DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town at the AFI in the coming week.
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If you’ve seen other films by Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, like Platform and The World, you may wonder why critic Calum Marsh calls the latest movie by this arthouse favorite the year’s best action movie. While I’d give that nod to Johnnie To’s Drug War, there’s no denying the visceral power of this four-part tale of revenge. With a title inspired by King Hu’s martial arts classic A Touch of Zen, Jia has done away with the punishing long takes of his previous work to make a provocative film that is as accessible as it is uncompromising, a martial arts vision of the violence that pervades modern day China. Read my Spectrum Culture review here.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday at the AFI Silver.
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Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
The AFI concludes its Pier Paolo Pasolini series with a rare 35mm print of the director’s final film, his notorious 1975 adaptation of De Sade. Set in the closing days of Mussolini’s reign, the film, as the Harvard Film Archive puts it, “[sets] up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumerist alienation.” Scenes of torture and sexual sadism make this a difficult film to watch (I’ve never gotten through it), and even though it is available through the Criterion Collection, screenings are rare. The intrepid cinephile looking to check this off their 35mm bucket list will not get another chance anytime soon. If you stop by the AFI a few hours early, you can theoretically see this right after Soylent Green. For more Pasolini, the National Gallery of Art will screen the director’s 1964 film Comizi d’amore on Sunday at 4:30.
View the trailer.
Monday November 25-Tuesday November 26 at the AFI Silver.
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A mild-mannered British sound designer (Toby Jones) is hired to work on an Italian horror movie. The AFI closes out its series of horror movies from 1973 with a recent film that pays homage to that very era. Director Peter Strickland’s salute to the Italian giallo is reportedly high on atmosphere, and has a well-regarded psychedelic soundtrack by Broadcast. Read Ian Buckwalter’s NPR review here.
View the trailer.
Saturday November 23 and Tuesday November 26 at the AFI
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(Zeitgeist Films)The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
It’s essentially a filmed lecture, sure, but what other filmed lecture is going to give you “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Julie Andrews one after the other? The rumpled philosopher-psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek is back in director Sophie Fiennes’ sequel to the 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. In my Spectrum Culture review of the film, I wrote that “Fiennes’s staging keeps the film visually interesting in a way that supports Žižek’s ideas, as he immerses himself in a kind of fantasy where he lives within cinema itself,” like “a post-doctoral Forrest Gump.” Read my review here.
View the trailer.
Saturday November 23 and Sunday November 24 at the AFI Silver.
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The AFI’s Overdrive: L.A. Noir, 1940-1959 series, co-presented with the National Building Museum, ends with 35mm prints of a pair of thrillers that play off atomic-age anxieties. If you haven’t seen Robert Aldrich’s 1955 classic Kiss Me Deadly, you’ve probably seen a movie that riffs on it, whether it’s Pulp Fiction or Repo Man. More obscure is Irving Lerner’s 1959 City of Fear, starring Vince Edwards as an escaped con ferrying around radioactive material in his convertible (yeah, that sounds like Repo Man too). Shot by frequent Sam Peckinpah cinematographer Lucien Ballard, the film boasts a jazzy score by Jerry Goldsmith (Chinatown). Both films were shot on various locations around Los Angeles. Readers interested in seeing more of the city on film should also check out Thom Andersen’s excellent documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube.
View the trailer for Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly screens Friday November 22 and Saturday November 23. The November 23 screening will be introduced by Deborah Sorensen, Assistant Curator, National Building Museum. City of Fear screens Friday November 22 and Sunday November 24. At the AFI Silver.
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Opening tomorrow, Bruce Dern thinks he’s won a million dollars in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
