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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Philip Seymour Hoffman (Lance Acord/IFC)A young man whom nobody likes is killed on a construction site in a 1970s working-class Irish Philadelphia. God’s Pocket is the directorial debut of Mad Men‘s John Slattery, who also co-wrote this adaptation of a novel by Pete Dexter. The movie’s fantastic cast is led by Philip Seymour Hoffman (in one of his last roles), and his co-stars include Mad Men bombshell Christina Hendricks as the dead boy’s mother, Richard Jenkins as an alcoholic newspaper columnist and Eddie Marsan as an undertaker. But the script is terribly forced, its blend of black comedy and impoverished noir never coming together, its dialogue so ham-handed not even this stellar cast can save it.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema
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David ThewlissWe meet Johnny (David Thewliss) raping a woman in an alley. Mike Leigh’s 1993 masterpiece Naked starts ugly and gets worse, but his motormouthed, philosophizing anti-hero is completely watchable thanks to an intense, incendiary performance from David Thewliss. The Freer Gallery is screening a 35mm print in their series Here Comes the Night: Cinema Nocturnes. Obviously, this is not for the faint-hearted, but for intrepid moviegoers, this may well be the best movie laying in town this weekend.
View the trailer.
Friday, May 16 at 7:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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Gig YoungThey Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
“Yowsah, yowsah, yowsah!” The cynical emcee Rocky (Gig Young) calls the shots for contestants in a punishing Depression-era dance marathon in director Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of the novel by Horace McCoy. The AFI is screening a 35mm print as part of their Jane Fonda AFI Life Achievement Award Retrospective series, but Fonda is the odd actor out here, her acting style a sore thumb against the more naturalistic talents of her cast-mates, especially the great Gig Young, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
View the trailer.
Monday, May 19 and Wednesday, May 21 at the AFI Silver. $12
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Image via Magnolia PicsThe Double
It’s a double dose of Jesse Eisenberg in Richard Ayaode’s The Double, an adaptation of the novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Strokes of Terry Gilliam milieu highlight Ayaode’s surreal, frantic tale of a timid, shy loner whose life is thrown through a loop when his work hires a new employee who’s his exact double. Simon James (Eisenberg) casually drifts through his meaningless existence—work, home, visiting his cruel mother, pining over his office crush (Mia Wasikowska), sleep—unnoticed, so it’s doubly disturbing when no one else notices that the new employee, James Simon, is identical to Simon. At first, the two buddy up, but Simon quickly realizes that his charismatic playboy double just wants to use him to work his way up the ladder at work and into the pants of every woman he comes in contact with. Ayaode’s film is stylish and dark—with a mise-en-scène that flirts somewhere between steampunk and retro dystopic—but the absurdist nature of the narrative quickly becomes cloying as James’ behavior becomes more and more insidious. — Matt Cohen
View the trailer here. Opens today at E Street Cinema.
The series Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema continues this weekend at the AFI Silver with this 1973 fantasy-drama, one of just a handful of film adaptations of the work of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. In this live-action film, director Wojciech Has achieves some of the dense, surreal imagery that would mark The Brothers’ Quay’s stop-motion adaptation of Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles.” The National Gallery of Art continues its Polish Masterpieces screenings with 1966 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee Pharaoh. Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz adpated Bolesław Prus’’s celebrated historical novel for this widescreen epic of Egyptian intrigue, partly filmed on location near Luxor and Giza.Note: as with all the screenings in this series, the films will be in DCP format.
Pharoah screens Sunday, May 18 at 4:00 pm at the National Gallery of Art. Free The Hourglass Sanitoroium screens Saturday, May 17 at 5:30 at the AFI Silver $12.
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Also opening this week, Bryan Cranston stars in a new version of Godzilla. We’ll have a full review later today.
