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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Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric (Guy Ferrandis/Sundance Selects)

Venus in Fur

Thomas (Matheiu Almaric) is directing his own adaptation of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs but can’t find the right actress until Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) walks in one stormy night. This is director Roman Polanski’s second stage adaptation in a row. If the sparks didn’t quite fly in Carnage, the two actors here generate plenty of tension and energy, all the more so that the lead is played by Polanski’s wife and her foil looks a lot like a young Polanski. The meta-play’s resonance with Polanski’s personal and professional life quickly becomes clear and obvious, and the carnivalesque music is awful. But the actors, especially Seigner, who can be funny and terrifying at the turn of a gesture, make this one of the director’s best films in years.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.

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Friederike Kempter, Marc Hosemann and Tom Schilling (Music Box Films)

A Coffee in Berlin

A black and white movie about a rootless 20-something? Writer-director Jan Ole Gerster’s first feature is ersatz Woody Allen — call it Frances Achtung!. Its characters aren’t nearly as insufferable as in Noah Baumbach’s recent coming of age indulgence, but for better and for worse, they’re also not as distinct. Niko (Tom Schilling) is the most banal of dysfunctional millennials, and the actor behind him is no Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera, not that they would have saved this flat picaresque.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.

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Would you kidnap this man?

Paths of Glory

On the front lines in World War I, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) refuses to let his men continue on a suicidal mission to take a German stronghold called “The Anthill.” But the lives of men don’t count for more than that anthill, and Dax’s men are brought to court-martial for cowardice. Stanley Kubrick’s late films are the pinnacle of a cool, detached style, but this 1957 masterpiece features the director at his most human. Kubrick’s famous control freakitude met its match in the irrepressible character actor Timothy Carey, who steals his scenes as Private Maurice Ferol. One of his unscripted improvisations made it into the final cut, to the chagrin of colleagues who understandably thought him a ham. If the picture on screen was all seriousness, the action behind the scenes was more playful. Carey was in Munich working on Paths of Glory when he staged his own kidnapping, leaving himself to be found gagged and handcuffed by German police. During the same period, Carey and his crew mates visited a local burlesque joint, and during a bubble-bath finale the gangly actor charged the stage to join the bubbly fraulien. Sadly, the actor never worked with Kubrick again, and one can only imagine how his distinctive presence might have worked in A Clockwork Orange or The Shining.

View the trailer.
Saturday, July 12-Sunday, July 13 and Tuesday, July 15-Thursday, July 17 at the AFI Silver.

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Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani

Possession

A young wife freaks out on the way home from the grocery store, exploding milk jugs in the process. This weekend, the AFI’s 8th annual Totally Awesome: Great Films of the 1980s series brings back a 35m print of an arthouse favorite. Anna (Ishtar’s Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill) have a marriage on the rocks in a divided Berlin. It sounds like a domestic drama, but its amour fou reaches supernatural extremes. Director Andrzej Zulawski was probably incapable of making a movie that wasn’t insanely melodramatic: casting Klaus Kinski as an actor playing Richard III in That Most Important Thing: Love is one of the more sensible things about that movie — and this film, presented in the director’s cut, is reportedly one of his most coherent and best films.

View the trailer.
Saturday, July 12-Monday, July 14 at the AFI Silver.

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Marquis

I’ll let the curators of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society describe this 1989 animated comedy: “Zut Alors! Zat dog, ze Marquis de Sade, has been imprisoned in ze Bastille for blasphemy! When he isn’t writing pornographic novels, he’s arguing with his horny, human-faced talking penis. Among ze inmates is ze pregnant cow Justine, who claims she was raped by ze King. Ze prison’s camel-faced Confessor plots to frame De Sade as ze fazzer and to make a quick buck peddling his noble smut. But ze Revolution is at hand! Who will survive? What will become of ze child? Will ze Marquis escape with penis intact? Or will zey be…separated? Zis one is definitely adults only. Maturity optional, but highly discouraged.”

View the trailer.
Monday, July 14 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s

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Amanda Langlet and Melvil Poupaud (Big World Pictures )

A Summer’s Tale

Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) is a socially awkward math student and aspiring musician on vacation in Bretagne, coupling and uncoupling over the course of a few weeks. The third film in director Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons series was released in 1996 but was never commercially distributed in the US. The Avalon will be showing a new HD restoration.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon

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Also opening this week, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.