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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Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Clara Wettergren and Vincent Wettergren (Magnolia Pictures)

Force Majeure

A young Swedish family takes a ski vacation in the French Alps when a controlled avalanche sends Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) into an act of cowardice from which his marriage may not recover. The Swedish title of this film is the decidedly less sensational Turist, which gets closer to what director Ruben Östlund has achieved with this gorgeously photographed film that comes off like a comic psychological thriller. What begins as a banal picture postcard upper-middle-class vacation becomes a tense, anxious nightmare that immerses the bourgeois in a world of leisure surrounded by the presence of volatile mother nature. One skiing sequence in particular is shot so that the blinding snow merges with the negative space of a movie screen. Which is how the movie should be seen. I previewed the film with an online screener, which conveyed the human drama just fine, but the film must be seen on the big screen so you get the full impact of the forbidding landscape of wintry recreation.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row

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Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman (Tribeca Films)

Listen Up, Philip

Self-conscious, arrogant, pretentious Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman) is a young New York writer whose second novel isn’t doing as well as he’d hoped. As his relationship with his photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss) falls apart, Philip gets an offer from his curmudgeonly hero Ike ZImmerman (Jonathan Pryce) to work from his summer home upstate and take on a teaching job. Writer-director Alex Ross Perry has created one of the most unlikeable mumblecore characters since Frances Ha, but where she was supposed to be delightful, Phillip strikes the figure of a tragic asshole too self-absorbed to be troubled with anything like redemption. Cinematographer Sean Price Williams is the go-to-guy for this brand of indie cinema, and his hand-held work takes you uncomfortably close to people you wouldn’t want to get anywhere near. The results can be uncomfortably funny, but Eric Bogosian’s incessant narration spells out the inner lives of characters played by actors who do just fine without the supplementary help. I can’t say I liked Listen Up, Philip, or that you’re even supposed to like it, but I want to see it again.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFi Silver.

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Elle Fanning and John Hawkes (Oscilloscope)

Low Down

The always reliable John Hawkes stars as jazz pianist Joe Albany in director Jeff Preiss’ adaptation of the troubled childhood memoir of Albany’s daughter Amy (played here by Elle Fanning). Preiss photographed one of the great jazz documentaries, Bruce Weber’s Chet Baker film Let’s Get Lost, and hired cInematographer Christopher Blauvelt to shoot this film in 16mm. The resulting evocation of 1970s’ LA has a color palette I could eat off of, though the story of Albany’s drug use and general parental neglect makes that an unappetizing prospect. I haven’t had a chance to preview the whole film, and the buzz is not promising, but Hawkes and Fanning are solid performances and I’d gladly pay to see this kind of cinematography (and hear the excellent jazz soundtrack) on something bigger than a computer screen.

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

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Jini Dellaccio

Her Aim is True

As part of this weekend’s FotoWeekDC festivities, the Goethe Institut screens a documentary about rock ‘n’ roll photographer Jini Dellaccio. Dellaccio began her creative career playing saxophone for an all-female jazz band, and moved to fashion photography before going on to document The Sonics, Neil Young and early performances by The Who and The Rolling Stones. Eddie Vedder is the executive producer of a film in which Dellaccio shares an archive spanning 50 years. The film’s director, D.C.-based British filmmaker Karen Whitehead, will be at the screening for a Q+A.

View the trailer.
Sunday, November 9 at 3 p.m. at the Goethe Institut.