DCIst’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town for almost the end of the world.
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Anthony EdwardsThese are the end times … for the Hirshhorn’s exhibit Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950. To help send off this exhibit, the Hirshhorn brings you Disasterthon!, an all-day program (from DVD, I presume) of disaster movies including The Host, the 2005 War of the Worlds, Sharknado, 28 Days Later, and Dr. Strangelove. The museum leads their doomsday programming with its least known title, director Steve De Jarnatt’s romantic apocalypse, which I recently wrote about on Spectrum Culture. “Imagine you meet the girl of your dreams at 10 o’clock, and at 11 o’clock find out the world is going to end at 12 o’clock. This is how I describe Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 bomb Miracle Mile to friends, framing the movie not in terms of nuclear annihilation but as a doomed romance. The film still works as a harrowingly effective B-movie apocalypse, but time has given it added resonance that even the director may not have expected.” Update: The Hirshhorn will be screening a 35mm print of Dr. Strangelove.
View the trailer.
Miracle Mile screens Saturday, April 26 at noon at the Hirshhorn. Free. See the complete disasterthon schedule here.
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Vivian Maier self-portrait (Vivian Maier courtesy of the Maloof Collection)If you follow street photography at all you’ve heard all the hype about the nanny who left behind more than 100,000 (that’s not a typo) photographic negatives. In my review for Spectrum Culture, I wrote, “Co-director John Maloof was researching Chicago history when he happened upon a group of negatives at an auction. The photos demonstrated a distinct vision of street photography, but when Maloof wanted to find out about the artist he drew a blank. By the time he tracked down the name Vivian Maier, it was to find her obituary. Maloof started to make Maier’s photos available on Flickr in 2007, and the photography world has eaten the story up ever since. I eagerly scarfed up that first publication of her photos, saw two New York gallery exhibits devoted to her work, and (full disclosure) contributed a small amount to the Kickstarter for this documentary project, which is now finally released. Did Maloof find out more about this mysterious photographer?” Plenty. Maloof’s film reveals something about Maier’s obsessive nature, and also reveals something about the filmmaker’s own obsessive personality. Read my full review for Spectrum Culture here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Zhao TaoOne of the best films of 2013 barely appeared on local screens. A Touch of Sin played for a week at the AFI last fall, but this weekend it returns for a screening at the Freer, with director Jia Zhang-ke and lead actress Zhao Tao in person. As I wrote last year, “If you’ve seen other films by Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, like Platform and The World, you may wonder why critic Calum Marsh calls the latest movie by this arthouse favorite the year’s best action movie. While I’d give that nod to Johnnie To’s Drug War, there’s no denying the visceral power of this four-part tale of revenge. With a title inspired by King Hu’s martial arts classic A Touch of Zen, Jia did away with the punishing long takes of his previous work to make a provocative film that is as accessible as it is uncompromising, a martial arts vision of the violence that pervades modern day China.” Read my Spectrum Culture review here.
View the trailer.
Saturday, April 26 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Kristin Wiig and Guy Pearce (Patti Perret/Hateship Capital LLC)A teenage girl (Hailee Steinfeld) plays cruel Cyrano, writing love letters from her widowed father (Guy Pearce) to her mild-mannered nanny (Kirsten Wiig, playing against type). Adapted from a short story by Alice Munro, director Liza Johnson and screenwriter Mark Poirer take Munro’s unsentimental prose and make of it a blunt melodrama. The cast, which includes Nick Nolte and Jennifer Jason Leigh, does well enough, and there are moments of quiet domesticity that would have fit right into a better Munro adaptation. But the script falls into the kind of easy redemptive tropes that Munro studiously avoided.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema
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The series Masterpieces of Polish Cinema continues this week at the AFI with Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 masterpiece “set on the last day of World War II and the first day of peace. And between them, a night that changes everything. In the eyes of Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), an idealistic young Polish resistance fighter, the incipient Communist regime does not represent the hopes and dreams he and his brothers in arms have been fighting and dying for.” Note, as with all films in this series, this will be screened in DCP. This weekend the AFI launches its Shakespeare series with a 35mm screening of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (Friday, April 25) and DCP screenings of Olivier’s Hamlet (Saturday, April 26) and Richard III (Sunday, April 27).
Ashes and Diamonds screens tonight at 7:15 p.m. and Saturday, April 26 at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
