DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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What it is: A special interactive program in homage to one of the great movie showmen.
Why you want to see it: Vincent Price discovers a deadly parasite and takes an early on-screen acid trip in this 1959 thriller. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Producer William Castle cranked out a series of low-budget B-movies throughout a long career, and in the late 1950s, he discovered the joy of the gimmick: from insurance policies handed out to customers (Macabre, 1958) to wooden axes (the Joan Crawford vehicle Strait-Jacket, 1964) to actual buzzers installed under lucky audience members seats. This last was the original gimmick of The Tingler (1959). Bruce Golsdtein of New York’s Film Forum brings the interactive program he designed for that theater’s postage-stamp screens to the AFI’s big Silver. Caveat: a William Castle horror movie starring Marcel Marceau may sound intriguing, but if you ever happen across his penultimate film, 1974’s Shanks, steer clear. Castle was lovingly portrayed by John Goodman in Joe Dante’s neglected Matinee, which is well worth seeking out.
View the trailer.
Monday October 31st at 7:00 pm at the AFI. Tickets are $12.
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What it is: A heart-wrenching look at the impact of AIDS on 1980s San Francisco.
Why you want to see it: Director David Weismann, who previously documented a legendary San Francisco theater group in The Cockettes, here trains his eye on the somber aftermath of the 1970s, when the gay community was devastated by a then-mysterious disease initially known as the “gay cancer.” There is just enough video and photo coverage from the era to put the epidemic in context, but the bulk of We Were Here is handed over to the era’s survivors: a florist, an activitst, an artist, a nurse and others. While many documentaries have moved away from talking heads, Weismann’s restraint makes the survivors’ voices of memory, sorrow — and finally hope — that much more powerful.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Olivia deHaviland and Olivia deHaviland in Dark MirrorNoir City DC
What it is: More from the AFI’s annual film noir festival.
Why you want to see it: Gumshoes and deceitful dames are blooming in Silver Spring as the AFI presents another slate of films noir, many of which are not available on DVD. These rarer titles include: Beware My Lovely (1952; Oct 29 and 30) in which lonely war widow Ida Lupino hires drifter handyman Robert Ryan. If you think that will end well, you haven’t seen as many lonely-war-widow-hires-drifter-handyman films as I have. My Name is Julia Ross (1945; Oct. 30 and Nov. 1) is an early effort from Joseph H. Lewis, who directed the noir classic Gun Crazy. If you think a dream job for a wealthy widower will end well, then, etc. The Dark Mirror (1946; Oct 30 and Nov. 1) puts sweet Olivia DeHaviland at a crime scene — but wait, she’s twins! Robert Siodmak, who directed great noirs like The Killing and Criss Cross, yokes them. The Hunted (1948; Oct. 30 and Nov. 20) stars single-named screen siren Belita as woman who has paid her dues in jail only to declare her innocence. But in film noir, nobody is innocent. Jean-Luc Godard called Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952; Oct. 29, 30, and Nov. 2) one of the ten best films ever made in Hollywood. Starring two of the great noir actors, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons.
View the trailer for Angel Face.
At the AFI Silver. See the theater website for showtimes.
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Kathleen HughesThe return of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society
What it is: A new location and a new night for this D.C. institution.
Why you want to see it. Carl Cephas, aka Dr. Schlock, says of the resurrected WPFS: “New location. New food. New atmosphere. Same old bite. Refreshingly new absurdist’s attitude. This time we go deeper underground. So deep that an elevator is needed, but this one is out of service. Take the stairs if you dare…………. ” Their triumphant return will be a Halloweenathon with “some of our favorite clips,” and if you are at all familiar with Dr. Schlock and his minions, you know this promises to be one of the best Halloween entertainment values in town.
McFadden’s, 2401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. 8 p.m. Suggested donation: $2.
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The Testament of Dr. Cordelier
What it is: Director Jean Renoir transports Jekyll and Hyde to 1950s Paris.
Why you want to see it: Renoir directed two films that are regularly listed among the very greatest in cinema: The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). One of his last films was this made for television play that brought Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Victorian identity crisis to a contemporary divided Paris. Starring Jean-Louis Barrault best known for his role in Children of Paradise. Also in The National Gallery’s Cinema Fantastique series this weekend, Jean Epstein’s silent adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe classic, La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), show with Eric Rohmer’s cinematic essay on Poe, “Histoires Extraordinaires.”
View the trailer for The Testament of Dr. Cordelier.
La Chute de la Maison Usher screens Saturday, October 29 at 2:30 p.m. Dr. Cordlier screens Saturday, October 29 at 4:30 p.m. At the National Gallery. Free.
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Also opening this week: the black sheep of the Olsen family, Elizabeth, stars in the highly anticipated psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, a festival hit throughout the year; and Justin Timberlake is a man living on borrowed — well, inherited — time in the dystopian sci-fi thriller In Time. We’ll have reviews of both tomorrow.
