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

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Felicity Price and Joel Edgerton (EOne)

Wish You Were Here

Four friends travel to Cambodia for beaches, dancing, and ecstasy, but the trip goes sour when one of them disappears. This much is established in the pre-credit sequence of Wish You Were Here, and the rest of the movie is spent piecing together what happened, to varying levels of success. Joel Edgerton stars as an Aussie businessman whose friend’s disappearance coincides with some bad decision making of his own. Edgerton was a completely flat Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, but here he’s not bound by a ridiculous moustache. Edgerton’s canine eyes give him the appearance of a friendly dog who goes sniffing around where he shouldn’t and gets into trouble. Director Kieran Darcy-Smith’s first feature has a non-linear narrative that clarifies and develops characters and relationships, at the expense of dramatic tension. The strategy finally pays off in the film’s last act as more and more is revealed, too late. Wish You Were Here eventually builds to a compelling climax, but it’s too bad the drama comes from plot revelations more than character.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.

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Lee Jung-jin and Cho Min-soo (Drafthouse Films)

Pieta

A loan shark makes good on bad loans by brutally crippling his debtors and making off with the insurance money. Then one day a woman shows up claiming to be his mother. The films of Kim Ki Duk (3-Iron) are among the most violent of a national cinema known for blood, and accusations of misogyny from Korean critics led to the director’s self-imposed exile. Pieta is Kim’s first film upon emerging from that exile, and its themes of abandonment and viciousness seem like a natural for his return to filmmaking, and moviegoers looking for his signature extremes won’t be disappointed. The movie isn’t as wretched as some of its more violent detractors would have you believe, but it doesn’t entirely work either. Certain images have stayed with me months after I saw the film, but the film as a whole doesn’t come together.

View the trailer, or don’t, because it’s loaded with spoilers.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Mosaic

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The Devil, Probably

If you missed out on the National Gallery of Art’s Robert Bresson retrospective last year, this weekend the American Film Institute gives you a chance to catch up on two of the director’s less frequently screened films. The Devil, Probably (1977) is the austere director’s study of anxious youth in the 1970s. Paris student Charles (Antoine Monnier) is fed up with the modern world, and in a decision not unusual in the Bresson oeuvre, decides that suicide is the answer. As challenging as that may sound, this is actually more accessible than some of the director’s other films. Also screening is a new print of Bresson’s 1956 masterpiece of imprisonment and release, A Man Escaped (Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday).

View a brooding clip from The Devil, Probably.
Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday at the AFI Silver Theatre.

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Edison’s Black Maria film studio

Black Maria: Selections from the Festival

Thomas Edison covered his West Orange, New Jersey film studio in black tar paper. The claustrophobic, dark conditions that resulted led his staff to compare it to the inside of a police paddy wagon, or Black Maria. Edison’s pioneering movie studio was named for the uncomfortably long arm of the law. And so Black Maria organizer John Columbus named his short film festival after this house of early movie magic, the moniker’s punishing source a sign that independent cinema doesn’t simply give succor to audiences in search of escapist entertainment. This is the festival’s 31st year. Saturday afternoon, the National Gallery presents a selection of this year’s best documentary and experimental shorts from independent filmmakers. The program includes the short films “Nile Perch,” “Bridge,” “Here and Away,” “Fordland,” “Fanfare for Marching Band,” and “The Lost Interview of Ray Bradbury.”

Saturday, at 3:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free. Introduced by John Columbus

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X, the Man with the X-Ray Eyes

What if the X-Ray Spex advertised in the back of old comic books were real? Exploitation king Roger Corman directed one of his best movies based on that premise, with Ray MIlland as one of the finest leading men to lend his august services to low-budget thrills. I wish I could say The Washington Psychotronic Film Society was screening a battered 35-millimeter print of this classic, and that the venue that hosts their video screenings wasn’t named the Douchiest Bar in D.C. But you should support the modest efforts of these cinephiles anyway.

View the trailer.
Monday at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s.

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Also opening this weak, teenage assassins are assigned to knock off James Gandolfini in Violet and Daisy. And don’t forget to check out our roundup of this year’s Outdoor Film Series.