DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week that didn’t cost millions and millions of dollars to make.
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(Ken Woroner/Roadside Attractions)The actress and director Sarah Polley’s documentary about her family seems straightforward enough from its blandly generic title. But it earns its humorously melodramatic silent movie score. Polley’s film begins as she ushers her father, actor Michael Polley (Baron Munchausen) into a recording studio to read the movie’s narration about her late mother, actress Diane Polley. The drama that unfolds reveals how much is hidden underneath the appearance of a normal life. As other family members and talking heads appear, Polley edits home movies and curiously apt footage that we assume is vintage. Then the family story takes an unexpected turn. I had mixed feelings about Polley’s last fiction feature, Take This Waltz, which boasted strong performances and tone, but suffered from an unbelievable script. That plot has nothing on Stories We Tell, whose real life twists and conflicts are deftly told in a manner that is both complex and watchable.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Lola Créton, Clement Metayer, and Felix Armand. (MK2/Sundance Selects)The revolution is kind of boring in this semi-autobiographical look at the Parisian student radical movement in 1971. High school student Gilles (Clément Métayer) tries to marry his artistic sensibilities with his politics. But are illustrations and films for the underground press enough of a fine art education? Director Olivier Assayas has tackled this kind of material in the past, but this latest effort comes off flat and uninvolved, its take on would-be-revolution never completely aligning with the emotional revolution of adolescence, its stellar soundtrack not surprising enough. Still, from Syd Barrett to Kevin Ayers, it’s a great soundtrack, and when the film finally sheds the revolution, it grows up, if not in the direction its idealistic antihero intended.. This weekend the AFI Silver Theatre screens what may be Assayas’ best film. Irma Vep (1996) stars the director’s then-wife Maggie Cheung as herself. Cheung is hired by an arthouse director (played by French New Wave icon (Jean-Pierre Leaud) to star in his remake of the silent serial Les Vampires. Irma Vep was a low-budget, partly improvised production that’s as unpredictably entertaining as it is avant-garde.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema. Irma Vep screens Saturday through Monday at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Michael Shannon (Millenium Entertainment)Richard is a family man and former altar boy. He’s also a contract killer. Based on the true story of gangland assassin Richard Kuklinski, The Iceman stars Michael Shannon as the moustachioed killer. The role sems like a natural for the Boardwalk Empire star, but the buzz calls it familiar territory that doesn’t transcend genre tropes. Still, Michael Shannon as a hitman should be enough of a draw to fill half a theater. Also starring Ray Liotta, Chris Evans, and James Franco, unfortunately without grillz.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema
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From the 2011 Bergdorf Goodman Holiday windows. (Pat Padua)Scatter my Ashes at Bergdorf’s
This glitzy documentary about the iconic Fifth Avenue department store shares some of the same talking heads with Bill Cunningham New York. Why is that a great documentary about fashion and photography, and this a terrible one? Director Matthew Miele gathers fashionistas who were charming in the Cunningham documentary and finds what’s most vapid and fawning about them and their relationship to Bergdorf Goodman. The film runs with a nearly constant runway soundtrack that recalls the wall-to-wall royalty free scores of David DeCoteau’s talking animal movies, but without the benefit of puppy reaction shots. And when they take a moment to document the crossroads of commerce and creativity, they blow it. I love Bergdorf Goodman’s window displays, and the film devotes a brief chapter to the making of the 2011 Holiday windows. But a good director would have pulled tension from the deadline and inspiration, and frankly, would have focussed the whole movie around it. Instead we’re left with an infomercial for the rich and famous. For a good fashion documentary, see Bill Cunningham New York, Unzipped, The September Issue, or hell, Project Runway. Scatter my Ashes wastes a great opportunity.
View the trailer.
Opens today at West End Cinema
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Three middle-aged friends spend a lazy summer together, but their idyll is disturbed by
a circus performer and his beautiful assistant. One of the leaders of the Czech New Wave, director Jiří Menzel is best known for Closely Watched Trains. Bistro Bohem, in conjunction with the Czech Embassy, launches a retrospective of the director next week. Future titles in the series include his 2006 arthouse hit I Served the King of England (June 18), Crime in a Music Hall (July 16), and Who Looks for Gold (August 20).
View a clip.
Tuesday, May 21 at 7 p.m. at Bistro Bohem (600 Florida Ave NW).
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Also opening this week, Star Trek Into Darkness. Read my review here.
