DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around the area in the coming week.
—
Joséphine de la Baume (Magnet Releasing)Ginger movie buff Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) and screenwriter Paulo (Milo Ventimiglia) meet cute in a video store. She keeps him at bay because of what she claims is a sensitive skin disease. But as the title and ominous, metallic score may lead you to believe, Djuna is a vampire. Director Xan Cassavettes is the daughter of John Cassavettes, and her feature debut mixes stylish visuals with sex and violence and bad acting. Kiss of the Damned evokes a certain school of 1970s erotic vampire movies, but with better and hipper production values and actual vampires. The plot’s dangerously erotic cat and mouse vaguely echoes Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, but with heavy accents that make it play like an acting class run by Tommy Wiseau. The movie sounds and looks good, and its pulsing industrial soundtrack is the kind of jarring music that might have pushed Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby into the future present direction he was aiming for. But the writing and acting here miss the bloody target, despite a late-act effort by Michael Rappaport to ground the film in douchery. Genre fans may find it diverting; others may want to bang pipes against metal in an echo chamber, undress and smear ketchup on their face and neck, and speak in a thick undetermined accent in the privacy of their own homes.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
—
Fabrice Luchini, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Ernst Umhauer (Cohen Media)Teenage writing student Claude (Ernst Unhauer) attracts the scholarly interest of uninspired high school teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini). Germain shows the prodigy’s writing exercises to his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott-Thomas), who runs a contemporary art gallery, and the pair of elders become wrapped up in Claude’s supposedly non-fiction pieces like a soap opera. Director François Ozon has done well in this twisted thriller territory before in superior entertainments like Swimming Pool and Under the Sand. In the House has an intriguing premise but the tension is deflated by parody — of contemporary art, of Woody Allen — which takes the movie farther and farther away from what could have been a provocative work about the nature of good writing. But maybe its ultimate failure means Ozon has the last laugh: a script that tutors its young charge in the elements of plotting never corrects its own mistakes.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
—
Fady Elsayed and James Floyd (Paladin)Brothers Rashid (James Floyd) and Mo (Fady Elsayed) are Arab teens living in London’s volatile Hackney. The elder Rashid boxes at the gym and is a small time drug runner, but tries to keep his little brother out of harm’s way. You can probably see where this is going. Writer-director Sally El Hosaini’s material is sometimes predictable, but that in itself is no sin. The young leads give off a convincing balance of brotherly intensity and vulnerability. But the director doesn’t quite maintain the tension for a two hour feature, and there’s a veneer of sensationalism that will suit her well when Hollywood comes knocking.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
—
(Milestone Films)This weekend the National Gallery of Art launches a tribute to director Shirley Clarke with the Washington premiere of Portrait of Jason, Clarke’s cinéma vérité document of an African-American male hooker. Clarke would go on to make concert films, some of which, including 1988’s Ornette: Made in America (May 25 at the National Gallery) relied on video pyrotechnics that are difficult to watch today. This 1965 film lets the interest fall on its flamboyant subject, who makes it what Ingmar Bergman called “the most fascinating film I’ve ever seen.”
View the trailer.
Saturday at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
—
Tom Dunson (John Wayne) drives 9,000 cattle from Texas to Missouri with his reluctant adopted son (Montgomery Clift, in his first major role). The AFI’s Howard Hawks series hits one of the director’s high water marks with this classic western, full of mythical American landscapes and Oedipal conflict.
View the trailer.
Saturday and Sunday at the AFI Silver Theatre.
—
Also opening this week, director Baz Luhrman’s greatly anticipated and highly dreaded adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
