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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Will I be wearing this outfit tomorrow? Maybe!Tomorrow night is the first in a series of Friday evening programs at the Library of Congress, presented in association with DCist and Brightest Young Things, hosted by Music Division staff member and DCist’s chief film critic, yours truly. This week I’m introducing a DVD screening of director Walter Hill’s 1984 musical flop Streets of Fire starring Diane Lane and Michael Paré, specimens of beauty plainly overshadowed by a villanous Willem Dafoe in rubber overalls. All programs will be in the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building (101 Independence Avenue SE). Doors open 30 minutes before screening. Seating is very limited, but standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30 p.m. In the likely event of a sellout, available seats will be released to standbys five minutes before show time. For information, call (202) 707-5502. Learn more about the Library of Congress’ 2014-15 concert season here. Note: the film will be projected from a DVD.
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Friday, January 16 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free.
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Best Actress nominee Marion Cotillard (IFC)Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is trying to get back to work after a bout with depression. But her co-workers, faced with the choice of supporting their colleague or getting a bonus, have voted her out of a job. Sandra has one weekend to convince each of her coworkers to vote her back in. Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are among the most compassionate directors working today, and their tale of labor relations goes beyond politics to observe the real needs of people on both sides of the economic conflict. This morning, Cotillard was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her moving performance.
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Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row
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Best Actress nominee Julianne Moore (Sony Pictures Classics)In this week’s second Best Actress-nominated opening, Oscar nominee Julianne Moore stars as Alice Howland, linguistics professor and mother of three grown children. At the relatively young age of 50, she receives the devastating diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimers. Moore is a reliable performer and acts rings around her husband, played by Alec Baldwin—and you wonder if Alice’s Words With Friends habit is a not-so-subtle jab at her co-star. Still Alice is an effective if unsurprising drama that suggests a more literal version of Todd Haynes’ Safe, with that film’s metaphorical affliction replaced here by something more literal.
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Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row, AMC Shirlington and Angelika Mosaic.
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(Magnolia Pictures)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. The AFI Silver is in the midst of a retrospective of director Ruben Östlund, so if you missed this during its brief commercial run, tonight’s your chance to catch up with on on the AFI’s big screen. And as an added bonus, the director will appear at tonight’s screening.
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Tonight at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Where the magic may or may not have rocked out. Courtesy of Jeff Krulik.In 2009, filmmaker Jeff Krulik invited area music fans to an event marking the fortieth anniversary of a concert that Led Zeppelin played at the Wheaton Youth Center on Georgia Avenue. Dozens of people showed up. But did the concert ever happen? There is no documentation of the 1969 performance, which allegedly occurred the same day President Richard Nixon was inaugurated. No ticket stubs or advertising or photos have surfaced, and the band’s official website will not confirm the date. Does a collective delusion surround local aficionados of the classic power trio? The potent combination of local interest and passionate obsession makes this a perfect subject for Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot). Watch his documentary about this fabled and possibly apocryphal milestone in headbanger legend on the 46th anniversary of when it may or may not have happened. “The Wheaton Youth Center (now called Wheaton Community Recreation Center),” Krulik told DCist, “is just as much a character in my documentary as any person; to me the building speaks volumes since it’s still basically intact, with its modernist curvy 1963 architecture and a gymnasium that looks the same as when Led Zeppelin did, or did not, play their first local concert on January 20, 1969.”
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Tuesday January 20 at 8 p.m. at the Black Cat.
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Boyd Holbrook (Amplify)A small town is divided in the aftermath of a tragic mining accident, but things get worse when a teenage boy goes missing. Elizabeth Banks plays Diane, the mother of the missing boy, her husband (Josh Lucas) a mining company executive who has left their family the target of angry townspeople. Writer-director Sara Colangelo gets strong peformances out of Jacob Lofland (Mud)
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Opens tomorrow at AMC Shirlington.
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Also opening this week: Paddington. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
