DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A still from Janus Metz’s ‘Armadillo’, playing this week at Filmfest DC.What it is: The 25th iteration of D.C.’s biggest and broadest collection of international filmmaking, this year with over 70 films on the schedule, nearly all of them playing here for the first time.
Why you want to see it: D.C. is a great town for international film, particularly with all of the museum spaces with screening rooms and specialized festivals sponsored by embassies. But there are always plenty of worthy films that never get a run here, and FilmFest DC provides an excellent, condensed collection of options. This year’s festival has a couple of geographical concentrations, including one on Scandinavian cinema, which includes Iceland’s Oscar submission (Mamma Gogo) and the first film ever produced entirely in Greenland (Nuummioq), among others. There’s also a section on South Korean movies, films about social justice, and a “Global Rhythms” series of films about music.
Other highlights from the festival: tonight’s opening night selection, the latest from French director François Ozon, Potiche, a comedy with Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu; Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer’s new film, 3, about two members of a couple who begin affairs with the same person unbeknownst to each other; and Armadillo, a Danish war documentary about soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
View the trailer for Potiche, tonight’s opening night film.
Opens tonight and continues through April 17 at a number of venues around town. See the schedule for a complete rundown of this year’s selections.
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What it is: The seventh annual collection of Korean film from the Smithsonian, AFI, Korean Foundation and Korean Film Council, featuring 13 Korean films, both new and old, on weekends from now until the end of May.
Why you want to see it: It’s a strong time for Korean film, and a great time to see it in D.C., what with FilmFest DC’s concentration on it and this ongoing festival. This week’s opening films are a comedic spy thriller from director Jang Hun, Secret Reunion, and Breathless, the debut film from Yang Ik-june, a personal story about violence within working class Korean families. In the weeks to come, there’s plenty more films of interest — including another chance to see not only the 2010 version of The Housemaid, which had a theatrical run here in February (read our review here), but also the superior original version from 1960, a landmark in Korean cinema.
View the trailers for this weekend’s films, Secret Reunion and Breathless.
Opens this weekend at the Freer and continues every weekend through May 22. Secret Reunion plays tomorrow at 7 p.m., Breathless on Sunday at 2 p.m. Check the schedule for complete listings. Free.
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Every Man for Himself [Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie)]
What it is: Jean-Luc Godard’s return to narrative filmmaking after spending most of the previous 12 years experimenting with documentary, essay and video. The film is about a television director who takes on a prostitute as a tenant in the apartment that he, until recently, shared with his recent ex-girlfriend. He’s also got an ex-wife and a daughter, and in the midst of a destructive mid-life crisis, he is unable to understand or connect with any of these women.
Why you want to see it: While Godard’s ’60s work is rightly regarded as his best, his return to something approximating more traditional narrative film in the ’80s produced some compelling work, but is often ignored after his erratic, eccentric, and radical efforts in the decade prior. Sauve Qui Peut may be no Breathless, but it’s still an arrival point for a new period in the director’s career, in which he incorporates the experiments of the prior years into his creative process in unusual ways, such as working out the script for this film on videotape prior to filming rather than on paper. If for no other reason, you’ll want to see this to be transfixed by a young Isabelle Huppert (as the prostitute), always an irresistible presence onscreen.
View the trailer (no subtitles).
Opens tomorrow for one week at the AFI.
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What it is: A Long Island-set drama shot in a dream-like observational style, about three individuals in a suburban town each dealing with their own problems on a single day.
Why you want to see it: Director Eric Mendelsohn hasn’t directed a new film since 1999’s Judy Berlin (which also starred Edie Falco), and that indie favorite, just like his 1993 debut, Through an Open Window dealt in similarly poetic fashion with suburban dysfunction. Mendelsohn may not make films that often, and may not vary his subject matter, but has a compelling eye for this world.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema
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What it is: A 1990 drama from director Éric Rohmer about a teenage girl who attempts to match her father up with a woman.
Why you want to see it: This is the first film of a quartet of movies built around the four seasons that Rohmer directed in the early-to-mid 90s, and comes near the start of a large retrospective of films by the director currently underway at the National Gallery, which will expand to the AFI near the end of the month. Rohmer’s typically understated style is evident here in the opening of a series of films that he said he intended to “focus on attractive, intelligent, self-absorbed if not entirely self-aware young women who present their dilemmas with clarity and elegance and express their feelings in inspired and witty dialogue.”
View the trailer (no subtitles).
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, with each of the subsequent films in Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series on the subsequent weekends. Free.
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Also opening tomorrow: Hanna, the latest from director Joe Wright (Atonement), which stars Saoirsie Ronan as a teenager raised from birth to be an assassin. Looking for something a little lighter? Then there’s also Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, perhaps the finest film in cinema history to prominently feature Minotaur penis, whether erect, severed, or both. (Okay, so that’s a narrow field.) In any case, children of the ’80s who take guilty pleasure in the trashy virtues of fantasy “classics” like Krull and Beastmaster may finally have the perfect film to accompany getting stoned and laughing incessantly for two hours. We’ll have full-length reviews of both tomorrow.
