DCist’s highly selective, subjective, and mostly blind guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.
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Team Edward is getting shaggy. (Entertainment One) A pretty boy billionaire (Twilight’s Robert Pattinson) rides his limo around Manhattan on the way to get a haircut. This seemingly mundane setup leads to sex and the Occupy movement. After last year’s tepid costume drama A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis is reportedly a return to early form for director David Cronenberg. As the sun sets on the Twilight franchise, Pattinson has taken on roles outside his signature chaste vampirism. He was an unconvincing rogue in Bel Ami but playing a vapid one percenter may better suit his brooding puss. The connection may make you wish Cronenberg had taken the helm of the Twilight series, or some other variation of adolescent development – what better project for a filmmaker whose major theme is the body in revolt? Based on the novel by Don Delillo, whose overwrought prose thankfully can’t be translated to screen. Also starring Juliete Binoche and Samantha Morton.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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From left: Kimberly Hébert-Gregory , Toni Lysaith, Jules Brown, and Clarke Peters. (David Lee/40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks) A young boy from middle-class Atlanta spends his summer in the Brooklyn projects with his grandfather, Bishop Enoch (Clarke Peters). A return to the low-budget roots of Spike Lee’s earliest films, the director financed Red Hook Summer himself and shot it in three weeks, but the buzz has been mixed. More alarming to me than reports of incoherence is that Lee prominently uses Bruce Hornsby on the soundtrack. Then again, Springsteen worked great in Lee’s mid-career peak 25th Hour, and even if the reports of an unfocused narrative are true, the film’s look at old time religion provides viewers a window on a world not often seen on the big screen.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty.Singer-songwriter Paul Williams was behind some of the best loved pop hits of artists from the Monkees to the Carpenters, from Kermit the Frog to Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Hey, you might stop me on the street and look at me funny(er) — when did that happen? 1987. Beatty and Hoffman, playing against type, starred as a pair of struggling New York songwriters in Elaine May’s generally reviled Ishtar. The box office flop went over budget and is often held up as an example of Hollywood excess, and a Slant critic goes so far as to theorize that the movie took an aesthetic dive as part of a conspiracy. Sure, the Middle Eastern sequences play in stereotypes that are embarrassing today. But the movie’s depiction of American interventionism was prescient, and a growing minority are starting to come around to a radical opinion: it’s a genuinely funny movie. The early scenes are as good as any New York comedy, and a lot of the credit goes to the songs Paul Williams wrote to depict the struggles of second-rate songwriters (you can listen to some of the recordings made for the film here). Last year Williams said to Wired Magazine, of his music for Ishtar, ”If I live to be 100, maybe the world will embrace it.” Speaking personally, he won’t have to wait that long.
View the trailer.
Friday, August 24 and Monday August 27 at the AFI.
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Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti (Janus Films/Photofest)A young woman is lost during a boating trip. During the search, her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Anna (Monica Vitti, in her breakout role) fall for each other and forget their friend. This is a basic setup for melodrama, but director Michelangelo Antonioni surrounded it in glacial pacing and existential angst to make one of the landmarks of world cinema, 1960s’ L’avventura. The National Gallery continues their celebration of Antonio’s centenary this weekend with a look at his great aesthetic leap. 1955 Le Amiche is a film still rooted in conventional melodrama, boring, and not in the good way that his best films are boring. L’Avventura’s stately pace conveys the alienation of its lost characters, and leaves plenty of time and space for quiet drama to simmer. Antonioni’s people live among Brutalist architecture and hold their emotions in reserve, isolated in wide-screen compositions of glorious black and white cinematography that will look great on the Gallery’s big screen.
View the trailer for L’Avventura.
Le Amiche screens Saturday, August 25 at 2:30 pm. L’Avventura screens Sunday, Agust 26 at 4:30 pm. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Susan Sarandon and Frank Langella (IDP)In the near future, a retired jewel thief (Frank Langella) receives a gift from his son: a robot butler (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard). We may never get a Hollywood reboot of Small Wonder, but the buzz is good around director Jake Shreier’s debut feature. And if the combination of an elder class of actors and robotics turns out to be a potent box office draw, we can only hope it bodes well for a Golden Girls android reunion. Also starring Liv Tyler and Susan Sarandon.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and Bethesda Row.
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Also opening this week: Compliance, a thriller based on true events that reflect our uncomfortable relationship with authority. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
