DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town.
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Yellow LineThe Freer’s retrospective of the Shintoho studio, a kind of Japanese equivalent of American International Pictures, continues this weekend with four more B-movies that will be new to all but the most dedicated fans of Japanese cinema. The Horizon Glitters(1961) migh be the most poetic title ever given to a prison break film. Curator Mark Schilling says it has “a freedom and energy that verge[s] on the anarchic.” Flesh Pier (1958) is a gritty look at Japan’s sex industry. Death Row Woman (1960) blends the women in prison drama film with a romantic drama and murder mystery. Yellow Line is a reportedly atmospheric descent into the seedy “Casbah” section of Kobe. The movies will be digitally presented, and if last weekend’s screenings are any indication, the contrast leaves something to be desired, and the subtitles are badly timed. But you won’t see these anywhere else.
The Horizon Glitters screens Friday, December 14 at 7 p.m. Flesh Pier screens Sunday at 1 p.m. Death Row Woman screens Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Yellow Line screens Sunday at 4 p.m. At the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium. Free.
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Defendant Yusef Salaam walks into courthouse flanked by police officers. (NY Daily News/Getty Images)In April 1989, a female jogger was brutally beaten and raped in the north end of New York’s Central Park. Five teenagers caught up in other mischief that night were blamed for the horrific crime. Director Sarah Burns collaborated with her father Ken and David McMahon on this compelling, infuriating look at justice delayed. The film begins with the revelation of the true culprit, which makes the unraveling of this story, about teenagers whose lives were ruined because of a crime they did not commit, that much more tragic.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Colin Blakely, Genevieve Page and Robert StephensThe Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
Holmes (Robert Stephens) takes on the case of a missing husband that becomes a quest for the Loch Ness Monster. If that doesn’t sound like a typical Baker Street mystery, it’s not, and neither is it typical of its director. A labor of love for Billy Wilder, this romantic vision of Holmes originally ran three hours, but was cut by nearly a third. Those missing reels are among cinema’s holy grails, but the autumnal adventure that remains is some of my favorite Wilder.
View the trailer.
Saturday at 4 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Totò and Ninetto Davoli (Photofest) A talking crow tells a story of two friars who are asked by Saint Francis to preach to the birds. Iconoclastic director Pier Paolo Pasolini would have been 90 this year. The National Gallery of Art remembers him with a rare screening of Pasolini’s favorite among his works. This weekend the museum is also presenting From Giotto to Pasolini: Narrative in Fresco and Film, an illustrated lecture by historian David Gariff on the influence of Italian medieval and Renaissance painting in Pasolini’s films.
View the trailer.
The lecture From Giotto to Pasolini: Narrative in Fresco and Film will be held Saturday at 4 p.m. Hawks and Sparrows screens Sunday at 4:30 p.m. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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The Smiling Star
Mark Hartley’s 2012 documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! took a salaciously titled look at the Filipino film industry under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Director Werner Schroeter’s collage, The Smiling Star, takes a more sober pass a the gap between rich and poor that marked that era. Schroeter secretly gathered footage and research while he was a guest of the Manila International Film Festival. “Drawing parallels with the tortured histories of South American countries, and with his own fiction feature The Black Angel, The Smiling Star is one of Schroeter’s most personal essay films.”
Monday at 6:30 p.m. pm at the Goethe-Institut.
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Also opening this week, the first part of Peter Jackson’s nine-hour, orgiastic adaptation of The Hobbit. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. In 3-D.
