DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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The Berninger brothersA divisive music documentary that had its local premiere at last year’s AFIDocs festival gets a commercial run this week. As I wrote last year, “A budding filmmaker is little brother to a rock star. This is the story of Tom Berninger, whose big brother Matt is lead singer for The National. Matt takes Tom on tour as a roadie, but little brother has bigger ambitions, even if he’s not entirely clear what those are. If you really want a documentary about The National, I wouldn’t blame you for completely hating Mistaken for Strangers. But the schlubby director and baby-brother-of-the-lead singer is on the poster for a reason. This is not a music documentary but an awkwardly funny movie about an uncomfortable sibling dynamic, so at odds with the band’s bombast that you suspect it’s a self-deflating put-on. Viva la creative difference!”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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(Entertainment One)From rushing dam waters to the runoff from tanneries to the fountains at Bellagio, water shapes the way we live in radically different and aesthetically powerful ways in this sometimes harrowing documentary about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. Director Jennifer Baichwal documented a Burtynsky project in 2006 with Manufactured Landscapes, but this time the photographer has a co-director credit, and the result is a marriage of aesthetics and eco-politics that must be seen on the big screen. Burtynsky’s work has left me cold in the past, but Baichwal translates the subjects of Burtynsky’s stills to images that earn the scale of his large prints, but in motion.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Burt Lancaster and Tony CurtisThis cynical classic of New York journalism has been given the Criterion Blu-Ray treatment, but its black and white photography (by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe) looks fantastic on the big screen. In my review of the DVD release for Blogcritics, I wrote, “A hard-boiled fantasia of 1950s Manhattan, the ironically titled Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most cynically entertaining pictures to come out of old Hollywood. There are no real heroes in the picture, although the character left standing in the final shot may be given bragging rights simply for surviving the perils of the Great Metropolis. But the film works on so many levels that there are more than enough heroes behind the camera to make up for the deliciously appalling behavior of those in front of it. … The plot revolves around press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis at his slimy best) and his sometimes smybiotic but mostly parasitic relationship with gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a figure based on Walter Winchell. Jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Millner) has the bad fortune to fall for Hunsecker’s daughter Susan (Susan Harrison), and these poor souls are but field mice for the predatory talons of J.J. and Sidney. The notion that a print columnist can wield so much power may seem antiquated in the digital age, but in an increasingly poisonous media environment, the spirit of J. J. Hunsecker (and Walter Winchell) is alive and well today.”
View the trailer.
Friday, April 11-Monday, April 14 and Wednesday, April 16-Thursday, April 17 at the AFI Silver.
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Night Train (Milestone Film and Video) Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish CInema
This weekend the National Gallery, in conjunction with the AFI Silver, launches an ambitious 21-film retrospective of Polish cinema. Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s New Wave thriller Night Train (1959) has earned comparisons to Hitchcock. Most of the film’s claustrophobic action takes place in the confines of a moving train, its passengers anxious to learn if there is a murderer on board. Shown with Tadeusz Konwicki’s Last Day of Summer (1959), an existential two-hander about a nameless man and woman who find each other on a beach. All programs in this series will be presented in DCP.
Sunday, April 13 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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On the Bowery (Milestone Film and Video)In conjunction with their Garry Winogrand exhibit, which I reviewed here, the National Gallery of Art launches this program of films from 1948 through 2013 that document New York street life, cinéma vérité-style. The program initiates the Gallery’s relationship with American University’s new Malsi Doyle and Michael Forman Theater, a state-of-the-art, 150-seat theatre that will serve as a venue for the Gallery’s film programs while the East Building’s ground floor is renovated later this year. Keiko Tsuno and Jon Alpert’s 1980 video Third Avenue is “a landmark cinema verite documentary … [that ] follows six people on Third Avenue, a complex and lively social universe, through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Shown with Lionel Rogosin’s 1956 film On the Bowery, a “mix of street photography and loosely scripted narrative [that] was a landmark of postwar independent cinema, chronicling three days under the elevated trains on New York’s skid row. In 2008, the film was selected for the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress.”
Sunday, April 13 at 4:30 p.m. at the Malsi Doyle and Michael Forman Theater, American University. Free.
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Also opening this week, Scarlett Johansson is a predatory alien in Under the Skin. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
