Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subejctive guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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My Neighbor TotoroNausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbor Totoro
The E Street Landmark Cinema cranks up its 35mm projector for its annual program of films from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki. This weekend’s selections are Miyazaki’s first feature, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), shown in its original Japanese version with subtitles; and one of the director’s most adored films, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), shown in an English-dubbed version. All films in the series will be shown in 35mm prints. And if you still haven’t seen Miyazaki’s most recent and final film, The Wind Rises, you can still catch that, in a digital presentation, at Landmark Bethesda Row and West End Cinema.
View trailers for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbor Totoro.
Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9 at E Street Landmark Cinema. Download the full Studio Ghibli series schedule here (pdf).
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Pierre Deladonchamps and Patrick d’Assumçao (Strand Releasing)A nude beach that’s a popular gay cruising spot becomes a murder scene in director Alain Guiraudie’s highly buzzed thriller. This is no Blue is the Warmest Color — more graphic and less conventional, this study of easy sex and dangerous affairs is tempered by the doughy straight guy Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who tells skinny Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) that he likes the gay side of the beach simply because people will talk to him there. Thus the pastoral backdrop for cheap hookups becomes an alienating, lonely place. N.B.: “Viewers are advised that this film contains scenes of a sexually explicit nature. No one under 18 will be admitted,” which corresponds to Criterion Collection writer Michael Koresky’s observation, “Never have scrotums been used as such elegant compositional elements.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) marries into a powerful family in order to avenge his father’s death. Sound a little familiar? The Freer’s Kurosawa’s Shakespeare series continues this weekend with a 35mm print of a film that has parallells with Hamlet, finding something rotten in Japan’s corporate culture. Film scholar Donald Richie, a specialist in Japanese cinema, singles out the film’s opening wedding sequence as “one of the most dense, the most brilliant, the most incisive in Kurosawa’s entire output.”
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 9 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Starman in 70mm
Responding to an invitation found on a Voyager Golden Record, an alien (Jeff Bridges) visits Earth only to have his spacecraft shot down somewhere over Wisconsin. To fit in with his new environment, he assumes a native form: the recently decesased husband of Karen Allen. The AFI Silver is showing a 70mm print of this 1984 John Carpenter film as part of its Screen Valentines series. Bridges earned an Oscar nomination for his role as an alien who convinces Allen to help him find his mothership.
View the trailer.
Friday, March 7 and Wednesday, March 12 at the AFI Silver.
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courtesy Video Data BankEarly Video Pioneers: Videofreex with Portapaks
Andrew Bujalski’s 2013 film Computer Chess used a vintage Sony Portapak video camera to evoke its late 1970s technonerd milieu. This Sunday the National Gallery screens work by Portapak auteurs the Videofreex collective (1969 – 1978), who founded the first pirate TV station and developed community television. Selected videos include an interview with Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, a discussion with organizer Abbie Hoffman, and excerpts from other early video recordings. Videofreex members Skip Blumberg and Parry Teasdale and Video Data Bank collections manager Tom Colley will appear at the program.
Sunday, March 9 at 4:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Also opening this week, hitman John Cusack is holed up in a seedy motel in The Bag Man. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
