DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Courtesy Magnolia Pictures.What it is: A revisionist history of the wild west; or: what does a retired gunslinger do in the autumn of his years?
Why you want to see it: As playwright, actor, or author, Sam Shepard’s work has frequently examined the varieties of American Mythological experience and played outlaw as imagined by Samuel Beckett (with the possible exception of The Notebook). The historical record states that bank robber Butch Cassidy died in a Bolivian shootout in 1908, but legend has it he may have survived. Director Mateo Gil imagines Shepard as Cassidy, a.k.a. James Blackthorn, living out his days in Bolivia in this contemplative variation on a time-honored American genre. Read Ian Buckwalter’s full review for NPR here. Read my Blogcritics review of Day Out of Days, Shepard’s recent collection of short prose, here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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What it is: A cynical classic of New York journalism that is still relevant today, part of the opening weekend of the AFI’s Noir City: The 2011 Film Noir Festival.
Why you want to see it: Alexander MacKendrick’s classic noir has been given the Criterion Blu-Ray treatment, but its black and white photography (by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe) looks fantastic on the big screen. In my review of the DVD release for Blogcritics, I wrote,
A hard-boiled fantasia of 1950’s Manhattan, the ironically titled Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most cynically entertaining pictures to come out of old Hollywood. There are no real heroes in the picture, although the character left standing in the final shot may be given bragging rights simply for surviving the perils of the Great Metropolis. But the film works on so many levels that there are more than enough heroes behind the camera to make up for the deliciously appalling behavior of those in front of it. … The plot revolves around press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis at his slimy best) and his sometimes smybiotic but mostly parasitic relationship with gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a figure based on Walter Winchell. Jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Millner) has the bad fortune to fall for Hunsecker’s daughter Susan (Susan Harrison), and these poor souls are but field mice for the predatory talons of J.J. and Sidney. The notion that a print columnist can wield so much power may seem antiquated in the digital age, but in an increasingly poisonous media environment, the spirit of J. J. Hunsecker (and Walter Winchell) is alive and well today.
View the trailer.
Sunday, October 16, Tuesday, October 18, and Thursday, October 20 at the AFI Silver.
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The Last Man on EarthWhat it is: The AFI’s Halloween tribute to an icon of scary cinema.
Why you want to see it: From 1950s B-movies to the “Thriller” video, Vincent Price was once the go-to guy for horror. But Price always brought a dignity to his roles that went beyond the creepiness, as in his elegant playboy in the classic film noir Laura (October 23 and 25) and his stage role as Oscar Wilde in the one-man play Diversion and Delights, which he brought to Ford’s Theater in the late ’70s. The AFI pays tribute to Price with a selection of films that demonstrate his range and affirm his iconic status. This week’s titles include The Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm), shown with the 1982 Tim Burton short Vincent, which Price narrates (October 14 and 19); the apocalyptic vision of The Last Man on Earth (October 16 and 19); and Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (October 17 and 20).
View the trailer for The Last Man on Earth.
October 14-31 At the AFI Silver. See the theater’s website for details.
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From K.364: A Journey by Train. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.Time Regained and K.364: A Journey by Train
What it is: Cinematic studies of time at the Hirshhorn.
Why you want to see it: The Hirshhorn’s film programming for the next two weeks reads like an extension of their recent Fragments of Time and Space exhibit, which DCist reviewed here. But that may simply be due to the nature of cinema. Tonight’s feature is Time Regained, the late Raul Ruiz adpatation of the final volume of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The length of the full work is considerably more than a fragment of time — and as such is considered unfilmable even in part — but Ruiz took it beyond period drama to something that is at once modern and sensual. I haven’t seen the film since it was first released, but the sound and image of a character very loudly carving and chewing on a steak lingers like a carnivore’s madeleine. Time Regained‘s all-star cast, including Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart and John Malkovich, will stand the test of time. Ruiz’s final work, The Mysteries of Lisbon, recently ran at the AFI for a week, and will return to D.C. at the National Gallery in December. Next week’s film at the Hirshhorn seems straightforward enough in summary.
K.364: A Journey by Train follows Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloah, two Israeli violinists of Polish heritage, as they travel from Berlin to Krakow for a gig. But this is more than My Dinner with Andre meets Before Sunrise. The video installations of director Douglas Gordon were the subject of a provocative Hirshhorn exhibit in 2003. His most infamous may be 24 Hour Psycho, which slowed down Hitchcock’s film to run for an entire day, and visitors to Fragments of Time and Space saw the return of Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time. So you can expect that Gordon will not fill a feature film’s duration with your conventional documentary narrative. The word meditation may be overused in criticism but with Gordon the experience of time is exactly that: at once a presence and a passage.
View trailers for Time Regained and K.364.
Time Regained screens tonight, October 13th at 8 p.m.. K.364: A Journey by Train screens next Thursday, October 20 at 8 p.m. At the Hirshhorn. Free.
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What it is: A masterwork of German expressionist film with a live musical accompaniment.
Why you want to see it: Of your cinematic -isms, German Expressionism is probably the coolest. Inspired by painters like Edvard Munch and embraced among the grotesqueries of Weimar culture, the overheated emotions and stark lines of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu are the stuff of nightmares, which makes the Halloween season the perfect time to dip into this oeuvre. And if stills are any indication, Karl Heinz Martin’s silent feature From Morning to Midnight, made less than a year after Caligari, makes its predecessor look like Mary Poppins. This digital restoration will be accompanied by a live performance with the Alloy Orchestra, who have provided challenging music for silent film scores since 1990. Note: the National Gallery will be projecting a digital restoration.
October 15, 3 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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The Great Yokai WarSpooktacular at the Japanese Information and Cultural Center
What it is: “A month-long celebration of spooky Japanese cinema.”
Why you want to see it: This month the Japan Center on 18th Street showcases just the tip of the iceberg of scary Japanese cinema. You won’t see the surreal horror of Hausu here, but the remaining films in the series are Fine, Totally Fine, which the Japan Center admits is “more fun than fright,” and The Great Yokai War. The latter’s PG-13 rating may seem to promise only a minimum of fear, but it is directed by the great Takashi Miike, who gave us the disturbing gore of Ichii the Killer and Audition, and whose 13 Assassins was a recent hit at E Street.
View the trailers for Fine, Totally Fine and The Great Yokai War.
Fine, Totally Fine screens October 19. The Great Yokai War screens October 28. Both at 6:30 p.m. in the Japan Information and Culture Center. Free, but RSVP required. Call (202) 238-6900 for more information.
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Also opening tomorrow: DCist’s favorite creepy actor Michael Shannon has apocalyptic visions in Take Shelter; and a controversial French singer gets the biopic treatment in Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
