Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
Luminiţa Gheorghiu (Zeitgeist Films)Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) is involved in a car accident that kills a young boy, which gives his controlling mother Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) a chance to take care of her own son. Her maternal benison takes the form of a lawyer and a massage that gets uncomfortably un-maternal. Director Calin Peter Netzer’s domestic drama comes out of the Romanian New Wave without the challenging longueurs of much of that national cinema, but he nearly sabotages this compelling drama with a failure that’s common in 21st century movies—from Malick to mumblecore: Handheld camera work so distracting that it pans from character to character in the middle of dialogue, sometimes without correctly anticipating who’s speaking next. The drama is strong enough to keep this watchable, but take a Dramamine before you see this, and read my Spectrum Culture review here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon.
—
Come see me in Z’ALP, screening March 19 at the Embassy of Switzerland (ExtraMile Films 2013)The 22nd annual festival launches next week with more than 200 films from 38 countries. This year’s focus is “Our Cities, Our Planet,” a look at the development of sustainable cities, including a March 21 program about green efforts in Washington, D.C. that will be introduced by Mayor Vincent Gray. Opening night premieres include Watermark, director Jennifer Baichwal’s second collaboration with photographer Edward Burtynsky; Your Inner Fish, “a scientific adventure story tracing the origins of the human body with evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin;” and Carpe Diem: A Fishy Tale, about efforts to control the invasive Asian Carp. Other festival highlights include Manakamana (March 29 at the National Gallery of Art), a documentary about Nepalese pilgrims travelling by cable car. This one earned some buzz, including a curious Letterboxd review that reads in its entirety, “Everyone is talking about the goat butts, but for me it was all about the ice cream.”
March 18-30 at venues around town. Check the festival website for a complete schedule.
—
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton in HALF OF A YELLOW SUN (March 13 and 16)The AFI, TransAfrica, and afrikafé present the 10th anniversary of a festival that showcases African filmmaking from all corners of the continent. Opening night feature Half of a Yellow Sun (March 13 and 16), starring 12 Years a Slave‘s Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton, is already sold out, but patrons can try for standby tickets before each show. Other festival highlights include the pseudo-documentary Le Président (March 14 and 20), in which Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo uses split-screens to tell the story of a leader who disappeared; Grisgris (March 17), Chad’s 2013 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film, tells the story of a would-be dancer and a prostitute; and the Ethiopian film Difret (March 15), about a lawyer who takes on the case of a teenaged girl who murdered her abductor.
View the trailer for Half of a Yellow Sun.
March 13-20 at the AFI Silver. Check the AFI calendar for a full schedule.
—
Courtesy Museum of Modern ArtTo celebrate the release of the documentary Hans Richter: Everything Turns, Everything Revolves, which screens Saturday afternoon at 2:00, the National Gallery of Art presents a 16mm print of Richter’s rarely screened 1947 film. Richter collaborated with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and Man Ray on a work that was one of the first feature-length avant-garde films made in America. Music by John Cage, Paul Bowles, Darius Milhaud, and others accompany a series of dream sequences, each created with the help of one of the contributing artists. If you like that program, you might want to come back to the Gallery on Sunday at 4:30 for the first part of the series series Masterworks of Czech Animation. Between screenings, you can check out the excellent Garry Winogrand exhibit, which I promise to review in this space soon.
Dreams That Money Can Buy screens Satruday, March 15 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
—
In conjunction with the exhibit Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950, the Hirshhorn will screen a 35mm print of artist Bruce Conner’s influential 1976 short film. Crossroads takes slow-motion footage of nuclear tests conducted at Bikni Atoll in 1946 and sets it to music by minimalist composer Terry Riley. Connor’s film is part of a two-part program that includes short films by artists who will be familiar to Hirshhorn regulars: Cyprien Gaillard, SUPERFLEX, and Doug Aitken. Read the entire program lineup here.
Sunday, March 16 at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the Hirshhorn’s Ring Auditorium. Free.
—
Also opening this week: Wes Anderson’s latest bauble, The Grand Budapest Hotel. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
