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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Bruce Willis (Twentieth Century Fox)

Die Hard

The AFI Silver’s annual Holiday Classics series offers the usual suspects, such as It’s a Wonderful Life (December 19 and 22-24), The Muppet Christmas Carol (December 19-24), and a 35mm screening of A Christmas Story (December 22-24), but Christmas is also time for one of the greatest action movies. The AFI will screen a DCP of director John McTiernan’s 1988 classic Die Hard, the first and best of a series that saw Bruce Willis’ character John McLane develop from an heroic ordinary Joe trying to get home on Christmas to an arrogant hot dog, to a washed up shell of a man, to an actor who should know when enough is enough. The film’s triumph over terrorism seems poignant in a post-9/11 world, and all the more now that Sony caved to terrorists by pulling the planned Christmas release of their political comedy The Interview. The AFI will also screen a DCP of Die Hard 2, aka Die Harder, on December 23.

View the trailer.
Monday, December 22 and Wednesday, December 24 at the AFI Silver.

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Millenium Mambo

The Freer’s retrospective of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien continues this weekend with a 35mm print of his 2001 film about Taipei youth culture, which was photographed by In the Mood for Love cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin. BAM/PFA staffer Jason Sanders writes that, “the glamorous Shu Qi pouts her way through the city’s neon nightclubs and hostess bars, accompanied by either her jealous DJ boyfriend or a much older, somewhat wiser gangster (Jack Kao). Drugs, dancing, and lovemaking fuel the plot, as does the heroine’s search for a way out of her ever-shrinking circles of associates.”

View the trailer.
Sunday, December 21 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free.

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courtesy GUANACO

The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas

An aging morning television host stages his own kidnapping and hides out in a swanky hotel. The National Gallery of Art’s series Athens Today, a survey of recent films by young Greek filmmakers, continues this weekend with this meditation on celebrity from director Elina Psykou. Variety writes that this “Greek Weird Wave entry of sorts … makes up for its formally less striking execution with a more accessible story.”

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Sunday, December 21 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery, West Building Lecture Hall 6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.

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Wings Hauser and Kimberly Beck

Nightmare at Noon

Programmers at The Washington Psychotronic Film Society seem to be engaging in repertory dialogue with the National Gallery of Art with this week’s exploitation offering from Athens-born director Nico Mastorakis (Island of Death). As the Gallery explores recent art cinema from that ancient land, the WPFS reminds us of the nation’s celebrated history of trash cinema with this 1988 title also known as Death Street USA. When a town falls prey to a government plot to taint the water supply, residents turn zombie and bleed green. In a rare sort-of-good-guy role, consummate hammy villain Wings Hauser (Vice Squad, Murder, She Wrote) fights back, with the help of his wife Kimberly Beck (Massacre at Central High) and drifter Bo Hopkins. Spoiler alert: according to the fine people at Psychotronic, George Kennedy explodes.

View the trailer.
Monday, December 22 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s.