Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

—

Jacopo Olmo Antinori and Tea Falco

Me and You

Pimple-faced 14-year old Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) skips a class skiing trip to spend a week alone in the basement of his parent’s Rome flat. Then his junky half-sister Olivia (Tea Falco) shows up. At his peak, director Bernardo Bertolucci was making classic arthouse films like The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris. Nowadays the 73-year old director is confined to a wheelchair, and much of the action in this lightweight effort is restricted to a basement set. The Guardian‘s Philip French called Me and You “a good deal less interesting and dramatic than Home Alone,” which is a great but unfair line. In his first film since 2003’s The Dreamers, Bertolucci creates a claustrophobic, shadowy lair that captures the inner turmoil of his troubled youths.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

—

Angeli Bayani and Koh Jia Ler (Film Movement)

Ilo Ilo

A struggling Singapore couple with a 10-year old boy hire a Filipino maid in writer-director Anthony Chen’s assured feature debut. Viewers in the West will miss a lot of cultural and historical subtleties. Set during Singapore’s financial crisis of the ’90s, the film’s title for American distribution is taken from the Philippine province that Terry, the Filipino maid, calls home, but the province is barely mentioned in the film. Calling the film Ilo Ilo suggests a faraway home and an alienation that is not irrelevant to the plot. But the film’s Mandarin title is a far clearer summation: Father, Mother Not At Home. The set up in that Mandarin title explains why such a culturally specific film has appeal beyond its native audience. Chen and his cast develop human relationships that are universal, and sustain a domestic drama set amid a financial anxiety that is relevant to Anywhere, 2014. The plot gets a little melodramatic, and Yann Yann Yeo’s overbearing mother is a standard issue domestic villain. But the rest of the cast and characters are more delicately shaded, and the central relationship between the maid-babysitter and the neglected boy is convincing and affectionate. Ilo Ilo breaks no new ground, but it’s a competent tearjerker and a sad window into a world economy that is still in crisis today. {Adapted from my review for Spectrum Culture.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up

—

The Warriors

This weekend the AFI celebrated the 35th anniversary of director Walter Hill’s New York gangland dystopia with a new DCP. Michael Beck, who went on to star in Xanadu, plays Swan, the Ulysses-like gang leader who tries to lead his troops back home to Coney Island, traversing dangerous territory, including the subway. Who knew that in the future, gentrification would be the real enemy? Still, the film’s shooting locations (which did not, despite the plot line, include the Bronx), have for the most part remained intact. To see how much New York has changed since 1979, see Scouting NY’s series of posts on the film’s shooting locations then and now.

View the trailer.
Friday, July 18-Monday, July 21 and Thursday, July 24 at the AFI Silver.

—

Aberdeen

Made in Hong Kong Film Festival

This weekend the Freer launches its 19th annual festival of new and classic films from Hong Kong. Aberdeen (Friday, July 18 at 7 p.m.) comes from prolific director Pang Ho-cheung, whose repertoire has included horror (Dream Home), gross-out comedies (Vulgaria) and rom-coms (Love in the Buff). His latest film is a comedy-drama that, according to Twitch Film’s James Marsh, “delivers a beautifully observed portrait of a modern Hong Kong family that fuses social commentary with fantastical imagery and his trademark cheeky humor to wonderful effect.” Director Benny Chan’s The White Storm (Sunday, July 18 at 2 p.m.) is an action thriller that the gallery calls “a hard-hitting tribute to the classic brothers-in-arms Hong Kong cop movies of the 1980s and 1990s.” Starring Sean Lau, Nick Cheung and Louis Koo. Both films will be presented in D-Cinema format. Next weekend, the Freer will screen the great 1985 horror-comedy Mr. Vampire on a double-bill with the 2013 film Rigor Mortis, which takes inspiration and even a couple of actors from the Mr. Vampire films.

View trailers for Aberdeen and The White Storm.
Aberdeen screens Friday, July 18 at 7:00 pm. The White Storm screens Sunday, July 18 at 2 p.m. At the Freer. Free.

—

Also opening this week, Richard Linklater’s highly anticipated Boyhood, which the director filmed over the course of 12 years. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.