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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Anna Kendrick and Emily Blunt (Walt Disney Pictures)Director Rob Marshall (Chicago) brings Stephen Sondheim’s celebrated 1986 musical to the big screen with an all-star cast and mixed results. The performers all sing their own parts, and despite the varied talents here, nobody here is straining for notes they can’t reach (See: Russell Crowe in Les Miserables). Johnny Depp is particularly hammy as the Big Bad Wolf, and the leads are for the most part fine. But the Princes Charming (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) can’t pull off the humor of the signature duet “Agony,” and Marshall doesn’t handle the material’s tonal shifts the way Tim Burton did with Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Granted, Sweeney Todd may be the better musical, but the sense of wonder so much needed at Christmastime is strangely lacking here. I’ve never seen a production of Into the Woods, but I imagine the big Hollywood budget simply tried too hard to capture the charm of a relatively low-budget stage production. Into the Woods isn’t a waste of time, but you might find more magic in a cast of unknowns.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow everywhere.
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Timothy Spall (Simon Mein/Sony Pictures Classics)Director Mike Leigh’s biopic of British master painter J.M.W. Turner is full of the kind of modest details that populate Leigh’s work. From eye to paint brush, Turner transcribed the world onto forbidding, dramatic canvases full of a strange atmosphere that this film sorely lacks. Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope (who has worked with the director since 1990’s Life is Sweet) occasionally treat the viewer to sumptuous landscapes seemingly worthy of the film’s subject — except the processed visuals have more in common with Thomas Kinkade than Turner. Timothy Spall portrays the artist as a crude, grunting cartoon fond of goosing the ladies. It’s two and a half hours.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row, AMC Shirlington and Angelika Mosaic.
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(courtesy Pascale Ramonda)The National Gallery of Art’s series Athens Today, a survey of recent films by young Greek filmmakers, wraps up this weekend with a psychological thriller about a teenage girl whose father suddenly disappears. Curiously, last week’s entry in the series was also about a disappearance. I should also note that it was off the coast of a Greek isle that the titular apparel went missing in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. What is in the water in this ancient land?
View the trailer.
Sunday, December 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, West Building Lecture Hall.
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If you’re burned out on holiday fare, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society offers this post-Xmas chaser from 1970, one of eight features directed by actor Cornel Wilde. As the WPFS describes it, “Humanity, Earth has ENOUGH of your shit. Grasses worldwide are dying: wheat, rice, corn, you name it. And without grass, society collapses. When famine threatens London, Nigel Davenport (A Man for All Seasons, Phase IV) tries to take his family to Scotland. But the old law is gone, and the only law left is the law of survival.”
View the trailer.
Monday, December 29 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s.
