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

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Virginia Madsen, Wanda Sykes, Brooke Shields, Camryn Manheim, and Darryl Hannah (Vertical Entertainment)

The Hot Flashes

(Condensed from a longer review for Blogcritics). It has been 30 years since Susan Seidelman made her first feature, the indie-minded Smithereens (1982). That debut starred punk icon Richard Hell and featured a soundtrack by the Feelies, neither of whom would be caught dead anywhere near Seidelman’s new movie The Hot Flashes reads like any number of Hallmark Channel listings with B-list talent. In the small Texas town of Burning Bush (seriously), a mammovan that looks like a Curbside Cupcakes truck faces shutdown, but unhappily married Beth (Brooke Shields) tracks down the now middle-aged members of the town’s women’s high school basketball champs to raise money for a good cause. It’s all so inspirational because Sports Disease America, but there is something degrading about this supposed empowerment: Beth stays with her no-good husband (Eric Roberts, who, given his participation in a number of David DeCoteau’s talking animal movies, will clearly do anything for money) longer than any woman should, and the filmmakers even have their charges recruit a vertically challenged veterinarian (Mark Povinelli) who lost his license to coach their team. Yet one positive takeaway is that despite the terrible script, Shields gives one of her most credible performances in recent memory. She may be playing a version of herself, but I’m not sure she’s acted as naturally since Pretty Baby, when she was young and exploited and a raw talent. The title aside, The Hot Flashes is unfortunately not a middle-aged coming of age movie, but it is a sober coming of age for a once edgy director.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

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Gemma Arterton (Christopher Raphael/Parallel Films)

Byzantium

Two women (Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton) with a long and complicated history take shelter at the coastal resort of Byzantium with sensually bloody consequences. Director Neil Jordan returns to the vampire genre almost twenty years after Interview with the Vampire. Jordan has a great set piece in the neon-soaked resort. These bloodsuckers take their victims by force of personality as well as by fangs, and sex and gore may lure genre fans hoping to break out of the wholesome Twilight template. But backstory flashbacks interrupt the lurid present too often for either past or present thread to take hold.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver Theatre.

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The Manxman

The Hitchcock 9: Alfred Hitchcock’s Silent Films

Over the next several weeks, the AFI Silver Theatre and the National Gallery of Art will screen 35-millimeter prints of the nine surviving silent movies from the Master of the Macabre, each with live musical accompaniment. On Saturday, the AFI screens The Manxman (1929), a love triangle set on the Isle of Man. The film stars Czech actress Anny Ondra, who would next appear in Hitchcock’s first sound feature, Blackmail. Sunday, the National Gallery presents a Ciné-Concert of The First Born (1928) followed by Easy Virtue (1929). This weekend’s AFI and National Gallery screenings of silent Hitchcock will be accompanied by Stephen Horne. The AFI’s new schedule is so good I could see a different movie every night this week and not see a bad film. Other highlights this week: Spencer Tracy stars as a one-armed stranger in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a prescient and scathing look at American alienation screening from Saturday through Thursday as part of Ernest Borgnine Remembered; and the first and best Mad Max (Friday-Sunday), part of Ozploitation: Australian Genre Classics. These films, like the Hitchcock series, will be screened in 35-millimeter prints.

View a clip from The Manxman.
The Manxman screens Saturday at 5:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre. The First Born and Easy Virtue screen Sunday at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art.

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Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors

This week’s movie schedule reads like a chapter out of the old Washington repertory theater scene. In addition to the AFI’s listings, you can see great movies in 35-millimeter at the Freer (John Woo’s classic Hong Kong gangster pic A Better Tomorrow, July 12 and 14) and the National Gallery of Art (see the Hitchcock entry above, and note that the gallery’s Friday and Saturday screenings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp feature a restored 35mm print). The Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center closes its Woody Allen mini-retrospective with 35-millimeter screenings of Manhattan (1979) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). I’ve never been a fan of the latter, but Manhattan is one of my favorite movie experiences. I’m sure its privileged milieu and questionable dating policies make some people react to it the way I reacted to its spawn, Frances Ha. But for me these problems are more than overcome by the spectacle of Gershwin songs playing against Gordon Willis’s sumptuous black and white cinematography of the great metropolis. The JCC will be hosting a Woody Allen trivia night between screenings on Thursday, July 18, and a “no-shush” Movie Moms and Dad screening of Manhattan on Friday, July 19.

View the trailers for Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors.
July 15-21 at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center. $11

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Peter Sellers

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Union Market launches DC Drive-In Friday night with Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece, in which the fate of the world is in the hands of mad fools. The director hits on all cylinders, getting vivid and varied performances out of a dream team cast, from the tightly coiled Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, to George C. Scott’s manic, bug-eyed General Buck Turgidson, to the many faces of Peter Sellers, who was originally cast in Slim Pickens role — how’s that for tonal shift?

View the trailer.
Friday, July 12 at Union Market. Free. Cars may line up southbound on 6th Street; the lot will open at 8 p.m. No one will be allowed to park after 8:45. Show begins at 9 p.m.

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Also opening this week, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) sics robots on monsters in Pacific Rim. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.