DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting and deadly movies playing around town in the coming week.
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(IFC Films)The American Film Institute surveys the career of director Olivier Assayas with a sneak preview of his new film, which gets a limited commercial run starting May 17th at E Street. Assayas, who was last seen on D.C. screens with the epic Carlos (May 24 and 26), has always had a great instinct for movie soundtracks (perhaps none better than in Irma Vep, screening May 18-20). His new movie about the political climate of early 1970s Paris takes its English-language title from the call-to-arms of a Thunderclap Newman song. Does youthful political struggle become an adult complacency? Also screening this weekend is Assayas’s early success Cold Water (May 4 and 5), about a pair of teen lovers (Cyprien Fouquet and Virginie Ledoyen) caught up in an all-night party with a classic rock soundtrack.
View the trailer for Something in the Air.
Thursday 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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How could a rock and roll horror movie possibly go wrong? The Washington Psychotronic Film Society answers that question Monday night with Don Edmonds 1980 atrocity Terror on Tour. Edmonds directed a pair of Ilsa naziploitation movies before making this tale of a band modeled after Kiss. The Clowns decapitate mannequins on stage, and I bet that any horror/rock and roll fan with half an imagination can only drool at that promising plot synopsis. But the movie is curiously boring, and the most frightening elements may well be the groupies that descend upon the harlequinned rock stars. Chances are the Psychotronic Floor show, starring The Incorrigible Dr. Schlock (aka Carl Cephas) will be more entertaining than the movie.
View the trailer.
Monday at 8 p.m. at Mc Fadden’s.
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Artist Zoe Beloff describes herself as a medium. Her unique films and installations use a 16 mm stereoscopic format she designed herself. This weekend Beloff introduces her 3-D films at the National Gallery of Art. Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side is based on the life of Elizabeth d’Esperance, a fin-de-siecle medium who reportedly conjured up full body apparitions. Charming Augustine is inspired by nineteenth century photos and texts from the notorious French asylum Salpêtrière. Beloff writes that her work suggest[s] a different direction that cinema might have taken. Ultimately what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if…”
View a clip from Charming Augustine.
Saturday at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
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Black & White and Dead All Over
This weekend the Newseum premieres a new documentary about the death of the traditional newspaper. Talking heads include Bob Woodward and David Carr, and if the latter is half as entertaining as he was in Page One: Inside the New York Times, this will be a must see for the media minded. After the screening, the Newseum hosts a panel discussion with Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication; Jeff Leen, assistant managing editor of The Washington Post‘s Investigative Unit; and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post investigative reporter Debbie Cenziper
View the trailer.
Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at the Newseum, free with admission ($21.95)
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An Emperor is haunted by the ghost of the Dragon King. Director Luo Li reimagines a sixteenth-century Chinese novel as a black-and-white indie film. According to the Freer, Li’s film is “at once a cheeky response to the big-budget historical adaptations currently clogging China’s movie screens, a subversive commentary on political corruption, and one of the most ingenious independent Chinese films in recent years.” The director will appear at the screening in person.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, Iron Man 3. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
