteration. This year’s festival has eight features and two shorts, from all over the continent. Leading things off tonight is The Athlete, an Ethiopian film about Abebe Bikila, who surprised the world at the Rome Olympics in 1960 by winning the marathon — and doing so barefoot.
View the trailer for The Athlete.
Opens tonight, and runs through Tuesday at the AFI.
