DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.

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Gael García Bernal, Bidzina Gujabidze, and Hani Furstenberg. (IFC FIlms)

The Loneliest Planet

Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) spend the summer before their wedding backpacking in Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains. A local mountaineer (Bidzina Gujabidze) guides them through their pre-nuptial adventure, but a fateful moment along the way tests their relationship. Writer/director Julia Lotkev (Day Night Day Night) married old and new technologies, using a digital Red camera but attaching old Soviet lenses found in the basement of a Georgian film studio. But a technological hurdle presented a political one: converting the vintage lenses for use on the Red meant travelling from Georgia into Russia, which is not an easy crossing. This tension fuels Lotkev’s film, which sets a kind of Bergmanesque domestic drama in the kind of forbidding landscape that was once the territory of Werner Herzog. The Loneliest Planet doesn’t have a satisfying resolution, but the film’s title — and its frequent long shots — suggests a bleak view of the human connection we seek in love or travel.

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

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David Bautista and RZA (Universal Pictures)

The Man with the Iron Fists

How many long time martial arts fans get to make a kung fu movie? The RZA’s oeuvre has been marked by this formative influence since the Wu Tang Clan, and he recently told the Washington City Paper‘s Matt Cohen that not only was Shaw Brothers “eye candy” the draw, but that he admired “the brotherhood, the loyalty, and the sacrifice in” classic martial arts movies. RZA failed to get a couple of indie-pix off the ground (Bobby Digital anyone?), but as well as providing the soundtrack, in collaboration with The Black Keys and Kanye West, among others. Most importantly, RZA directed and stars in this epic. Also starring Russell Crowe as a British soldier and Lucy Liu as a madam. The movie was not screened for critics, but the trailer looks like a hoot. Co-written by Eli Roth.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a multiplex near you.

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Laura Linney and Tobey Maguire (Jan Cook/Radius/The Weinstein Company)

The Details

Dr. Jeffrey Lang (Tobey Maguire) is celebrating ten years of marriage to his wife Nealy (Elizabeth Banks). The couple plans to have a second child and build an addition to their suburban home. But all is not well: Nealy shuns her husband in the bedroom, the doctor’s eye wanders to porn, and his anger issues break out of his careful spelling out of cuss words. Add to this a case of raccoon infestation, and you have a lot of details of domestic life in crisis. Director Jacob Estes (Mean Creek) would love these details to add up to a chilling black comedy, but the tension doesn’t come through in a plot that is too quirky by half, a musical score that self-consciously accents that quirkiness, and a tone that’s little better than an extended sitcom.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Mosaic.

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(Working Films)

Brooklyn Castle

In the world of scholastic chess competition, one Junior High school has won more national championships than any other: an inner-city school, many of whose students are below the poverty line. Director Katie Dellamaggiore began to follow the chess masters of Brooklyn’s I.S. 318 in 2008, when the school sent students to tournaments around the country. But personal struggles and budget cuts proved to be their most formidable opponents.

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

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Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani

Possession

Anna (Ishtar‘s Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill) have a marriage on the rocks in a divided Berlin. It sounds like a domestic drama, but Possession takes a place of honor in the AFI’s Halloween on Screen series because of an amour fou that reaches supernatural extremes. Director Andrzej Zulawski was probably incapable of making a movie that wasn’t insanely melodramatic: casting Klaus Kinski as an actor playing Richard III in That Most Important Thing: Love is one of the more sensible things about that movie — and this film, presented in a new 35mm print of the director’s cut, is reportedly one of his most coherent and best films.

View the trailer.
Friday, November 2 and Sunday, November 4 at the AFI.

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Also opening this week, The Bay, Barry Levinson’s found-footage horror movie inspired by ecological crises on the Chesapeake. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.