DCist’s highly selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing in town during the coming week.
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Denis Lavant (Indomina)French director Leos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge) specializes in a kind of overheated art-house melodrama that can be as compelling as it is embarrassing, sometimes within the same scene. His movies never fail to make me roll my eyes at least once, and his latest, his first feature since 1999’s compelling/embarrassing Pola X is no exception. Frequent directorial stand-in Denis Lavant stars as Oscar, who rides around Paris in a limo driven by his chauffeur (Edith Scob, best known for Eyes without a Face) to make a series of appointments that become increasingly more strange. An immersive vinyl body stockinged video-game that comes early in the film is far from the most outrageous episode as Oscar moves in and out of different lives. Despite an arthouse corniness that tries to wring profound emotion out of somebody running down the street really excited to hear David Bowie, the director has a uniquely operatic vision, and while parts of Holy Motors drag, I couldn’t stop watching, wondering where this ride would go next. With Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street landmark Cinema
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The Weinstein CompanyAn sensitive, aging goth rocker named Cheyenne (Sean Penn) … there may be no better attention getting opener than that clause, but it gets better, or worse. Cheyenne misses a chance at a death bed reconciliation with his holocaust-survivor father, and is driven to seek out the Nazi officer who tortured dad at Auschwitz. The plot synopsis of This Must be the Place sets off any number of maudlin Best Foreign Picture alarms. I wasn’t able to catch the press screening, but despite my misgivings, the sight of Sean Penn in Robert Smith makeup is enough to make me want to pay good money to see this. Director Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, The Consequences of Love) is at the helm. With Frances McDormand as Cheyenne’s tai-chi practicing wife, Harry Dean Stanton, and David Byrne as himself.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Patience (After Sebald)The AFI’s annual roundup of new European cinema is now in its 25th year. The 2012 edition opens with Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut, Quartet (Friday, November 9). Highlights this week include Marion Cotillard as a killer whale trainer in Rust and Bone (Saturday, November 10), the boozy Irish comedy Grabbers (Friday, November 9 and Saturday, November 10), Tabu (Sunday, November 11 and Wednesday, November 14), a silent film homage from Portugal, and Patience (after Sebald), a documentary companion to author W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
View the trailers for Rust and Bone, Grabbers, and Patience (after Sebald).
November 9-20 at the AFI Silver.
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(EPIX/Brainstorm)A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman
Monty Python’s Graham Chapman died in 1989, but not before recording audio of himself reading his autobiography. More than twenty years after his passing, fourteen animators took Chapman’s audio recordings, as well as recordings of the surviving troupe members and, for some reason, Cameron Diaz, to make this 3D animated feature about Chapman’s ribald life of sex, death, and comedy.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow in 3D at Angelika Mosaic, and screens In 2D at the AFI as part of the European Union Festival on Saturday, November 10 and Monday, November 12.
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Case of the Grinning Cat (Icarus Films)This weekend the National Gallery begins its two-part homage to the late filmmaker. Marker was best known for the classic science fiction short La Jetée, but the majority of his work falls under the category of documentary essay. À Bientôt, J’espère, from 1968, looks a textile plant strike in the eastern French town of Besançon. The Case of the Grinning Cat looks at the image of a beaming feline that began to appear in Paris graffiti after 9/11. The program also includes a three-minute study of the late director’s pet cat as it listens to a piano sonata by Federico Mompou.
View the trailer for The Case of the Grinning Cat.
Sunday, November 11 at 4:30 at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Also opening this week, the latest incarnations of two cinematic icons, Abraham Lincoln and James Bond. We just posted a full review of Skyfall, and will post a review of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln tomorrow.
