DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan (Alex Bailey/The Weinstein Compnay)Journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) doesn’t do special interest stories. But when he hears of the struggles of Irish Catholic matron Philomena Lee (Dame Judi Dench) he takes on her quest to find the son she gave up for adoption decades ago. Co-star and co-producer Coogan also co-wrote the script for the film, adapting Sixsmith’s book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, and if it doesn’t sound like your typical irreverent Steve Coogan project, you’re right. Dench can breathe life into commercial products, shining in Skyfall and even in the formulaic Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but she doesn’t quite find the dignity in a dotty character who reads Harlequin romances. The odd couple dynamic was clearly meant to give the cynical Sixsmith a chance to learn something about life and faith from a little old lady, but Coogan’s performance doesn’t sell the transformative potential of the script. Partially filmed just blocks from the White House.
View the trailer.
Opens today at AMC Loews Georgetown, Landmark E Street Cinema, AFI Silver, Landmark Bethesda Row, Angelika Mosaic, Cinema Arts, and other area theaters.
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Eliades Ochoa and Enzo Avitabile (Shadow Distribution)Director Jonathan Demme made one of the great music documentaries with Stop Making Sense. His portrait of the Neapolitan saxophonist and singer-songwriter Enzo Avitabile is reportedly not up to that high standard, despite the potential intrigue of a figure who collaborated with James Brown and Tina Turner. Demme follows Avitabile around Naples, and in collaboration with an eclectic range of musicians including Eliades Ochoa (Buena Vista Social Club), Naseer Shamma, Daby Touré and Trilok Gurtu.
View the trailer.
Opens today at the Avalon.
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Toni Servillo (Janus)Journalist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) celebrates his 65th birthday with a decadent birthday party. Director Paolo Sorrentino directed Sena Penn in last year’s fish-out-of-water story This Must Be the Place, but that movie’s alienated view of a foreign land (America) had a dry charm that overcame cringeworthy moments like a gothed-out Penn spouting lines like “David Byrne you’re an artist!” Here Sorrentino directs an eye to the Felliniesque excesses of his homeland, with mixed results. I appreciate the amusing parody of a Marina Abramovic performance piece, and the scale makes me think the director could have made a far better Great Gatsby than Baz Luhrman’s. But despite the lush cinematography, the film doesn’t feel like a satire of empty lives. It just feels empty.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Courtesy PhotofestThe Gospel According to Matthew
If you survived the AFI’s screening of Salo, the National Gallery of Art’s post-Thanksgiving schedule offers a pair of earlier, gentler films more from director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Friday the Gallery screens the director’s naturalistic Biblical adaptation, The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), a film influenced by Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis as well as by early Renaissance painting. Also screening this weekend, Anna Magnani plays a woman trying to rise past her former life as a prostitute in Mamma Roma (1962).
View the trailer.
The Gospel According to Matthew screens Friday, November 29 at 2:00 pm. Mamma Roma screens Saturday, November 30 at 4:00 pm. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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This 1925 silent stars Harold Lloyd as Harold Lamb, a naive underclassman desperate for popularity joins the football team, only to be put in the thankless role of waterboy and tackling dummy. Does this mean we can blame Adam Sandler on Lloyd’s influence? The Freshman was one of Lloyd’s most popular movies, and is one of the great silent comedies.
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Sunday December 1 (with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin) and Monday-Tuesday December 2-3 (with recorded track by Carl Davis) at the AFI Silver.
