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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Rajesh Tailang (Zeitgeist Films)

Siddharth

Mahendra (Rajesh Tailang) makes his living as a chain-wallah, repairing zippers on the streets of Delhi. But business is bad, so he sends his 12-yr old son Siddharth away to work in a factory to help make ends meet. When Siddharth goes missing, Mahendra goes on a series of difficult journeys to find his son. Kidnapping drives the plot of many an action movie, but director Richie Mehta’s film conveys the struggle of an impoverished parent who can’t afford to hop on a plane to embark on a globe-trotting rescue mission. Like the films of Satyajit Ray, Mehta’s modest film depicts a nation in transition—Mahendra and his wife can’t afford the technological benefits we take for granted, like cell phones and even search engines. Siddharth benefits from a strong central performance from Tailang, who handles the contradictions of a parent who by Western standards may seem neglectful, but whose struggle for a meager existence, even without the loss of a child, is heartbreaking.

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

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A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora’s Box

The Freer’s annual Made in Hong Kong festival continues this weekend with 35mm prints of director Jeffrey Lau’s two-part send-up of the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, which tells the story of Buddhism’s arrival in China. In these films, the Monkey King (Stephen Chow), banished from heaven for trying to eat his master, the Longevity Monk, is reincarnated five hundred years later as a bungling crook named Joker. Chow appeared in these films in 1995, and in 2013 he teamed up with co-director Derek Kwok to direct the action comedy Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, which broke box office records in China. The Freer will be showing a digital presentation of Journey to the West Friday at 7 p.m.

View the trailer for A Chinese Odyssey Part One
A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora’s Box screens Sunday, August 17 at 1 p.m. A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella screens Sunday, August 17 at 3 p.m. at the Freer. Free.

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Charlton Heston is the greatest artist of his time

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The AFI’s 70mm Spectacular continues this weekend with a 70mm print of this 1965 biopic of Michaelangelo (Charlton Heston, of course) painting the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), directed by Carol Reed, best known for The Third Man. New York Times critic Bowsley Crowther wrote, “No matter how much one may goggle in absolute wonder and awe at the creation of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, so ingeniously and magnificently represented in this huge color film, and no matter how much one may work up a certain historical respect for Michelangelo, the major if not the only feeling aroused by this more than two-hour work is one of sympathy with the mounting impatience of the Pope.”

View the trailer.
Saturday, August 16 and Sunday, August 17 at the AFI Silver.

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From Phill Solomon’s “The Secret Garden” (1988). Courtesy the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation

From Vault to Screen: Canyon Cinema 16mm

This weekend the National Gallery of Art’s continues a showcase of films from San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema Foundation, a substantial archive of American experimental cinema. The program “A Minor Cinema” focuses on what film scholar
Tom Gunning calls the “outsider” side of personal cinema, and includes archival prints of works by Phil Solomon (“The Secret Garden,” 1988), Mark Lapore (“The Sleepers,” 1989), Nina Fonoroff (“Department of the Interior,” 1986) and Peggy Ahwesh (“Nocturne,” 1998).

Saturday, August 16 at 2:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building Lecture Hall. Free.

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Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting (Lionsgate Home Entertainment)

Robin Williams Tribute

As the Washington Post first reported, West End Cinema will be (digitally) screening three of the late actor’s best-loved films starting tomorrow. The theater will show The Birdcage, The Fisher King, and Good Will Hunting—for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor—twice daily through August 21

View the trailer for Good Will Hunting.
Friday, August 15 through Thursday, August 21 at West End Cinema.