DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in your living room in the coming week. It’s cold outside, and area movie screens don’t have anything new or notably old to offer this week, so hunker down with some recent additions to Netflix Instant.
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Jack LemmonC.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a doormat for Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) and the other executive shoes at Consolidated Life who use his bachelor pad for their sordid assignations. Baxter falls for Miss Kubelik (Shirley Maclaine), his Dulcinea as elevator operator. If you’ve never seen director Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic I don’t want to tell you any more about this most cynical of romantic comedies, this most devastating of holiday movies. The wide-screen compositions are best seen on the big screen (the AFI ran it during their holiday series last month), but it just became available on Netflix Instant on January 1. If you’re one of those people (like me) who mistrust Oscar-winning movies, know that The Apartment, one of my very favorite movies, completely earns its five Oscar wins. They don’t write them like this anymore.
View the trailer.
Stream it here.
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Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony
It’s impossible not to have preconceptions about young men obsessed with a cartoon targeted to little girls. But director Laurent Malaquais observes this strange pop culture phenomenon without resorting to common snark. The result is an oddly moving documentary about a kind of community and belonging that you never dreamed could emerge from Big Marketing.
View the trailer.
Stream it here.
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Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi (Kino Lorber)If you blinked, you missed the only area screening of the latest film from director Alain Resnais, but now it’s available for streaming. When it played one night at the Avalon, I wrote, “A deceased playwright (Denis Podalydès) leaves behind a video message for actors who have performed in his play Eurydice and instructs his august former charges to determine whether a young amateur troupe should be allowed to perform the play. Ninety-one-year old director Alain Resnais assembled a who’s who of French actors playing themselves, including regular collaborators like Sabine Azéma. Even if Resnais doesn’t have another masterpiece like Last Year at Marienbad in him, he hit a late-career high mark with Private Fears in Public Places (2006), so I’m hoping this is a rebound from the absurd loopiness of 2009’s Wild Grass.”
View the trailer.
Stream it here.
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Shelley Dvuall and Sissy Spacek (Criterion Collection)Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) are roommates with a strange relationship. Director Robert Altman’s riff on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona came to him in a dream, and even he admitted he wasn’t sure what it all meant, but that didn’t stop Roger Ebert from naming it the best film of 1977. 3 Women was not available on any home format until rights issues were finally cleared up and Criterion got the license to release it. Now you can watch this challenging meditation on identity in the comfort of your own home.
View the trailer.
Stream it here.
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If you feel like getting out of the house Monday night, you could possibly do worse than to check out this Spanish Superman rip-off brought to you by the folks at the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. Directed by the man who brought you Slugs: The Movie), and starring Cameron Mitchell, this 1980 fantasy-comedy features, according the the WPFS, “an alien superman with a jive Eurodisco theme song” and the powers of “flight via blue screen, strength to lift balsa wood steamroller props, and the ability to turn guns into bananas! WATCH as he faces slow-ass killer robots, stock footage of sharks, toybox special effects, and hokey dubbing!”
View the trailer.
Monday, January 6 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s.
