DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Noriko and Ushio Shinohara (Radius)Painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife Noriko have been married for forty years, but Cutie and the Boxer isn’t simply a portrait of a New York creative couple. Their creative and conjugal dynamic — he is an egomaniacal alcoholic more than twenty years her senior — is not as cute as it sounds. Against the opening credits we see Ushio working on a wall-sized new piece, using boxing gloves dipped in paint for an abstract action canvas. Soon we see him working on a cardboard sculpture in the shape of an oversized motorcycle. Flashback to the early 1970s and a short documentary about the Shinoharas, and you learn that Ushio has been working variations on the same boxing paintings and motorcycle sculptures for the past several decades, while his unheralded wife takes her art in new directions but remains in his shadow as an assistant. This is the first feature documentary by director Zachary Heinzerling, and despite the superficially quaint subject the film, he doesn’t shy away from asking difficult questions about art and the kind of dysfunctional relationship where, in her autobiographical art work, Noriko refers to her husband as “Bullie.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Martina Gedeck (Music Box Films)A middle aged tourist (The Lives of Others’ Martina Gedeck) is on vacation in the Austrian countryside when an invisible wall appears, shutting her off from the rest of humanity. The wall is one of those Big Symbols of disconnected modern life that has dodgy prospects under the best of circumstances, but writer-director Julian Pölsler makes a terrible creative miscalculation that completely overwhelms the movie’s gorgeous landscapes and high production values. The Wall is adapted from a 1963 novel by Marlen Haushofer, and while it develops into a pretty tale of survival, Pölsler commits a grave cinematic sin: a voiceover heard throughout the film. We constantly hear descriptions of what we are seeing, and are even treated to shots of the protagonist writing in her diary. A stark, dialogue free treatment of this material might have been a harrowing cinematic experience, but you still have to deal with seeing an actor putting their hands up against an invisible wall like a trapped mime. If a 108-minute narrated travelogue of an existentially tormented mime is your idea of meaningful cinema, you’ll love The Wall.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon.
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Glamaorous jewel thief, or compensated re-enactor? (Doppelgänger Releasing)Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
Director Havana Marking uses reenactments, animation and surveillance footage to tell the story of the The Pink Panthers, a group of Serbian jewel thieves who pulled off a series of high-profile jewelry store heists that netted over $300 million dollars worth of bling. But despite the pulsating soundtrack, dramatic real-life footage and visual invention, the most compelling parts of Smash and Grab tell the story of the former Yugoslavia. From innocently cheesy tourism videos to newsreel footage of the Tito dictatorship through the divisive war-torn 1990s, Marking handles conventional documentary material more cleverly than the superficially clever visual tricks. So if a movie about a ring of jewel thieves doesn’t interest you, rest assured that as a document of a country in torment, Smash and Grab pulls off a bait and switch that might be worth your time.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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(New Yorker Films)A loner (David Dawaele) possessed of an acute moral compass protects a village girl (Alexandra Lemâtre) tormented by abuse. French director Bruno Dumont is an uncompromising filmmaker in the tradition of Robert Bresson. When Dumont can rein in his pretensions like in 1999’s Humanité, he can be a powerful filmmaker, but he can just as easily veer off into the self-indulgence of something like Twentynine Palms (2003). The National Gallery hosts the D.C. premiere of this challenging artist’s new film with a 35mm print.
View the trailer.
Sunday, August 25 at 4:30 pm at the National Gallery of Art.
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A mutant wild boar wreaks havoc on the Australian outback. If I didn’t already have you at mutant wild boar, director Russell Mulcahy graduated from New Wave music videos to direct well-regarded genre pictures like The Highlander series. Co-starring Arkie Whitely, (whom you may recognize from The Road Warrior), an actress with a colorful and tragic life. Whitely was the daughter of artists Brett and Wendy Whiteley, who lived at New York’s Hotel Chelsea and, as the legend goes, once hired Janis Joplin to babysit their daughter. Whitely died of adrenal cancer in 2001 at the age of 37. As part of their continuing Ozploitation series, the AFI will be screening a 35mm print of this 1984 classic. Also screening at the AFI Silver this weekend is a 70mm print of Paul Thomas Annderson’s The Master. The AFI was one of the few venues in the country to show Anderson’s film the way it was meant to be seen. If you missed it the first time around, now’s your chance. Read my review here.
View the trailer.
Friday, August 23 and Sunday, August 25 at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week, old friends try to recreate a pub crawl from twenty years ago in The World’s End, the conclusion to director Edgar Wright’s celebrated Cornetto Trilogy. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
