Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
(Gkids)A teenage girl holds on to a letter her father started to write just before he died, Director Hiroyuki Okiura (Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade) begins his film like an anime Ozu, complete with the awkward contrast between tradition and the modern world as Momo and her mother leave Tokyo for an Ozu-esque rural island community. But when Momo starts to see goblins, the beautiful animation takes a more fanciful turn. Letter to Momo is at times maudlin and wacky, and at two hours may try the patience of its teenage demographic. But the beautiful animation and generally likable characters make it a watchable coming-of-age melodrama-fantasy.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema, which will will alternate Japanese and English-language versions of the film.
—
John Hawkes and Jennifer Aniston (Roadside Attractions)The late Elmore Leonard was a master of sharp dialogue, intricate ploting, and vivid characters, and his fiction has been successfully adapted in decades of films from the original 3:10 to Yuma to Out of Sight. But the generic title of the latest Leonard adaptation (based on his novel Switch, a prequel to Jackie Brown) may be fair warning that this black comedy crime-drama is as unsurprising as its title. Jennifer Aniston plays a kidnapped woman whose husband (Tim Robbins) refuses to pay ransom. John Hawkes and Mos Def (in roles played by Robert DeNiro and Samuel Jackson in Jackie Brown) are the misguided kidnappers, and if the film is at all watchable it’s because the sympathy Hawkes brings to his role, along with a dignity that is otherwise missing from this derivative screenplay.
View the trailer.
Opens today at West End Cinema
—
(Distrib Films)An actor (Louis Garrel, directed by his father Phillipe) leaves his family for an affair with fellow actress Anna Mouglalis. This 77-minute drama of lost young French people in love suggests a condensed version of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, complete with a Jean-Pierre Leaud look-a-like, but it somehow feels longer than that 210-minute epic. Its characters’ self-absorption is unengaging; its flights of passion and philosophy too brief to gain emotional or intellectual traction. Though it does feature gorgeous black-and-white photography by cinematographer Willy Kurant—whose resume has wildly veered from Godard’s Masculin-Feminin to Louis C.K.’s Pootie Tang.
View the trailer.
Opens today at The Avalon.
—
Scott Baio, the Runaways’ Cherie Curie, and Jodie Foster.The AFI’s Totally Awesome 8: Great Films of the 1980s continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this teenage melodrama of four San Fernando Valley girls who deal with the anxiety of their changing bodies in the manner of the time: sex, drugs, and booze. The directorial debut of Adrian Lyne featured Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, a hip-hating Sally Kellerman, and a soundtrack produced by disco kingpin Giorgio Moroder.
View the trailer.
Saturday, August 30 and Thursday, September 4 at the AFi Silver.
—
From “Entr’acte” (2013), directed by Lawrence Jordan. Courtesy Canyon Cinema FoundationMetamorphosis
This weekend the National Gallery of Art’s wraps up its showcase of work from San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema Foundation, a substantial archive of American experimental cinema.This program includes a selection of newer films by “artists whose work has been the bedrock of Canyon Cinema as well as of filmmakers working in their influential lineage.” Titles include “Sources” (Rose Lowder, 2012); “Entr’acte” (Lawrence Jordan, 2013); and “Little Girl” (1966/2013) by Bruce Baillie.
Sunday， August 31 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
