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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(Kino Lorber)Nigerian pianist-saxophonist-bandleader Fela Kuti created Afrobeat, had 27 wives, died of AIDS, and is the subject of a Broadway musical. One of those things seems less important than the others, yet prolific director Alex Gibney’s documentary about the politically active and musically influential figure too often goes behind the scenes of a Broadway show. All props to choreographer Bill T. Jones aside, the Broadway show’s book is full of awkward exposition, which may be a way to fill in the gaps of the documentary story Gibney is telling. Fela’s activist mother died after military personnel stormed his compound and threw her out a third-story window. Naturally, Gibney cuts from raw newspaper reports to Broadway Fela’s account. Gibney does show Broadway’s attempt to whitewash Fela’s character, Broadway Fela daring to call his entourage of women queens when he saw no problem smacking his queens around. When Finding Fela decides to be a music documentary or political documentary, it’s fine—various talking heads (including Jones) does a thorough job of explaining his influence and almost as thorough a job of his less palatable personal life. And then it’s back to Broadway! The movie runs nearly two hours, a poorly paced slog that would have been vastly improved if it had focused on Fela and not spent so much time with It’s The Fela Show!
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
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John Philip Law and Marisa MellThe AFI continues its thorough Mario Bava series with this swinging ’60s caper based on an Italian comic book super thief. I was all ready to tell you how this would be a rare 35m screening, but unfortunately the AFI will be presenting this digitally. It’s still worth seeing, though, not least for one of Ennio Morricone’s most thrilling scores. You may have seen parts of the film without realizing it—the Beastie Boys used clips in their video for “Body Movin’.”
View the trailer.
Friday, August 8 and Saturday, August 9 at the AFI Silver.
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The return of Moose (center) (Lionsgate)“There’s a magic that happens when you dance … and for one perfect moment you feel totally alive.” The trailer for the latest installment of this street-dance franchise suggests a feature film that equals 112 minutes of total living, but the movie was not made available for critics to preview before opening. I saw three of the four previous Step Up movies and found they were actually improving with the inventive 2012 iteration Step Up Revolution (read my DCist review of that here). But this year’s franchise stepchild, Make Your Move (read my Spectrum Culture review here) , whose director wrote the screenplay for the first Step Up, is one of this year’s worst movies. It’s a low bar, but the new actual Step Up looks better, even if it is a gathering of all-stars from the previous films (with the obvious exception of Channing Tatum). These all-stars include Moose (Adam Sevani), whose entire filmography is made up of appearances in four of the five franchise entries as well as the Miley Cyrus vehicle LOL, in which I spotted him wearing, of all things, a Flipper (the band) t-shirt.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a multiplex near you.
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(Cinema Guild)In the province of Illocos Norte in the Northern Philippines, struggling family man Joaquin (Archie Alemania) is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, leaving his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani, who recently played a Filipino maid in Ilo Ilo) to provide for her family. Director Lav Diaz has a reputation for endurance cinema that makes Béla Tarr look like a premature cinemaculator, and this four-hour crime drama—an epic riff on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—is not Diaz’s longest feature film by a long shot. I have not had a chance to screen this film, and do know know when I would have had the time to give it justice, but Diaz has a growing reputation as a director of powerful if punishing films. If I had the time, I’d gladly support the West End Cinema’s risky decision to give generous screen time to such a challenging work.
View the trailer.
Opens Saturday, August 9 at West End Cinema.
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Not to be confused with the excellent Ray Milland vehicle of the same name, this 1988 horror exploitation follows the adventures of a mutant cat that emerges from the bowels of another cat to attack vapid fitness freaks on a pleasure cruise…and George Kennedy. Thanks to the Washington Psycotronic Film Society for bringing the Citizen Kane of mutant cat films to this great metropolis.
View a fan-made mashup.
Monday, August 11 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s
