DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi (Kino Lorber)A deceased playwright (Denis Podalydès) leaves behind a video message for actors who have performed in his play Eurydice and instructs his august former charges to determine whether a young amateur troupe should be allowed to perform the play. Ninety-one-year old director Alain Resnais assembled a who’s who of French actors playing themselves, including regular collaborators like Sabine Azéma. Even if Resnais doesn’t have another masterpiece like Last Year at Marienbad in him, he hit a late-career high mark with Private Fears in Public Places (2006), so I’m hoping this is a rebound from the absurd loopiness of 2009’s Wild Grass. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet will be shown as part of the Avalon’s French Cinémathèque series. I haven’t been able to confirm a local release date for the film, so this may be Washington’s only big-screen chance to see the latest film by this inconsistent but fascinating master of cinema.
View the trailer.
Wednesday, August 21 at 8:00 pm at the Avalon.
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Bobby Sommer (Cinema Guild)A museum guard (Bobby Sommer, who like his character in the film is a former roadie) at the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna spends his days quietly musing about art. He befriends a tourist (singer Mary Margaret O’Hara) who is in Vienna to visit a sick cousin. As you might expect, life and art intersects in quiet moments, and Museum Hours comes off as a contemplative version of the kind of project Peter Greenaway would have sank his overbearing teeth into. Director Jem Cohen made documentaries about Fugazi and Benjamin Smoke, but his approach doesn’t suit this material. I wanted to like Museum Hours, yet however undeniable the art and sentiments, the movie feels sloppy, its compositions and rhythms awkward, its lack of precision at odds with the painstakingly crafted works of Breugel and Rembrandt.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Lake Bell (Seamus Teirney/Roadside Attractions)Voice coach Carol (writer-director Lake Bell) is the daughter of award-winning voiceover artist Sam Sotto (voice actor Fred Malamed), but in a world where female voiceovers are rare, father discourages his daughter from folloing in his footsteps. Naming a voiceover artist “Sotto” isn’t the most promising joke, and the buzz on this comedy is mixed. But the subject is ripe for observation and satire, and the film gives Rob Corddry a bigger-than-usual supporting role as as Carol’s brother-in-law.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Casanova (Photofest)Ciné-concerts at the National Gallery of Art
This week the National Gallery continues their series Russian Cinema in Exile in the Ballets Russes Era with three ciné-concerts featuring Russian silent star Ivan Mosjoukine, who co-directed the weekend’s first feature. Location footage of 1920s Paris lends romantic texture to Le Brasier ardent (1923), the film that supposedly inspired Jean Renoir to pursue a career in film. In Les Ombres qui passent (1924) an Englishman inherits a small fortune in Paris, which makes him an easy mark for a beautiful con woman. Mosjoukine takes on the role of a lifetime in Casanova (1926), an extravagant production filmed in Russia, Austria, and Venice. The 35mm print includes a color-stencilled finale. Silent film composer Robert Israel will accompany each film in live performance.
Le Brasier ardent screens Saturday, August 17 at 2:00 pm. Les Ombres qui passent screens Saturday, August 17 at 4:00 pm. Casanova screens Sunday, Augist 18 at 4:00 pm. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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The conflict between man and nature has fueled many an art-house movie (cf. the complete works of Werner Herzog). But what if the eternal struggle was addressed in an exploitation film? The AFI’s Ozploitation series continues with director Colin Eggleston’s 1978 “ecological horror story” about a troubled married couple who find natural terror on a camping trip. “Like a nightmare nature documentary, the entire menagerie of Australia’s animal kingdom begins to coordinate attacks on the unthinking couple, a now-savage Eden casting out the transgressors.” The AFI will be screening a rare 35mm print courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
View the trailer.
Monday, August 19 and Wednesday, August 21 at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week: Forest Whitaker stars in Lee Daniels’ The Butler. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
