DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
What it is: The fragmentation of mind and heart, from the director of Run Lola Run.
Why you want to see it: Hanna and Simon are arts professionals facing their twentieth anniversary as a couple when they are both drawn into the embraces of the same young scientist. What could be a standard, if very European, rom-com-melodrama becomes a cinematic puzzle with Twyker visual inventiveness. He frequently uses multiple screens to convey how distracted human attention can be — it’s not just the young whose minds wander, as can be seen in a scene where Hanna attends a stem-cell lecture by her soon-to-be-lover and can’t stop imagining the work of Jeff Koons (the pornographic stuff with Cicciolina). Twyker also plays with soundtrack conventions of film: “Space Odyssey” plays portentuously on the soundtrack as Hanna stands lost in thought in the courtyard of modern German architecture, but the music is interrupted when someone speaks to her — we were hearing her internal soundtrack. 3 has been called an homage to Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies, but the modern touches can’t disguise all the effort going into this: the movie seems to be taking on too much — cancer, mourning, the art world and sexual mores, where the myriad themes of, say, Bringing Up Baby — not to mention the sharp repartee — seemed effortless. Twyker finally turns down the visual pyrotechnics, but the relationships still seem as superficial as Jeff Koons — and not as funny.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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What it is: The AFI’s popular series of celebrated classics and lesser-known films from the dark side of Hollywood.
Why you want to see it: The 70th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon (Oct. 22, 24 and 26) is this weekend’s marquee title in the 2011 Film Noir Festival, but the AFI has plenty of other choices to whet your appetite for hard luck shamuses and smouldering femmes fatale. These films were meant to be seen in moody black and white celluloid, and many of them are not available on DVD, so come and get ’em: He Ran All the Way (1951; Oct. 21, 24 and 26) stars John Garfield as a reluctant stick-up artist and Shelley Winters as the neighborhood dame who takes him in. Scripted by Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler, soon before they were blacklisted. Crashout (1955, Oct. 22 and 24) is a rare jailbreak picture starring WIlliam Bendix and Percy Helton, best known as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. Loophole (1954 Oct. 22 and 26) stars Barry Sullivan as the fall guy in what programmers call “a B-movie Les Miserables.” They Won’t Believe Me (1947; Oct. 23 and 25) features Robert Young as a homicidal sex addict, years before he was cast as the star of Father Knows Best. Cry Tough (1959; Oct. 23 and 25) comes late in the noir cycle and stars John Saxon as a Puerto Rican ex-con. High Wall (1947; Oct. 23 and 25) sets pretty boy Robert Taylor as a brain-damaged vet against the sexy doctor (Audrey Totter) who believes he may not have killed his wife. And though it is available on DVD, don’t miss the classic Laura (1944; Oct. 23 and 25), starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Vincent Price.
View the trailer for Laura.
October 15-November 2 at the AFI Silver. Check the AFI’s website for showtimes.
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What it is: Uncanny, “not natural” cinema at the National Gallery.
Why you want to see it: The National Gallery presents the first of a planned several series that will showcase films of the French fantastique. This Sunday’s program is a cine-concert with Ben Model on piano accompanying Rene Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1924). The title is translated as “Crazy Ray” but the French title Paris Sleeps is a more poetic summary of the 35-minute film’s plot: a mad scientist devises a la-ser that freezes motion and aims it at the heart of Paris. Stopping time is a long held human fantasy with various motivations, from man’s desire to arrest the aging process to more lascivious needs (cf. Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata). Cinematic treatments of this theme are also a reflection on the medium itself — for what does photography do but capture time? Shown with Clair’s Le Voyage Imaginaire (1925), in which three French office workers vie for the affections of their Lucie the typist (it was another era, ne’st ce pas?) For those who find modern orchestral accompaniment of silent films sometimes intrusive, Model’s solo piano accompaniment will be an especially welcome treat.
View a clip from Le Voyage Imaginaire.
Sunday, October 23 at 4:30 at the National Gallery. Free.
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What it is: A festival of contemorary Arab cinema brought to you by Filmfest DC.
Why you want to see it: Imagine a festival of one thousand and one films, one for each of the Arabian Nights, none of which involve Robin Williams. While we can but dream of such programming, Filmfest DC offers us a taste thereof with Arabian Sights, two weeks of the best in contemporary Arab cinema. This year’s festival highlights Egyptian cinema, with five titles including 18 Days, the first feature made about about the revolution that had all the world’s eyes glued to Tahrir Square. Also on tap are films from Morocco (Rough Hands, October 28 and 29) and Palestine (Man Without a Cell Phone, November 3 and 6). The festival opens next Thursday — get your tickets now.
View the trailer for 18 Days.
October 27-November 6 at Mazza Gallerie, the Goethe-Insitut and the French Embassy. See the festival website for details.
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What it is: “The intersection of dance, film, new media, and performance.”
Why you want to see it: Dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Maida Withers presents an evening of six dance film shorts which blend performance and electronic media. Ayodamola Okunseinde and Steve Hilmy contribute music and visuals for dances choreographed by Withers for Dance Construction Company, featuring dancers Tzveta Kassabova, Giselle Ruzany, Anthony Gongora, and Nathaniel Bond. Titles premiering at this event include TZVETA I and II, a showcase for dancer Tzveta Kassabova; MAIDA – Leaving Inward with dancer/filmaker Withers; and Collision Course – a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a showcase for dancers Nate Bond, Giselle Ruzany, and Anthony Gongora, whose “body parts [are] wrapped in bed pillows secured with packing tape like appendages.” For more on the intersection of dance and art, read Withers’ reflection on the exhibit of Degas’ dancers on the Philips Collection blog.
View the trailer for Collision Course.
Friday, October 21 at 8:00 pm at the Artisphere. $12.
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Taiwanese Cinema: Two Pivotal Films
What it is: The Freer gallery screens two milestones in the new Taiwanese cinema.
Why you want to see it: The films of Tsai Ming-liang have the power to both mesmerize and anesthetize audiences — sometimes within the same film. From the dry existential humor of The Hole (1998), which finds urban dwellers casually dealing with a giant concrete fissure between their apartments; to the obsessiveness of What Time is it Over There? with its tribute to Truffaut’s 400 Blows and cameo by its star Jean-Pierre Leaud. Ming-liang’s strange relationship with Western film — a kind of destructive admiration — can be seen in Rebels of the Neon God (1993), an homage to Rebels Without a Cause that at once honors the original’s teenage angst and approaches it with the rigors of Taiwanese cinema. The films of director Hou Hsiao-hsien are perhaps even more challenging. His long shots and slow narrative style are not for the impatient, but the adventurous cineastes find them among the most rewarding in cinema. The Freer will be showing his 1985 feature, A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985). (Note: both programs will be shown in a video projection.)
Check out the schedule at the Freer Gallery’s website.
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Also opening this week, Pedro Almodóvar’s much-anticipated new film, The Skin I Live In. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
