DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Emayatzy Corinealdi and David Oyelowo A night nurse (Emayatzy Corinealdi) with a taste for indie movies and a husband in jail strikes up a romance with a bus driver (David Oyelowo). Date movies-within-movies may or may not reveal something about the characters involved. In Sooner or Later, a 1979 TV movie with a cult following, golden boy Rex Smith asks his underage would-be-sweetheart to a drive-in that’s showing, of all things, Mandingo. Middle of Nowhere has loftier plans for its moviegoing couple: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eat Soul. This L.A. love story has been getting good buzz, and reportedly overcomes the cliches that could have sunk it. Writer-director Ava DuVernay worked as a Hollywood marketer for years and in 2012 became the first African-American woman to win Best Director at Sundance.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Silent movie icons Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks helped found United Artists, and have been called Hollywood’s first power couple. But they waited for the talking picture era to make their first movie together. The National Gallery of Art screens this early talkie to mark the publication of Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, edited by Christel Schmidt, who will sign copies of the book after the screening. (Full disclosure: I worked on images for the book).
View a clip.
Saturday, January 12 at 2:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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The National Gallery’s series Sixpack: The Austrian Experiment continues with a work called “science fiction in a literal sense” by director Michael Palm. Low Definition Control (Malfunctions #0) looks at surveillance society with a progression of footage made without their subject’s knowledge. Shown with A to A, a study of 100 traffic circle islands that recalls the work of local artist LIndsay Rowinski.
Sunday, January 13 at 4:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
This week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society goes south of the border with this Mexican punk exploitation flick also known as Fearless Bitches. Leather and leopard-skin clad youth do battle with cops do battle in a lawless land. It looks like The Road Warrior, only it came out before George Miller’s wild opus.
View the trailer.
Monday, January 14 at McFadden’s.
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35mm Film
Major theater chains in the D.C. area have gone to all-digital, but there are still a handful of places where you can still see light projected through celluloid. I’ll be writing more about these analog holdouts in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, if digital formats haven’t won you over, please check out the AFI Silver (Anna Karenina, Argo, Flight, Hyde Park on Hudson, and A Royal Affair are all showing in 35mm prints), The Avalon (Les Miz and Silver Linings Playbook, West End Cinema (the only venue in city limits showing a print of Django Unchained), P&G Old Greenbelt (Les Miz), Montgomery Royal in Wheaton (Parental Guidance, Django Unchained and Les Miz; opening tomorrow, Gangster Squad and Zero Dark Thirty, and A Haunted House); and Rivertowne 12 in Oxon Hill (Parental Guidance, This is 40, The Hobbit 3D, Twilight Breaking Dawn 2, Wreck-it-Ralph, Texas Chainsaw, Django Unchained and Les Miz; opening tomorrow, Gangster Squad and Zero Dark Thirty, and A Haunted House)
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Also opening this week, two of this year’s most formidable Oscar contenders: Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial Zero Dark Thirty, and Michael Haneke’s Amour. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
