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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Niels Arestrup and André Dussollier (Jérome Prébois/Zeitgeist Films)

Diplomacy

In the summer of 1944, Hitler assigned General Dietrich von Choltitz the job of blowing up Paris, and the General began planting mines around the city’s iconic landmarks to carry out this task. Somehow, Paris was saved. Director Volker Schlöndorff’s (The Tin Drum) film adapts a play by Cyril Gély that imagines that the Mona Lisa was snatched from the jaws of death thanks to meetings between Choltitz and Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling. Niels Arestrup and Alain Resnais regular André Dussollier reprise their stage roles in a film that I didn’t get to preview but that the New Yorker’s David Denby calls “fascinating.”

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema

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Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank (Dawn Jones/Roadside Attractions)

The Homesman

A pioneer woman (Hilary Swank) brings on a drifter (Tommy Lee Jones) to take three mentally disturbed women from Nebraska to Iowa. If you count a pair of TV movies, this is Jones’ fourth film as a director and his last theatrical effort, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was a good homage to Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I didn’t have a chance to preview the film, and the buzz has been mixed, with high ratings from The Guardian’s Robbie Collins, who writes that it “may be old-fashioned in its bones, but it’s not a film to be watched and then tidily packed away.”

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row

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The Apple Game

The AFI’s tribute to director Věra Chytilová, director of the Czech New Wave classic Daisies, continues this weekend with a rare 35mm screening of this sexual farce from 1977. A doctor at a maternity clinic (Jirí Menzel, director of Closely Watched Trains) moonlights as a Lothario, but when he knocks up a beautiful country nurse (Dagmar Bláhová), it may be time for him to marry. This was the director’s return to feature filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus imposed by the hardline Czech Communist regime.

Sunday, November 23 at 5:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver.

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Three Times

The Freer’s retrospective of director Hou Hsiao-hsien continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this 2005 drama that unfolds in three time periods that explore the history of Taiwan and the mystery of love. BAM/PFA staffer Jason Sanders writes, “guided by the star wattage of his two leads, Hou brings these disparate times to life through an assortment of filming aesthetics (most culled from moments in his own career) and pays tribute to the resilience of Taiwan and the lovers that exist within its borders.”

View the trailer.
Friday, November 21 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.

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Blood Freak

Herschel (Steve Hawkes, who co-directed and co-wrote the film) is a homeless Vietnam vet who comes to the aid of Angel (Heather Hiughes) when her car breaks down. What begins as a story of the good Samaritan becomes a disturbing saga of drugs and transformation. What makes this appropriate Thanksgiving programming? A turkey farm that turns our hero into the very beast he would carve in thanks. Let us give thanks to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society for this timely feast.

View the trailer.
Monday, November 24 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s.

Tomorrow, a review of Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell and Channing Tatum.