Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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(BOND360)This week, scientists using a telescope stationed at the South Pole observed new evidence of “cosmic inflation,” Alan Guth’s theory of what happened right after the Big Bang. It seems like just a year ago evidence was stacking up against Guth’s ideas. Mark Levinson’s documentary follows six scientists preparing for the launch of the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter and asking one of the most basic and complex philosophical questions: why do we exist? Legendary editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, among other classics) was at the editing deck and finds a kind of rhythm in the material, but not enough. The director was a physicist before he was a filmmaker, and that may be why he doesn’t sell the quest as a cinematic story so much as a long-form news report. But this is a must-see for anybody interested in the material.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema. Johns Hopkins University Professor, Producer & Film Subject David Kaplan will appear in person at the 7:15 p.m. screening on Friday, March 21
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Bruce Gilden (Cheryl Dunn)The Environmental Film Festival isn’t just about being green. Its programs also observe the urban environment and how humans relate to the streets where they live. Which is where this documentary about New York street photographers comes in. Director Cheryl Dunn interviews shutterbugs both young and old in Everybody Street, and fans of old pros like Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Davidson and Mary Ellen Mark, among others, will have to see the film. But it falls short of a must-see. And photographic merits aside, Ricky Powell does not belong in this company. His most famous image is of Basqiat and Andy Warhol—Powell seeks out what he recognizes, which has nothing to do with the street photography approach of discovering something new in the unfamiliar. Otherwise, Dunn has great material to work with, not just in the photographers and their work but in the great subject of New York City. Personalities like Jill Friedman, who heckles New York cops and curses like a sailor, should be more than enough to fill the frame. But the movie never quite comes into focus, the energy of its subjects and, in turn, their subjects coming to life in still photos more than in the main event.
View the trailer.
Saturday, March 22 at 1 p.m. at the Avalon.
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The AFI Silver’s Burt Lancaster series continues with the actor’s sole credit behind the camera. Lancaster directs himself as Big Eli, a widower who makes off for Texas with his young son in the 1820s because he finds Kentucky “too civilized.” Will they find wild conflict and love along the way? The movie doesn’t have a good reputation, but a 35mm print shot in Technicolor CinemaScope by Ernest Laszlo is sure to look gorgeous on the AFI Silver’s big screen. As if that were not enough to recommend it, the film has a score by Bernard Hermann and is the screen debut for Walter Matthau, playing “whip-wielding saloon keeper Stan Bodine.” I don’t think they have those in Kentucky!
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 23 and Tuesday, Mar 25 at the AFI Silver.
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(Cinema Guild)Two aging relatives live quietly in the French countryside in director Dominique Benicheti reticent documentary. Benicheti used the wide compositions of CinemaScope and recorded ambient sounds of farm life to immerse the viewer in a modest way of life. Film Forum called it, “A veritable ode to the beauty of rural France, and the nearly wordless intimacy of a lifelong relationship” I’d never heard of this 1972 film (and there are only 20 ratings for it on the IMDB) so I imagine the National Gallery’s 35mm screening is a rare one indeed.
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 23 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Otto (Dean Stockwell) runs a gas station/diner in a nuclear-waste ridden town and wants to torch his business for the insurance money. Lionel (Neil Young) and Fred (Russ Tamblyn) are his trusty employees. Neil Young put three million dollars of his own hard-earned money into this labor of something—his third film as director. Also starring Dennis Hopper, members of Devo, and Russ Tamblyn, who had no idea there was a daughter on the way that would become an accomplished poet and star of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants franchise.
View the trailer.
Monday, March 24 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s
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Also opening this weekend, the first installment of art house bad-boy Lars von Trier’s self-described sex epic Nymphomaniac. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
