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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The Conformist with Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in person
Saturday, the AFI screens a 35mm print of director Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 masterpiece about fascist Italy in the 1930s. Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has a “maniacal obsession with normality [that] leads him to fascist politics, an ill-fated marriage, a dangerous affair and the betrayal of a kindly mentor. He ultimately discovers that demonic conformity is the surest route to depravity.” Master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) will appear for a Q&A after the screening. This special event was made with the support of the Georgetown University Italian Research Institute, the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute.
View the trailer.
Saturday, May 31 at 3:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(Milestone Film and Video)Black Cross (Knights of the Teutonic Order)
The series Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema continues at the National Gallery of Art this weekend with director Aleksander Ford’s 1960 epic of the 15th century. During the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War, a knight sets out to rescue his beloved, who has been kidnapped. Black Cross (Krzyżacy) was the biggest box-office success in Polish film history. The series also continues at the AFI Silver this weekend with the 1977 film Camouflage (Barwy ochronne), “an ironical and absurd comedy set at a university summer school camp.” All screenings in the Polish masterpieces series are in DCP.
View the trailer for Black Cross
Black Cross screens Saturday, May 31 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
Camouflage screens Sunday, June 1 at 8:45 p.m. and Monday, Jun 2 at 9:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $12.
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Vargas and his motherJournalist Jose Antonio Vargas has written for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and won a Pulitzer Prize as part of the team that covered the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings for the Washington Post. As he revealed in a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, he’s also an undocumented immigrant. Vargas was born in the Philippines, and this film, which he co-directed with Ann Raffaela Lupo, documents his work on immigration reform in the United States and his attempt to reconnect with the mother he has not seen in 20 years.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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The Freer screens a 35mm print of prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s 2011 film this Sunday as part of the series Kiyochika: Master of the Night and An American in London: Whistler and the Thames. The Gallery writes that “[his] cleverly constructed romantic comedies (Woman is the Future of Man, In Another Country) operate on systems of themes and variations, and are suffused with both longing and humor. In The Day He Arrives, the nighttime streets of Seoul become conduits for nostalgia, painful reunions, and fortuitous chance encounters when a lapsed filmmaker returns from the countryside for a brief visit.” The Freer will also screen a digital copy of director Jean-Pierre Melville,’s 1959 film Two Men in Manhattan.
View the trailer for The Day He Arrives.
Two Men in Manhattan screens Sunday, June 1 at 1 p.m. The Day He Arrives screens Sunday, June 1 at 3 p.m. at the Freer Gallery. Free.
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This 1959 science fiction film, written, produced and directed by Ed Wood, may owe its high cult profile to reverse psychology, as Michael and Harry Medved included the film in their 1980 book, The Golden Turkey Awards, but Plan 9 has since become one of the most beloved worst movies ever made. The curators at the Washington Psychotronic Film Society write, “Once every generation, a film defines a genre. Ed Wood’s ‘true’ story of aliens raising the dead to kill the living is such a film.” Bela Lugosi, whose silent bloodsucking footage was intended for a film called Tomb of the Vampire, was instead recycled here as a posthumous tribute to the director’s friend.
View the trailer.
Monday, June 2 at 8:00 at McFadden’s.
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Also opening this week, the autobiographical Dance of Reality, director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
