DCist’s completely subjective and far from comprehensive guide to the most costumed, stabby, tempestuous, and tongue-slapping films playing in town during the next seven days.

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Robert Pattinson and Christina Ricci (Magnolia Pictures)

Bel Ami

Team Edward fans who can’t wait for November’s final installment of the Twilight franchise get to swoon over the smouldering fang-boy in this costume melodrama based on the novel by Guy de Maupassant. Humbly-born George Duroy sleeps his way through Parisian high society to gain his footing as a journalist, bedding in turn Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman and Kristin Scott Thomas. The naturalistic cinematography and attractive cast makes the film lovely to look at, and after seeing so many digital screenings it’s a treat to watch actual 35mm film again. But you realize the kind of movie you’re dealing with when Duroy visits a tuberculosis patient wearing a white shirt. If you thinking this chick magnet is going to be a blood magnet, you’re right! Pattison pouts and sneers and furrows his prominent brow enough to establish a commanding presence, but it’s less acting than face-making. The film’s flaws are not the fault of the supporting cast but of the script. If Christina Ricci is going to pose in a riff on Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, it could at least make practical sense, but how long could she have been waiting for her lover in that uncomfortable position? The most painful sight is Kristin Scott Thomas, whose hard-line character was the closest to a good thing in the otherwise terrible Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; here she’s wasted as a weak woman in a fluffy film. We’ll see how she fares seducing (I throw up a little inside typing this) novelist Ethan Hawke in the upcoming Woman in the Fifth.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.

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Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste.

Children of Paradise

A three-hour romance involving a mime may not be the modern moviegoer’s idea of a good time, but even if you don’t think mimes are funny, what’s behind the mask is the real draw. Considered one of the greatest of all French films, director Marcel Carne’s three-hour epic romance used to be available only in scratchy prints from damaged negatives, but a digital restoration comes to West End Cinema tomorrow. Children of Paradise is the Gone With the Wind of 1820s Paris, and like that American classic is a testament to a nation’s strength in crisis. For Carne’s France, the crisis was behind the scenes. The film was made under trying circumstances during Nazi occupation – expensive sets were damaged by storms, film was rationed, and, according to Pauline Kael, hungry extras made off with banquet spoils before they could be filmed. The filmmakers found subtle ways to thumb their Gallic noses at their oppressors, from nods to liberte to the film’s running time — Vichy regulations imposed a maximum 90-minute running time for feature films, which the director got around by releasing his epic in two parts that would be reunited after Liberation. The difficult production history is hardly visible in the finished work, loaded with all the artifice that you’d expect from a film about nineteenth century French entertainers, but also bursting with vivid characterizations and a love story that needs every second of the 190 minutes it takes to unfold.

View a demonstration of the restoration.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema. Note: this is a digital presentation.

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The Shining

Stanley Kubrick took great liberties in his adaptation of the Stephen King novel, but those changes help make the resulting work one of the great horror movies, and one that has given rise to a variety of outlandish theories. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a writer who hopes to find quiet and inspiration in a job as winter caretaker of the massive Overlook Hotel. But to the dismay of his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and precocious son (Danny Lloyd), the isolation brings out not creation but destruction. King’s novel fills in Jack’s backstory with drunken episodes of child abuse prior to his fateful mountain retreat, but Kubrick disposes of any such history, which make’s Jack’s transformation that much more demonic.

View the trailer.
Friday, June — Monday, June 11 at the AFI Silver Theatre. $11.
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Lillian Gish

The Wind

The AFI’s Silent Cinema Showcase continues this weekend with one of the great silent actresses. Southern belle Letty (Lillian Gish) must choose between two suitors, and the storms of human passion are matched by mother nature’s storms. Gish is most familiar to moviegoers as the matriarch in Night of the Hunter, but began her career as a silent sweetheart. She’s just one of a number of silent era icons to be cast decades later in autumnal roles that look back on the history of cinema. The Wind director Victor Sjöström was a master of silent film but is best known as the lead in Ingmar Bergmann’s Wild Strawberries. Live musical accompaniment marks the world premiere of an original score by Andrew Simpson featuring the Cantate Chamber Singers, a 30-voice ensemble that is sure to resonate powerfully in the Silver’s main theater.

View a clip from The Wind.
Saturday, June 9 at 3 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre. $11.

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Surviving Life (Athanor Studio)

Surviving Life

Eugene is an avuncular office worker with a recurring dream of the same beautiful woman. Can he learn to control his subconscious? Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s 2010 feature is a “psychoanalytical comedy” that combines live action with collage animation. If this resembles Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, that may be because Gilliam was influenced by Švankmajer’s short films like “Punch and Judy” (1966)

View the trailer.
Sunday, June 10 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.

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Also opening this week, one of the year’s best films, and one of the worst: director Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien franchise, Prometheus; and the Jane Fonda hippie rom-com, Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.