DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.
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The Mutual Inspirations festival is not blessed with a name that adequately signals the treasures it holds. The city-wide showcase of Czech cinema focusses on the work of director Miloš Forman, whose early work, including his American debut Taking Off, screens at the National Gallery of Art Sunday afternoon. But the festival saves its most daring title for the AFI. One of the definitive cultural statements to come out of the Prague Spring, Daisies (1966) is a classic of the Czech New Wave. Director Vêra Chytilová packs a lot of visual inventiveness and madcap surrealism into its 76 minute running time, which follows the subversive adventures of two young women, both named Marie. Daisies can be precious, coming off like a triple-length avant-garde feminist Benny Hill episode. As short as it is, I can only take it in limited doses, but those doses make up the wildest movie in town this week.
View the trailer.
Sunday, September 23 and Monday, September 24 at the AFI.
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Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Olsen (Kevin Moss/IFC Films)A romantic comedy-drama about returning to college, written and directed by its star, sounds like it could be an unbearable vanity project. But writer-director Josh Radnor, best known for his role on the sit-com How I Met Your Mother, gives his co-stars plenty of room to shine. Which is what the movie is about: learning how to grow up by watching how other people, from a span of generations, handle their own lives. Jesse (Radnor) is an admissions counselor at an unnamed Manhattan college, talking to prospective students whom we don’t see. But the counselor is kind of lost himself. A former professor (the always excellent Richard Jenkins) lures Jesse back to his Midwest college, where he has fond memories of a favorite but cold professor (Allison Janney) and strikes up a correspondence with the age-inappropriate Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen). The central relationship between Jesse and Zibby is treated with a rare and unselfish maturity. Liberal Arts wraps up its threads of growth and intimacy a little too easily, but the strong cast, especially Jenkins and Olsen, with a peripheral but entertaining bit by Zac Efron, carries the film.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema, Avalon Theatre and Angelika Mosaic (Fairfax).
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Os Mutantes with Gilberto Gil (far right) in TropicáliaThe AFI’s celebration of Latin American cinema is now in its 23rd year. More than fifty films are scheduled, with threads dedicated to Music Movies and Late Night Latin. Highlights include Tropicália (September 28 and 30), a documentary about the Brazilian art and music movement of the tumultuous 1960s; promises of zombie lust in Juan of the Dead (October 5 and 6); Mexican immmigrant melodrama The Girl, with Abbie Cornish; media satire As Luck Would Have It (Oct 9), with Salma Hayek; and Argentinian film The Last Elvis (September 21 and 26), starring a real life impersonator.
View the trailer for Tropicália.
September 20—October 10 at the AFI. See the festival schedule for a full list of screenings.
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(Cinema Guild)The documentary circuit has been kind to local foodies, with Ferran Adrià and Jiro Ono among the chefs who have made it to Washington’s arthouse screens. Director Paul Lacoste adds Chef Michael Bras, of three-star hotel restaurant Laguiole, to the menu. Step up to the Plate follows the aging chef as he prepares the porcelain canvas, but like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the film also catches the master chef at a time when he’s trying to hand over the family business to his son.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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One of the highlights of the documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed!, about American exploitation movies made in the Philippines, was a sidebar on diminutive actor Weng Weng, who starrred in a series of James Bond spoofs. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society brings us the first of Weng’s films as Agent 00, in which he naturally battles Mr. Giant. AV Maniacs writes in awe of “how out of proportion his massive nipples are in relation to the rest of his body.” As that observation suggests, this is a film that you feel bad about wanting to see, but you have to see it anyway.
View the trailer.
Monday, September 24 at 8:00 pm at McFaddens. Free, suggested donation $5.
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Also opening this week, one of the most anticipated films of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
