DCist’s highly subjective and thoroughly uncomprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

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Dorothy Malone and Jerry Lewis.

Artists and Models

What it is: Life is hard and funny for artists like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.
Why you want to see it: Struggling artist Rick Todd (Dean Martin) taps the vivid, sleep-talking dreams of comic-book obsessed roommate Eugene (Jerry Lewis) for his own successful comic book. This was the first Lewis and Martin feature directed by Frank Tashlin, who cut his teeth on Warner Brothers cartoons and went on to direct the essential early rock ’n’ roll movie The Girl Can’t Help It. His visual wit is a perfect match for the goofy dynamic of his stars. Part of the AFI’s tribute to Shirley Maclaine, and a surprising reminder that she—and Lewis—made some pretty good movies. Also starring Dorothy Malone, Eva Gabor and Anita Ekberg.

View the trailer .
Sunday and Wednesday at the AFI Silver Theatre, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. $11.

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The Chaser

Korean Film Festival

What is it: The eighth annual festival of Korea’s bold and often brutal cinema.
Why you want to see it: Korean Festival DC 2012 is presented in conjunction with the AFI, the Korean Foundation and the Freer, whose Kimchi, Drinks, and a Movie program is unfortunately sold out. But you can still see the grisly action movie accompanying the program and have no worries about losing your dinner. The Chaser is Na Hong-jin’s look at police corruption and a serial killer. Roger Ebert called it “ a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days.” Also showing Saturday is Na’s The Yellow Sea, about a down-on-his-luck taxi driver caught between volatile borders and brutal gang wars. The director will appear at both screenings.

View the trailer for The Chaser.
The Yellow Sea screens Saturday at 7 p.m.; The Chaser screens Saturday at 10:30 p.m. At the AFI Silver Theatre.

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Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara watch a Noh play in Late Spring.

Late Spring

What it is: Yasujiro Ozu’s bittersweet masterpiece of a father and daughter’s relationship in the National Gallery’s Japanese Divas series.
Why you want to see it: Director Yasujiro Ozu returned time and again to his favorite actors, and the cumulative effect of watching his films leaves the viewer feeling they have followed the the comings and goings of a community over the years. Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara starred together in six of Ozu’s films playing some variation on the father-daughter dynamic. In Late Spring, from 1949, a widower, Ryu, looks for a husband for his daughter Hara, who in turn looks for a match for her lonely father. Ryu speaks one of the quintessential Ozu lines in Tokyo Story when he laments, “Life is disappointing,” but Ozu’s subtly heartbreaking films are among the most accomplished in cinema. Also at the Gallery this weekend, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu (Friday at 2:30 p.m.) and the 2011 Cannes Festival favorite Hanezu (Sunday at 4:30 p.m.).

Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art East Wing, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.

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Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

What it is: One of the greatest of all silent movies.
Why you want to see it: A Man (George O’Brien) and his Wife (Janet Gaynor, who won an Oscar for her role) live a peaceful country life when they are nearly split apart by The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). Sunrise was the first Hollywood film by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau, and with the help of graceful camerawork turns the archetypal love triangle into a work of poetry. Live musical accompaniment by Andrew Simpson knocks the ticket price up a few bucks, but it’s a cinematic experience worth more than ten 3-D blockbusters.

View the trailer.
Saturday at 5 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre. $13.

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And Along Come Tourists

What it is: A drama of Auschwitz, the tourist destination.
Why you want to see it: Sven (Alexander Fehling) is a young German who chooses a career in what he thinks will be the quiet life of a civil servant. But he ends up at Auschwitz, where tourists visit by the busload, and he cares for an elderly former inmate who still lives on the site. Interestingly, Fehling went on to play a Nazi in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Director Robert Thalheim, who will be appearing at the screening, based the film on his own experiences working at the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Center. Part of the Goethe-Institut’s retrospective of Thalheim’s work.

View the trailer.
Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut, 812 Seventh Street NW.

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Also opening this week, beloved figures in biopic and documentary form: Michelle Yeoh stars as Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady; and Kevin MacDonald’s Marley, about the reggae legend. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.