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

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Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Nonotchka

The New AFI Calendar is here!

Tickets are almost gone for Friday’s Count Gore DeVol spectacular, and are going fast for the second screening of the Cool “Disco” Dan documentary. But the AFI’s new schedule is loaded with good movies that probably won’t sell out. Screen Valentines launches this weekend with a new 35mm print of the 1939 classic Ninotchka (February 1-3 and 6-7), with Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas exchanging dialogue by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. The first part of a tribute to Howard Hawks, one of the great Hollywood directors, begins with Boris Karloff in the pre-code crime drama The Criminal Code (February 1, 3, and 5). Quentin Tarantino Retro and The Roots of Django begins this weekend with a screening of the digital restoration of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film Django. And Mrs. and Mrs. Hitchcock redeems the awful Helen Mirren-Anthony Hopkins biopic with a series of Hitch classics, beginning with Psycho (February 3-5 and 7), that feature a screenplay credit to Alma Reville.

View the trailer for Ninotchka.
See the new AFI schedule here.

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(First Run Features)

Garbo the Spy

The National Gallery’s series on Catalan filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta begins this weekend with the a documentary about Juan Pujol García, a double agent who took his code name from the star of Ninotchka. Garcia shuttled between Britain and Nazi Germany, and became the only spy to receive both the Order of the British Empire and the Iron Cross II. Isaki co-wrote this documentary, which features historians Nigel West and Mark Seaman, and a cast of informants including the elusive Garbo himself.

View the trailer.
Sunday, February 3 at 4:30 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.

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Bea and Frank in “King’s Point”. Courtesy of HBO

Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts

The Oscars are handed out on February 24, and some of the feature-length contenders have returned to area screens: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, and Life of Pi are back at E Street, and The Master is back on Bethesda Row. The next few weeks also give moviegoers a chance to check out the competition in the shorts categories, though at 210 minutes, the documentary shorts program runs longer even than the most bloated features. The doc shorts lineup includes Sean Fine and Andrea Nix’s coming of age documentary short “Inocente;” “King’s Point,” Sari Gilman’s look at five seniors living in a typical American retirement resort in Florida; “Mondays at Racine,” Cynthia Wade’s look at a Long Island beauty salon that offers free services for women undergoing chemotherapy; “Open Heart,” Keith Davidson’s study of a group of Rwandan children who leave home to seek heart surgery in Sudan; and “Redemption,” in which filmmakers Jon Alpert & Matthew O’Neill look at the increasing number of New Yorkers who make their living from scavenging trash.

Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema. For live action and animated fiction shorts, see programs at the Landmark E Street Cinema, also opening tomorrow.

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Rhino Season

This year’s installment of the Freer’s Iranian Film Festival continues this week with a tale of love and art from exiled director Bahman Ghobadi. The poet Sahel (Behrouz Vossoughi) and his wife Mina (Monica Bellucci) are jailed for treason after the Islamic Revolution. Mina is released after a decade and told that her husband is dead. But is he? Wide-screen compositions of an arid Turkish landscape reportedly recall Once Upon a time in Anatolia, which was my favorite movie of 2012. Martin Scorsese lends his imprimatur to the film. Note: the film will be presented in the HDCAM format.

View the trailer.
Friday, February 1 at 7:00 pm and Sunday, February 3 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free.

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Watermelon Man

A white insurance salesman wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a black man (Godfrey Cambridge) Studio execs intended the film to be a vehicle for a white actor (Alan Arkin and Jack Lemmon were suggested) to play in black face, but director Melvin Van Peebles suggested a black actor, transforming the film. After the movie’s success, Columbia Pictures offered Van Peebles a three-picture deal, but he turned them down to make the even more subversive Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and he never made a major studio picture again. Career footnote: he appeared on All My Children in 2005, as the father of a character played by his son Mario.

View the trailer.
Monday, February 4 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s.

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Also opening this weekend, the coming-of-age-zombie-romcom Warm Bodies. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.