DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most intersting movies playing around town in the coming week.

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Michel Gondry cleverly animates his animation process, complete with 16mm Bolex and overhead projector. (IFC)

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

I didn’t think the best new movie in town this week would be a documentary about Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, linguist and political activist. But as I wrote in a review of the film for Spectrum Culture, director Michel Gondry’s “vivid [hand-drawn] animation … succeeds in revealing [the director’s] thinking process as he tries to work out Chomsky’s ideas. The animation circumvents the French-English language barrier by using a third language, that of cinema.” The film focuses on Chomsky the linguist more than Chomsky the political activist, leaving a beautifully animated celebration of ideas, both visual and verbal. Read my full Spectrum Culture review here.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema

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Berenice Bejo and Tahar Rahim in Asghar Farhad’s THE PAST

European Union Festival

Tonight the AFI Silver launches the 26th annual showcase of new European films. More even than FilmFest DC, the EU Festival gives area cinephiles a chance to preview next year’s arthouse favorites. Highlights this week include middle-aged love story Le Week-End (December 7); the latest collaboration between director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, Venus); the “psychedelic period piece” A Field in England (December 6 and 7) from director Ben Wheatly (Kill List); and The Past (December 8), the latest from Asghar Farhadi, director of the Oscar-winning The Separation.

View trailers for A Field in England and The Past.
December 5-22 at the AFI Silver.

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Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey (December 8 at the Goethe Institut)

Capital Irish Film Festival

Solas Nua’s eighth annual festival of contemporary Irish film launches tonight at the Landmark E Street Cinema with director Lance Daly’s “recession comedy” Life’s a Breeze, followed by an opening night reception at Aria’s Pizzeria, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The four-day festival showcases recent feature films, documentaries, shorts and animation that observe and celebrate the Irish. The program’s remaining films, including a documentary about Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin, will be at Goethe-Institut’s comfortable, state-of-the-art screening room. Bernadette director Lelia Doolan will be on hand December 8 to discuss
the film.

View the trailer for Life’s a Breeze.
December 5 at Landmark E Street Cinema and December 6-8 at the Goethe Institut. See the festival website for a complete schedule.

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(Cinedigm)

Narco Cultura

In 2009, El Paso, Texas counted five murders all year, making it one of the safest cities in America. That same year, just across the Mexican border, Juarez counted 3,622 murders. Despite or maybe because of the grisly statistics, narco-traffickers are treated as heroic outlaws, legends of songs written by musicians looking for a way out of the ghetto at any cost. War photographer Shaul Schwarz finds images both beautiful and bloody for this documentary about the narco-trafficker’s affect on popular culture, as seen through an LA narcocorrido singer a Juarez crime scene investigator.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema

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Devi

The Freer launches the film series, “Power, the Spirit, and the Flesh”, in conjunction with their exhibit “Yoga: The Art of Transformation”, with a rare 35mm screening of this early film from master director Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy). Actress Sharmila Tagore, a distant relative of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, stars as Doyamoyee, a young wife whose father-in-law is certain she is an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.

Sunday, December 8 at 2 pm at the Freer. Free.