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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(Zeitgeist Films)Hanging oneself can result in an involuntary voiding of the bowels. Latvian-born artist Signe Baumane demonstrates this in an unusual way: with hand-drawn animation of a rabbit. “Rocks in My Pockets” refers to Baumane’s grandmother, whose attempt to commit suicide by drowning failed because she neglected to weigh herself down. That’s just the first of five women in Baumane’s family, including herself, who have battled severe depression. As harrowing as her family stories are, the movie is far from a downer. Baumane’s uses papier-mâché stop-motion and hand-drawn animation (inspired by Bill Plympton) to tap a depressed mind that’s fertile with imaginative visions like DNA strands with eyes and a forest full of grotesque creatures. Baumane narrates the entire film in a thick accent that lends dark humor to her film as it wanders through the precarious territory of her family tree, psychotropic drugs, and Eastern European history. Director Signe Baumane and producer Sturgis Warner will be present for Q&As on Friday, Octover 24 and Saturday, October 25 following the 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. shows.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up
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Dan Duryea and Lisabeth ScottA greedy dame (Lizabeth Scott) stumbles on a cache of dead presidents that belongs to a shady mug (Dan Duryea). The AFI Silver’s Noir City D.C. festival continues with a new 35mm print of this classic noir from 1949 directed by Byron Haskin. Film Noir Foundation member Alan K. Rode will introduce the October 25 screening. Next week’s Noir City listings also include rare screenings of international noirs from France (Jules Dassin’s classic heist film Rififi, October 25 and 28), Germany (The Murderers are Among Us, 16mm, October 26 and 30), Norway (Death is a Caress, October 26 and 29) and Japan (Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, October 30). See the festival’s entire program here. I’d camp out in Silver Spring if I could.
Saturday, Oct 25 and Wednesday, October 29 at the AFI Silver.
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Do you call that clean?Rehabilitated axe-murderer Lucy Cutler Harbin (Joan Crawford) is released to the custody of her family after twenty years of asylum living. When a new series of brutal axe murderers occur, who are you going to blame? The AFI Silver’s William Castle series continues next week with a pair of double bills, which unfortunately will be split between 35mm and digital presentations. Monday, October 27, the AFI screens a 35mm print of The Night Walker, a 1964 film in which Castle cast former husband and wife Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. Shown with a digital presentation of Castle’s 1944 film When Strangers Marry, with Robert Mitchum and Kim Hunter. Next Thursday, October 30, the AFI screens a Joan Crawford Double bill, with a 35mm print of Strait-Jacket and a digital presentation of I Saw What You Did.
View the trailer for Strait-Jacket
The Night Walker and When Strangers Marry screen Monday, October 27 at 8:45 p.m. Straight-Jacket and I Saw What You Did screen Thursday, October 30 at 9:30 p.m. At the AFI Silver.
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(Courtesy of the Freer)The Freer’s 2014 China Onscreen Biennial continues this week with the North American premiere of a film written and directed by Chinese novelist/blogger Han Han. Bérénice Reynaud summarizes the film as “three slackers leave their forsaken Dongji Island to explore the Chinese continent, but elusive women, gangster uncles, thieves, puppies, and hitchhikers upset their plans.” You had me at puppies. Shown in the HDCAM format. The screening will be preceded by a pre-recorded Q&A with writer-director Han Han.
View the trailer.
Friday, October 24 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Courtesy The Goethe-InstitutA Second Quarter
The Goethe-Institut’s series The Wall in Our Heads:American Artists and the Berlin Wall continues this week with a digital screening of a 1975 film directed by artist Lawrence Weiner. The Video Data Bank describes the film as “decidedly European; the ‘place’ (Berlin) is the catalyst for the ‘action’ (the work). The works recited in the film are concerned with barriers and borders, physical and geophysical phenomena. The characters also translate, count, and recite the alphabet. They build a narrative that is not a story to be followed dogmatically but rather a pattern from which to extract one’s version of what is seen. The scenes are set in an old bourgeois apartment, in an office near the West Berlin train station, and at the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof and its vicinity, with the Berlin Wall in the background.”
Monday, October 27 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe Institut, $7
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Also opening this week, Keanu Reeves avenges his dog in John Wick, and Michael Keaton is former action star looking to prove he’s a respectable actor in Birdman, Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
