DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Death and the teenager. Awwwww!What it is: Gus van Sant’s latest meditation on thanatos and the Gap model.
Why you want to see it: It’s the love story between a terminal cancer patient (Alice in Wonderland‘s Mia Wasikowska) and a young man who lost both his parents and loves going to funerals (Henry Hopper). Did I mention his best friend is the ghost of a Kamikaze pilot? Under the direction of Gus van Sant, we’re not in indie rom-com territory despite a soundtrack that features Sufjan Stevens. Hopper is the son of the late Dennis, and has something of his father’s early good looks, but more fragile. This is van Sant’s first picture since the much-lauded Milk, but the lack of a powerful central figure, or credible conflict may send the director reeling back to his old indulgences. Will van Sant ever again strike the right balance of death and pretty boys as he did in Elephant? Or is he doomed to the navel-gazing of Last Days? With frequent collaborator Harris Savides as his cameraman, it’s guaranteed to look haunting, even if empty. See Ian Buckwalter’s full review for NPR here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
What it is: A wild ride through Tang Dynasty China at the hands of master action director Hark Tsui.
Why you want to see it: During the construction of a towering Buddha, people mysteriously erupt into balls of spontaneous combustion. Is it divine intervention, or political intrigue? Director Hark Tsui made the classic Hong Kong fantasy picture, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, complete with a villain whose long white eyebrows reach out like tentacles to grasp his prey. With Detective Dee he tempers myth with reason — but who’s to say either one has all the answers? Tsui has dabbled in genres from Hong Kong gangster picture (the A Better Tomorrow series) to historical epic (the Once Upon a Time in China films) and even a kind of rom-com (Love in the TIme of Twilight) and always leaves it better than when he found it. The fantastic set pieces here, including a darkly atmospheric underground canal, will make you wish somebody would hand him the keys to the Pirates of the Carribean franchise already. And the magical talking deer will make you dream of an HK version of Antichrist. Andy Lau is the titular investigator, with Carina Lau as his endangered Empress. Art and stunt direction is by former Jackie Chan sidekick, the great Sammo Hung. Purists may raise eyebrows at the heavy CGI, but if it has to be used, let it be used by directors like this.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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What it is: The late Raul Ruiz’s four-and-a half hour period melodrama.
Why you want to see it: Chilean director Raul Ruiz, who died this year, is known for elliptical narratives like his bold adaptation of Proust’s Time Regained (coming to the Hirshhorn this Fall). But the buzz around this epic, one of the centerpieces of the AFI’s Latin American Film Festival, promises the old-fashioned pleasures of soap-opera. Mysteries of Lisbon is based on a novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, whose life ran the gamut from orphanage to clergy to adulterer to suicide at sixty-five. Shot digitally (sigh), Mysteries was originally made as six-episode miniseries for European television. Reviews suggest a vivid tapestry weaving Dickens and Nabokov, Middlemarch and Hitchcock. If that’s even partially accurate, I’m going the distance with this one.
View the trailer.
Friday through Thursday at the AFI.
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What it is: A dramedy from Norway that won the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance.
Why you want to see it: Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen) is unhappily married with a young son, but is intrigued by her new neighbors and soon falls into bed with one. Domestic affairs, snowy landscapes and barren trees are all part of what we think of when we think of Scandanavian cinema. But director Anne Sewitsky, making her feature debut, adds a prominent device: a Norwegian vocal quartet, dressed like a boy band and singing American spirituals at regular intervals. Early in the film, Kaja’s son is looking through a box of books with the new neighbors’ son, adopted from Ethiopia, and naturally they find a book on slavery, which they then proceed to “play.” The anxious dramedy is well played, but maybe Norway just has a higher bar for preciousness. My eyes got whiplash from all the rolling, and I just wanted to throw sheets over that goddamned boyband.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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Ciné-Concert: Aran of the Saints
What it is: The National Gallery’s Irish Film series closes with this rare silent film accompanied by a live vocal and instrumental score.
Why you want to see it: Aran of the Saints documents life on the Aran Islands in 1932, including “religious activity…a young boy’s funeral…[and] the day-to-day activities of an island community: arrival of goods from the mainland, children at school, fishing, planting crops, weaving, commerce, and games of ‘tig’ in the lush green fields. Made by the Catholic Film Society of London, the film is a textured anthropological study of a community, and as such presents a stark contrast to the portrait of an isolated family battling the elements in [Robert] Flaherty’s Man of Aran a mere two years later.” Performed with a new score composed by musicians from Aran. MacDara O Chonaola, Caitríona Ní Almhain, Mícheál Ó hAlmhain, and Deirdre Ni Chonghaile perform live accompaniment. Preceded by the short films His Mother, Ireland 1922 and Whaling Afloat and Ashore.
Sunday, September 25 at 5:00 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art.
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Also opening this week: Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, and Shut Up Little Man!, a documentary about going viral in the days of the cassette tape. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
