Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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(Cinema Guild)This weekend the Environmental Film Festival presents the latest documentary from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), who produced last year’s stunning Leviathan. That film used GoPro cameras in an immersive, disorienting seascape that boldy opened up the visual language of documentary filmmaking. SEL’s latest effort is a decidedly mellower analogue effort that’s mesmerizing in its own way. Directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez documented pilgrims travelling by cable car to and from Nepal’s Manakamana temple. Shot in real time, using the entire eleven-minute length of a 16mm magazine for each journey, Manakamana is a series of moving portraits of technology and faith.
View the trailer.
Saturday, March 29 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Psst! Let’s eat sushi and not pay! (GKIDS)Ernest is a hungry busker. Celestine is struggling in dental school. They also happen to be a bear and a mouse, respectively. The directing team of Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar were behind 2009’s A Town Called Panic, and this Oscar-nominated film, based on a series of children’s books, is beautifully animated in hand-painted watercolors. But the well-meaning message about prejudice is seriously undermined by the life of crime that Ernest and Celestine embark upon. What kind of message is that for kids? Why can’t we just get along and steal candy? Delightful my ass, the pair should be sent to juvenile detention and eat something healthy fer Chrissakes. E Street Landmark Cinema will screen both the original French version of the film and a dubbed version featuring the voices of Forest Whitaker, Lauren Bacall, and WIlliam H. Macy.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
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Courtesy Nuri Bilge Ceylan FilmsIn conjunction with the Sackler’s photography exhibit, In Focus: Ara Güler’s Anatolia, the Freer offers Turkish food and drink before a 35mm screening of my favorite movie of 2012. As I wrote then, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s epic “is an existential police procedural about storytelling and film making that is absolutely mesmerizing for more than half its running time. If the lyricism falters towards the end, well that’s what happens when stories that begin “Once upon a time” meet real life.” The event is co-sponsored with the Turkish Culture and Tourism Office/Embassy of Turkey. Read my full review here. Read my Spectrum Culture review of a pair of reissues of the music of Turkish protest singer Selda here.
View the trailer.
Sunday, March 30 at the Freer. Turkish food and drink will be served at 12:30 p.m. The film screens at 2 p.m. Free.
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Detail from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Woman before the Mirror,” 1912Draw Til You Drop—The Painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
In conjunction with the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition Modern German Prints and Drawings from the Kainen Collection, the Goethe Institute presents a series of films about German Expressionist artists. Monday’s program is a 35mm print of a 2000 documentary about Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). Kirchner’s “streetscapes of Berlin serve as a backdrop in our mind’s eye when we seek to capture big-city life in the first half of the 20th century. The span of tension in [his] life and work makes for suspense-filled drama and yields an intense film portrayal.”
Monday, March 31 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. Introduced by Marion Deshmukh, Professor of 19th & 20th Century German History and Art History at George Mason University.
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The Washington Psychotronic Film Society presents this 1979 fantasy from Taiwan. I’ll let them explain it. “OK, I can’t really explain this film. It just has too much going on. A horse with a human face. Chimpanzees growing the size of Godzilla. Shiny happy glowing people. A rock the size of Gibraltar bouncing off some guys head. The worst special effects that I have ever seen in one movie. There’s a story somewhere here. Buddha coming down to Earth and stuff. I don’t know. You’ll just have to see for yourself. Did I mention fading subtitles and bad Engrish?”
Monday, March 31 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s
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Also opening this weekend, Russell Crowe stars in Darren Aronofksy’s biblical blockbuster Noah; and a long-married couple (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) try to rekindle their marriage in Le Week-End. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
