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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Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson (Magnolia)Aspiring ginger songwriter Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) struggles with his musical creativity when he stumbles on a chance to play with a band led by Frank (Michael Fassbender), who performs avant-indie rock while wearing a giant papier-mâché head. If this sounds precious, it is! Screenwriter Jon Ronson played in a band with the real Frank Sidebottom, aka Mancunian musician Christopher Sievy, but the creative tension set up behind the struggling songwriter and the natural artist doesn’t work because the fictional Frank’s music doesn’t win any awards either. Director Lenny Abrahamson peppers the film with Jon’s awkward social media attempts, which go viral enough to land the group a stint at SXSW, but the musical desert at the heart of the movie means you never root for them to succeed, and Frank’s mental illness is treated as an afterthought instead of the rich creative subject it could have been.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza (A24)Zach (Dane DeHaan) grieves for his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza), after she dies unexpectedly. But is she really dead? Darkly comic films like Reanimator and Shaun of the Dead have dealt with the emotional weight of bringing the dead back to a crazed half-life, but I have yet to see a successful entry in what the producers of Life after Beth call the “rom-zom-com.” The jury’s still out on this — I haven’t had a chance to see it, and the buzz has been mixed. In a negative review, The Guardian’s Jordan Hoffman singles out Plaza as “at age 30 … still the best teenager working in entertainment.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema
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Spc. Adam Winfield (Oscilloscope)In 2010, a group of American soldiers in Afghanistan killed at least three civilians and reportedly kept body parts as trophies. Private Adam Winfield, only 21-years-old at the time, was a member of the platoon known as The Kill Team, and with the help of his father tried to alert the the military to the atrocities committed by his platoon. The young soldier was met with more reprisals than answers. Ian Buckwalter wrote that the film is “maddeningly incomplete .. [but] as a case study in our military’s moral failings, it’s grimly effective.” Read Ian’s City Paper review here.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Joseph Cotten is BARON BLOODThe AFI Silver continues its thorough Mario Bava retrospective with a 35mm print of
this 1972 Gothic horror film. Baron Otto von Kleist (Joseph Cotten) is Baron Blood, returned to life by a spell inadvertently cast by his descendent Antonio Cantafora and Elke Sommer, an architect charged with converting the family castle to a boutique hotel. Also screening in the Mario Bava series this weekend is a 35mm print of the director’s 1971 ur-slasher A Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve (Saturday, August 23), in which horny teenagers stumble upon an aristocratic bloodbath.
View the trailer for Baron Blood
Sunday, August 24 at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week, tragic tales of youth: classical cellist Chloe Grace Moretz watches over her comatose body in the supposed tearjerker If I Stay; and three boys live in poverty in the documentary Rich Hill. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
