DCist’s highly subjective, selective, and totally blind guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town this week.
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Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer (Agatha Nitecka/Oscilloscope Laboratories)The late Adam Yauch—better known as MCA—co-founded the film distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, which brought movies like We Need to Talk about Kevin and Meek’s Cutoff to indie theaters. So you know if they’re handling an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it won’t be your mother’s Brontë. From the intimate hand-held camerawork, the first black actor (James Howson, in his feature debut) to portray Heathcliff, and a rounded 1970’s font, this period piece sets tradition in a very modern idiom. Slant Magazine writes that director Andrea Arnold “graft[s] the bombastic animalism of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist … onto Brontë’s outline,”. Some readers may shudder at that thought, but it sure sounds interesting to me.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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(CBS Films)The Irish playwright and director Martin McDonagh’s second feature film is a crimnal-minded comedy that seems to wear its quirks on its sleeve. I loved his feature debut In Bruges, which made genuinely moving characters out of what could have been standard issue post-Tarantino gangsters, but his last theatrical work, A Behanding in Spokane (which I wrote about here) was too self-conscious and affected to generate anything resembling actual human behavior. Psychopaths reunites the director with two of Behanding‘s principals, Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken, and In Bruges star Colin Farrell. Variety writes that the new film “exploits easy quirk for big laughs,” which doesn’t sound promising at all, but fans of McDonagh (like me) will need to see it anyway.
View the trailer.
Opens today at your local multiplex.
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(Samuel Cullman/Charlotte Street Films)Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) uses home movies, ephemeral film and news reports in his film about America’s War on Drugs. But his dedication to the project shows in his legwork: Jarecki travelled to more than twenty states to interview people on the front lines of the conflict. The principal talking head is David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun journalist who went on to write two of the great television crime dramas, Homicide and, of course, The Wire. The House I Live in won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance.
View the trailer.
Opens today at West End Cinema.
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(Linda Goldstein Knowlton/Long Shot Factory)Director Linda Goldstein Knowlton (The World According to Sesame Street) adopted her daughter Ruby from China, and began to wonder about her daughter’s search for identity in the face of China’s one-child policy. Somewhere Between, which the director funded through Kickstarter, looks at the state policy that led to thousands of abandoned children, mostly girls. Knowlton spent time with girls who, like her own daughter, were put in orphanages and later adopted by American families. Like any other child raised in America, these children are raised on Sesame Street and Twitter, but compounding the usual identity questions of orphaned children is the feeling of abandonment — not only by their parents but by their homeland.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman (Fine Arts Films/Photofest)A bored English couple (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) travel to Naples to sell a deceased uncle’s villa. Amid the trappings of wealth, the Italian countryside rekindles a rocky romance. Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film has been compared to James Joyce and Michelangelo Antonioni as a touchstone of modernism. The National Gallery of Art presents a newly restored digital print.
Saturday, October 13 and Sunday, October 14 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
