DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. We’ll keep you updated with any schedule changes due to the inclement weather.
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Masaharu Fukuyama and Keita Nonomiya. © 2013 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK, INC./AMUSE INC./GAGA CORPORATION. All rights reserved. A Sundance Selects Release.Ryoto (Masaharu Fukuyama) is a successful businessman who provides plenty of material comfort to his family. But he and his wife (Machiko Ono) learn that their six-year-old son was switched at the hospital at birth. When he meets the modest shopkeeper who has been raising his own son for six years, he learns something about what fatherhood really means. If this sounds sentimental, it is, but director Kore-Eda Hirokazu usually handles loaded subject material with more subtlety than this. Like Father, Like Son is well acted and beautifully made, but falls too easily along class lines. Not to be confused with the 1987 Dudley Moore/Kirk Cameron vehicle.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Natalie Jenison (Sony Pictures Classics)An eccentric inventor tries to reverse engineer a painting by one of the great Dutch masters. Tim Jenison is a great documentary subject, his obsessive quest fascinating and provocative. Director Teller stays in quiet character, but the same cannot be said for host Penn Jillette. Despite obvious admiration for his friend Tim, Jillette, who with his partner Teller co-produced the film, makes the common documentary error of inserting himself into the story. If you love Jillette that won’t be a problem, but I’d have loved a version of Tim’s Vermeer that put all the focus on Jenison and his work, and left his famous friend on the cutting floor. There is a four-star hour stuck in this two-and-a-half star 80-minute film.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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She belongs dead.
Bride of Frankenstein — Live Interactive Show!
The monster wants a mate in James Whale’s sequel to 1935 Frankenstein, one of the rare sequels that may surpass the original, with no small thanks to Elsa Lanchester’s iconic hair. The AFI Silver’s special presentation is hosted by local legend Count Gore DeVol (Dick Dysel) in a live version of Channel 20’s Creature Feature program. Co-presented with the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival. By Saturday evening, audiences will be drooling from cabin fever and may turn the event into a cinematic feast of human flesh. Be there.
View the trailer.
Saturday, February 15 at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver
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My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns
The Freer Gallery’s Iranian Film Festival continues with a documentary about director Negahdar Jamali, who makes Middle Eastern Westerns on cheap video equipment. The Freer notes, “his films are micro-budget affairs shot on cheap video equipment, using homemade sets, costumes, and special effects and starring Jamali and his friends as cowboys and Native Americans. His passion for Westerns borders on obsession, causing friction with his long-suffering wife and the many acquaintances from whom he ceaselessly cajoles money and favors to support his unlikely hobby—but Heydari refuses to make fun of his subject. Rather, he creates an affectionate portrait of a charming eccentric who is fully dedicated to his art.” In short: Heydari is his country’s Jeff Krulik. Can we set up a cultural exchange? I’d love to see the results.
View the trailer.
Friday, February 14 at 7 p.m. (make sure the Gallery is open) and Sunday, February 16 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Sylvia Sidney and Cary GrantThe National Gallery of Art’s series “Recovered Treasure: UCLA’s Festival of Preservation” continues Friday with this 1934 vehicle for actress Sylvia Sidney adapted from a story in the Ladies Home Journal. Sidney stars as a young woman offered cold cash if she can impersonate a visiting princess. She just has to convince Cary Grant. Shown in glorious 35mm with the 1933 Laurel and Hardy short Busy Bodies.
Friday, February 14 at 2:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Streaming Pick: A Pony Tale aka A Talking Pony!?!
A brooding teenage girl lives with her stepmother and stepbrothers, their ranch facing foreclosure.When her horse Horatio starts talking, hilarity ensues and the ranch is most certainly saved. This straight-to-VOD quickie is the latest talking animal feature from director David DeCoteau, an auteur of softcore gay porn and talking animal movies, many of which are filmed in the same ginormous house in Malibu. Starring Family Affair‘s Johnny Whitaker and Kristine DeBell, whose appearance in most of the talking animal movies suggests an Ozu-like continuum between films, the players reliving the same drama in the same house over and over again. I haven’t watched it yet, but I can’t wait.
