DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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The New AFI Calendar is here!
What it is: A full season for the area’s premiere repertory theater.
Why you want to see it: The Silver’s big screens will be chock full of classics to see us through a cold mild winter. This weekend the AFI begins four-count-em-four promising series. For those of you looking forward to seeing what Wim Wenders does with 3D dance in Pina, the Gene Kelly Centennial Retrospective shows you what directors like Stanley Donen and Jacques Demy could do with dance in two dimensions. The series begins with Kelly starring opposite fiery Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (Jan. 4, 5 and 7), and with legends Frank Sinatra and Jerry the Mouse in the perennial favorite Anchors Aweigh (Feb 5 and 6). Charles Dickens in the Cinema: A Bicentennial Retrospective begins this weekend with W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber in George Cukor’s all-star David Copperfield (Feb 3 and 5) and David Lean’s Great Expectations (Feb 7 and 11), considered one of the finest Dickens film adaptations. Screen Valentines: Great Movie Romances gets a headstart on the 14th with 75th anniversary screenings of the screwball classic The Awful Truth (Feb 3-5) with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, and a new 35mm print of The African Queen (Feb 8, 10 and 13), with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn photographed by Jack Cardiff, subject of last year’s documentary Cameraman. Finally, Bigger Than Life: The Films of Nicholas Ray begins with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell in the bittersweet film noir They Live by Night (Feb 3- 4, 8-9).
View trailers for Great Expectations and They Live by Night.
At the AFI Silver. See theater website for detailed listings.
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What it is: One of the iconoclastic artists of the 20th century, as seen by his friend, director Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Why you want to see it: Henri-Georges Clouzot is best known for the influential thriller Diabolique, which inspired Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Here he trains his eyes on his friend Pablo Picasso. The gallery presents these screenings in association with the recently opened exhibit, Picasso’s Drawings, 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition. For a taste of what Clouzot could do with cinema as canvas, check out these lighting tests for the never completed film L’Inferno, the subject of an excellent documentary that played the AFI’s European Union festival in 2009. Also at the Gallery this weekend: Ciné-Concert: Nathan the Wise (Feb. 4 at 2:30), a silent film program accompanied by theater organist Dennis James; and A Place in Berlin(Feb. 5 at 4:30), an experimental documentary featuring avant-garde jazz musicians Günter “Baby” Sommer and Dietmar Diesner.
View the trailer for Le Mystère Picasso
Wednesday February 8 at 2:30; Thursday and Friday, February 9 and 10 at 12:30. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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What it is: Grand Guignol for the 21st century.
Why you want to see it: An obsessive-compulsive young woman with graphomaniac tendencies and a pair of ventriloquist dummies is fixated on an abandoned movie theater across the street. Suddenly, its marquee lights up. She wanders inside. This is not the prelude to another Tom Hanks vehicle, but rather is the framing conceit of The Theater Bizarre, a horror anthology film that offers six segments of old fashioned Grand Guignol entertainment. The collection features horror stalwarts like Udo Kier, who stars as a marionette man who introduces each segment, and Tom Savini, who also directs a segment. Strong production values help overcome inconsistent acting, from indifferent to hammy in just one scene of “The Mother of Toads,” for instance. Film Threat gives it four stars, which may be all you need to know.
View the trailer.
Midnight shows only. Friday and Saturday at E Street.
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What it is: The Freer’s Iranian Film Festival takes a sober look at the nation’s treatment of women.
Why you want to see it: Along with filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the subject of This is not a Film, which screened at the Freer last month, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested in 2010 and forbidden from practicing his craft for 20 years. Good Bye was thus made under great strain, as suits the tale of a lawyer whose husband has been exiled. Noora (Leyla Zareh) is unable to find work due to her involvement with a human rights group, and is shuttled through a Kafkaesque maze of bureaucracies. Rasoulof is currently allowed to leave his house but not Iran.
View the trailer.
Sunday February 5 at 2 at the Freer. Free.
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Monstrosity (aka The Atomic Brain)
What it is: A MST3K chestnut, stripped of witty banter for your Psychotronic screen-shouting pleasure.
Why you want to see it:An elderly rich woman schemes with a mad scientist to transplant her biddy brain to the skull of a young woman. These evil machinations are achieved through nothing less than atomic power! Monstrosity is the only directorial credit by Joseph V. Mascelli, director of photography for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? On the basis of this, it’s hard to believe he wrote a book called The Five C’s of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques, but customer reviews call it an essential reference for the beginning filmmaker.
View the trailer.
Monday February 6 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s. Free.
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Also opening this week, Pina, Wim Wenders’ 3D homage to late choregrapher Pina Bausch. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
