DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing in town in the coming week.
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Akim Tamiroff Vertigo recently toppled Citizen Kane from its 50-year lock on top of Sight and Sound’s poll of the greatest movies of all time. But for me, Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’s sleazy mid-career vision of Tijuana beats both of them. By the end of the 1950s Welles had taken on the Falstaffian proportions that most people remember him by, and like that mischievous story-teller who he would also play to perfection, corrupt Sheriff Hank Quinlan is prone to lying. But Quinlan creates fiction in the name of justice in much the way that Welles uses cinematic tricks to make the truth of art. He plants a nearly flawless company of character actors in a black and white border landscape that sizzles with vice. Dennis Weaver is the only, wild misstep, yet his role, watching over a scantily-clad Janet Leigh in an isolated motel, anticipates Anthony Perkins in Psycho a few years later. The final set piece, with dialogue fading in and out of electronic distortion, is a metaphor for the distortion of reality and the difficulty of recording truth with a machine: the hard life of making movies. Note: like all Landmark screenings, this will be a digital projection.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at midnight and Sunday morning at the E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Jess and Barb are at their sorority house on Christmas Eve when a frightening stranger calls. It could be a slasher movie from the 1980s and onward, but this was made in 1974, and starred heavyweights like Keir Dullea and Olivia Hussey (still smarting after having to “dance” with Sally Kellerman in Lost Horizon). Before Bob Clark made the holiday classic A Christmas Story (and Porky’s), he made this pre-slasher cycle exploitation that set the tone for the deaths of thousands of young adults.
View the trailer.
Friday, November 30 at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Demia Bruce comforts his daughter Deja Bruce (International Film Circuit)Director Peter Nicks arrived at the subject of his feature documentary debut in a family way. His wife’s first job as a speech pathologist was at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. The idea simmered for a decade before Nicks had the access he needed, but despite landing in the middle of the health care debate, Nicks is no polemicist. In the vein of Frederick Wiseman (whose own documentary Hospitalis now over 40 years old), Nicks’s slicker version of cinema vérité aims to observe his volatile subject without judgement or suggesting a solution. The director told Filmmaker Magazine, “When we started talking to people, what we found is they didn’t want to talk about Obamacare or politics, they wanted to talk about who they were and what their journey was.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Joan Blondell and Lyle Talbot in Three on a MatchLyle Talbot, “The Entertainer”
The character actor Lyle Talbot had a long and strange movie career that spanned more than half a century, from a 1931 Vitaphone short, to television serials, Ed Wood films, and even a late-career appearance on Who’s The Boss? But his name was never on everybody’s lips, and his story may not have been told if it were not for his daughter. New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot, author of the new book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, will appear at the AFI Silver Theater this weekend to launch a series that looks at the early years of Talbots film career. Look for juicy pre-code titles like Three on a Match (Saturday, December 1), with a young Bette Davis as a secretarial school grad and a baby-faced Humphrey Bogart; and the classic prison drama 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Saturday, December 1).
View the trailer for 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
December 1-19 at the AFI Silver. Margaret Talbot will appear at the 4 p.m. screening of Three on a Match on Saturday, December 1.
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Three women live in the California desert, their habits communal and murderous. Resemblance to the Manson family suggests, in the words of one programmer, “an allegory for the dead ends of 1960s utopianism and the American dream.” The movie is also supposed to share the “surreal, dreamlike humor” of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). It doesn’t sound very funny to me, but it could be fascinating. The Goethe-Institut continues its homage to director Werner Schroeter with this little-known relic of 1973. This is a Digital Presentation from Blu-ray, but it’s not like you can get this from Netflix.
Monday, December 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. $6.
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Also opening this week, a stripped down crime drama set in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign. We’ll have a full review of Killing them Softly, directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and starring Brad Pitt, tomorrow.
