Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting films playing around town in the coming week.
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Aftermath (March 4 at the AFI, March 8 at the DCJCC)Washington Jewish Film Festival
Now in it’s 24th year, the festival features 64 films from 18 countries documenting cinematic varities of the Jewish experience. Tickets are already sold out for tonight’s opening film The Wonders and the John Turturro-directed centerpiece Fading Gigolo, starring Woody Allen as a New York bookstore owner. But you can still get tickets for closing night film Cupcakes, from Israeli director Eytan Fox (director of Yossi and Jagger). Tickets are also available for the festival’s spotlight on Polish cinema, including The Jewish Cardinal and the controversial thriller Aftermath (March 4 at the AFI, March 8 at the DCJCC) and Oscar contender Ida (SOLD OUT).
View the trailer for Aftermath.
February 7-March 9 at various venues. Please check the festival website for a full schedule.
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A wealthy invalid (Barbara Stanwyck) with a wandering husband (Burt Lancaster) overhears a phone conversation plotting a murder. The AFI Silver’s Burt Lancaster series continues with a 35mm print of this1948 film noir classic, adapted from a radio play set in real time. A 1989 TV-movie version of the same play starred WKRP‘s Loni Anderson and The Avengers‘ Patrick Macnee.
View the trailer for the 1949 film here; watch a French commercial for the 1989 TV movie here.
Friday, February 28 and Monday, March 3-6 at the AFI.
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The Freer launches its series Kurosawa’s Shakespeare this weekend with a 35mm print of the director’s 1985 masterpiece. Kurosawa spent a decade planning his adaptation of King Lear, which stars Tatsuya Nakadai as a sixteenth-century samurai who must divide his kingdom among three sons. Ran‘s epic battle scenes are among the finest in cinema, with Toru Takemitsu’s mournful score in brilliant counterpoint to the brutally choreographed chaos. This is the best movie in town this weekend, and a must-see on the big screen.
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 2 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Oh the humanity! (Cinedigm)The team that brought you Koyaanisqatsi thirty years ago returns with another “stunning, wordless portrait of modern life.” Philip Glass provides the music for writer-director Godfrey Reggio’s black and white meditation on man’s relationship to machine. I didn’t get a chance to preview it, and am a little skeptical. I never got over the shot in Ron Fricke’s 1992 Baraka that captured a frightened indigenous person peering out from behind foliage at some modern technological monstrosity, a scene caught in hi-tech 70mm six-track Dolby Stereo. But I’m the only person I know who found Baraka disingenuous, and Fricke (who was cinematographer on Koyaanisqatsi) isn’t involved with this, so if you have high hopes that 74 shots of state-of-the-art digital projection can capture the multitude of humanity, then go forth and see it.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Wavemakers: Following the Legacy of the Ondes Martenot
The National Gallery of Art asks a great question with their Sunday film program: “What do Édith Piaf, Arthur Honegger, Elmer Bernstein, and Radiohead have in common with films like Lawrence of Arabia and There Will Be Blood? The answer is the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument invented in the 1920s whose distinctive sound has penetrated the music tracks of our time.” Documentary artist Caroline Martel found “Martenot connoisseurs, players, scientists, and instrument makers — a unique band of followers who believe this most sensitive electronic instrument, the Martenot, might just provide, to this day, the missing link in musical history.”
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 2 at 4:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
