DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond (IFC)In 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo carried out a series of sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington area. The case was the subject of a bad 2003 TV-movie, but director Alexandre Moors gives the material the less sensationalistic treatment of a psychological thriller. Matt Cohen, in his review of the film for The Week, wrote that, “The relationship between Malvo and Muhammad is an odd one. It’s not long after Muhammad takes Malvo under his wing that he starts referring to him as his son, and Malvo — clearly desperate for a father figure — falls into this trap. Soon, Muhammad begins toying with Malvo’s fragile mind, playing cruel games — like leaving him tied up in the woods and forcing him to kill his “enemies” — that warp the young Malvo into the cold-blooded killer that terrorized the D.C. area. It’s this slow-building and perfectly captured emotional manipulation that makes Blue Caprice more than a great VOD movie — it’s one of the best films of the year, period.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema and the AFI Silver.
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Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice ChevalierLast spring, Doug Aitken’s installation Song 1 (read our review here) projected a multitude of voices singing “I Only Have Eyes for You” on the Hirshhorn’s outer ring. Paul Thomas Anderson used a similar device in Magnolia, but the first Hollywood depiction of a song spread by the multitudes may have been in director Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 musical Love me Tonight. In one of the film’s most wonderful and apparently influential scenes, Maurice Chevalier sings “Isn’t it romantic” to his tailor, who passes it on to a customer, and so on, and so on until a troop of soldiers carries the tune past the window of Chevalier’s soon to be beloved, Jeanette McDonald. The National Gallery of Art launches Rouben Mamoulian: Making Movies Musical this weekend in tribute to the director. Also screening this weekend is Mamoulian’s first talking picture Applause (1929) and the Technicolor matador melodrama Blood and Sand (1941). The Gallery will be screening 35mm prints of these films, which will be introduced by historian and critic Joseph Horowitz, author of On My Way: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess.
View the trailer for Love me Tonight.
Applause screens Saturday, September 28 at 2:00 pm. Love me Tonight screens Saturday, September 28 at 4:00 pm. Blood and Sand screens Sunday, September 29 at 4:00 pm. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Paul Newman and Laurence HarveyThere may be a good reason you haven’t heard of the American remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon. But the Freer Gallery’s series Pages of Beauty and Madness: Japanese Writers Onscreen forgoes the obvious to bring a 35mm print of this rarely screened film to Washington. The 1964 Western was directed by Martin Ritt and stars Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, William Shatner, Claire Bloom, and Edward G. Robinson, a cast that on paper does not seem to belong together at all. This is a special book-club screening: read Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s stories “Rashomon” and “In a Bamboo Grove” (available in English in Rashomon and 17 Other Stories), and after the screening join Noriko Sanefuji of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center for what promises to be a lively discussion on the merits of Toshiro Mifune vs. Paul Newman. Also at the Freer this weekend: Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles star in the erotically charged 1976 adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, also in a 35mm print.
View the trailer.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea screens Friday, September 27 at 7:00 pm. The Outrage screens Sunday, September 29 at 2:00 pm. At the Freer. Free.
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Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen
Actress Barbara Sukowa was most recently seen on area screens in her widely acclaimed performance as Hannah Arendt, but I found her impersonation a mannered caricature. Sukowa fared better as a 12th-century German mystic. The Goethe-Institut’s series Women in History as Played by Barbara Sukowa: Films by Margarethe von Trotta concludes next week with this biopic of the composer and religious visionary.
View the trailer.
Monday, September 30 at 6:30 pm at the Goethe-Institut.
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Yog, Monster from Outer Space, aka Space Amoeba
In my program notes for a 2007 screening at the Mary Pickford Theater, I wrote, “Three monsters … they are scary!” So goes the trailer for this widescreen meditation on the crossroads of science and real estate. Developers uncover a hidden island in the South Pacific and make plans for a family resort. Meanwhile, a satellite falls from the sky bearing the titular organism and her transformative powers. This is how the island is taken over by three giant creatures: a cuttlefish, a crab and a snapping turtle. “Who will win? Man or monsters?” This was the penultimate film by director Ishiro Honda, who unleashed Godzilla on an unsuspecting world and said of his terrifying creations, “Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy; that is their tragedy.”
View the trailer.
Monday, September 30 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s.
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Also opening tomorrow: Joseph Gordon Levitt stars in his directorial debut, Don Jon. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
