DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.
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Hannah Fierman in the “Amateur Night” segment of V/H/S. (Magnet Releasing) A cabal of petty thieves is hired by an unknown party to extract a mysterious found footage video from a spooky house, where they find a cache of tapes they must view one by one. This is the setup for a series of vignettes that assembles the talents of hot indie horror directors including Ti West (The Innkeepers), Adam Wingard (You’re Next), Joe Swanberg (Autoerotic), and Radio Silence. Indiewire calls it “A sharp rebuke to the laziness of the ‘found footage’ horror movie,” but Gene Shalit’s Stache argues that the anthology is simply “about the gory deaths of drunken douchebags.” Could they both be right?
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Asian Pacific American Film Festival
Highlights from the 13th annual installment of this festival include Mrs. Judo: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful (October 5 at the Freer), a documentary about 99-year old Keiko Fukuda, one of only four people in the world, and the only only woman, to hold judo’s highest ranking of 10th Dan; I am Ghost (October 5 at the Goethe) , from Filipino-American director H.P. Mendoza ; and Crumbles, about a fictional Asian-American indie rock band.
View the trailer.
October 4-7 at the Goethe-Institut and the Freer. See the festival website for a complete schedule.
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A Sense of Place: František Vláčil
A citywide celebration of Czech films continues at the National Gallery this weekend with a showcase on the work of a director whose work is little known here. While his countrymen made the Czech films of the 1960s into one of the more vibrant cinematic New Waves, Vláčil toiled hard on allegorical epics that got him into trouble with censors anyway. On Sunday the Gallery screens a 35mm print of his 1962 film The Devil’s Trap, followed by a premiere of the digital restoration of his 1967 epic Markéta Lazarová (1967). This three hour film tried to recreate medieval life to such an extent that costumes and sets were made with traditional tools.
View a fan-made trailer for Markéta Lazarová.
The Devil’s Trap screens Sunday, October 7 at 2:00 pm. Markéta Lazarová screens Sunday, October 7 at 4:30 pm. At the National Gallery. Free.
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ExcisionThe AFI opens this seventh annual festival of fear with Northern Virginia native Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision (October 10), an expansion of his 2008 award-winning short film into a feature starring 90201’s Anna Lynne McCord as well as genre icons Malcolm MacDowell and Traci Lords. Next week’s life-endagering lineup also includes Play Dead, a “filmed spook show” co-directed by Shade Rupe and Penn and Teller’s diminutive but no less menacing Teller, who tells festival promoters that he “love[s] the idea of bringing more lying, evil, and skullduggery to Washington, D.C.!”
View the trailer for Excision.
October 10-18 at the AFI. See a complete festival schedule here.
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Also opening this weekend, Nicole Kidman finds a novel way to treat Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in The Paperboy, starring Matthew McConaughey as an investigative reporter in 1960s Miami. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
