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

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John Dall and Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY (UCLA Film and Television Archive)

Gun Crazy

This Sunday the National Gallery of Art launches its series Recovered Treasure: UCLA’s Festival of Preservation with a 35mm print of one of the great films noir. Barton (John Dall) is a naive war veteran who meets a carnival sharpshooter (Peggy Cummins) with whom he spends life sharing their common pleasure: firearms. Blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo worked on the screenplay. Rebecca Prime, author of Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture, will introduce the screening of Gun Crazy. Saturday afternoon, the Gallery will screen 35mm prints of two noirs directed by Anthony Mann. The 1947 crime films T-Men and Raw Deal were both photographed by the great noir cinematographer John Alton. The Anthony Mann screening will be introduced by historian Max Alvarez, author of The Crime Films of Anthony Mann (2014).

Gun Crazy screens Sunday, February 2 at 4:30 p.m. T-Men and Raw Deal screen Saturday, February 1 at 2 p.m. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.

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The New York Art Quartet

The Breath Courses Through Us

The Library of Congress’s free Jazz film series concludes this Friday with the U.S. premiere of director Alan Roth’s documentary about 1960s free jazz group The New York Art Quartet, which featured John Tchicai (saxophone), Roswell Rudd (trombone), Milford Graves (drums), Reggie Workman (bass), joined by poet Amiri Baraka. Workman, who has performed with John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, David Murray and other giants of jazz, will help introduce the program along with director Roth and WPFW’s Luke Stewart.

View the trailer.
Friday, January 31 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater, 3rd Floor, James Madison Building, Library of Congress. No tickets or reservations needed. Limited seating begins at 6:30 p.m.

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Alice Herz Sommer in “The Lady in Number 6,” part of the Documentary Shorts Program A at West End Cinema

The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014

Completists who want to see all of this year’s Oscar nominees can cross fifteen titles off their scorecards with programs opening this weekend at E Street Landmark and West End Cinema. E Street offers programs of Live Action and Animated Shorts, including Disney’s “Get A Horse!” in which director Lauren MacMullan recaptures the feel of early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Its six minutes pack more entertainment than the entirety of Frozen, the film it preceded in theaters. Live Action shorts include Xavier Legrand’s tense domestic drama “Just Before Losing Everything” and Martin Freeman in “The Voorman Problem,” whose six minutes are somewhat less of a slog than the projected ninety-five hours of Hobbit. West End Cinema will screen two programs of the longer Documentary Shorts. Program A includes three films, “The Lady in Number 6,” about a 109 year old Holocaust survivor; “Karama Has No Walls,” about the 2011 Yemen uprising; and “Facing Fear,” in which the gay victim of a Neo-Nazi hate crime offers forgiveness to his attacker. Program B includes “CaveDigger,” about an artist who digs caves out of sandstone cliffs; and “Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall,” about a terminally ill prisoner and the fellow prisoners who serve as his hospice volunteers.

Live Action and Animated Shorts programs open tonight at E Street Landmark. Documentary Shorts programs open tonight at West End Cinema.

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Fat Shaker

The Freer’s 18th Annual Iranian Film Festival continues this weekend with a film that the gallery calls “one of the most unconventional films to emerge from the country in recent years. The formidable Levon Haftvan plays a gluttonous alcoholic who uses his deaf-mute son to lure attractive young women into drug and booze-fueled nights of illegal excess. Afterward, he extorts money from the women by threatening to go to the authorities. His schemes are derailed by a female photographer who refuses to be intimidated and instead attempts to rescue the young man from his controlling father.”

View the trailer.
Friday, January 31 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, February 2 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free.

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35mm films at the AMC Shirlington

Paramount recently became the first major studio to stop distributing 35mm film prints, closing out their long and storied celluloid run with prints of Anchorman 2. If someone can tell me where I can see a print of this, let me know. Unfortunately, this means that Martin Scorsese’s excellent Wolf of Wall Street, which the director shot on film, is only being distributed in digital formats. A year ago in this space I highlighted a few area theaters bucking the digital trend, but at least two of those analogue venues have since shut down: Montgomery Royal in Wheaton and Rivertowne in Oxon Hill. I have recently confirmed that one local franchise of a major theater chain is sticking to 35mm for now. The AMC Shirlington remains all 35mm, all the time. This weekend the Chilean-Spanish drama Gloria will open at the Shirlington, and the theater will continue its runs of Twelve Years a Slave, The Book Thief, Inside Llewyn Davis, The Invisible Woman, Nebraska, The Past, and Philomena. All on 35mm film.

The AMC Shirlington is located at 2772 S Randolph St, Arlington.