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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Mads Mikkelsen (IFC)Mads Mikkelsen is a stone-faced immigrant out for revenge in director Kristian Levring’s solid old-school Western. In my Spectrum Culture review, I wrote that, “Levring was one of the Dogme 95 directors, and if his latest film doesn’t hold to their simple manifesto, it’s still an efficient, seemingly uncomplicated genre movie that thoroughly satisfies both its audience’s lowbrow need for visceral entertainment and the cineaste’s highbrow need for sharp composition, lush cinematography, and taut editing…The film doesn’t provide details of Danish customs or their assimilation into American life, but it’s not like you expect that in a genre picture. And that doesn’t mean the film has nothing to say about the immigrant experience. Its villains are the privileged establishment, meting out their twisted justice at the expense of new arrivals.” Read the rest of my Spectrum Culture review here. The movie’s landscape compositions (in which South Africa plays the Old West) should be seen on the biggest screen possible, and in these parts, that means the tiny and not-long-for-this-world West End Cinema. Say goodbye to the theater with a bang; or, if you come back next weekend for their 40th anniversary run of Grey Gardens, with hoarders. .
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Mark DeFriest (Found Object Films)Mark DeFriest’s father encouraged his son’s talent as a mechanic and creative, if mischievous, tinkerer. When the elder DeFriest died, Mark—then 19—took some of the tools his father promised him, but his stepmother had him arrested. In 1980, he was sentenced to four years in prison, where he remains today. Director and Washington native Gabe London uses vivid animated sequences to dramatize some of DeFriest’s many escapes, which earned him the nickname “The Houdini of Florida” but also got his parole date extended to, at the time this film was completed, 2085. But it is DeFriest himself, clever, haunted and mentally ill, that makes this documentary a compelling call for justice. And, like The Salvation, this is a West End Cinema exclusive.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Caleb Landry Jones, David Thewlis and Callum Turner (©Sophie Mutevelian/BFI)82-year old director John Boorman (Deliverance) returns to characters he first introduced 27 years ago in the semi-autobiographical Hope and Glory. Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) and his best mate Percy (Texas-born Caleb Landry Jones) are drafted into the British Army in this military comedy that seems at time like a more sophisticated version of Stripes, sans spatula but not without late-night raids of women’s quarters. Like Boorman, Bill grew up near the legendary Shepperton Studios, and he admires their depiction of war from afar knowing full well real war is just around the corner. David Thewliss co-stars as Sgt. Major Bradley, an emasculated sad sack that is a far cry from the actor’s vicious characters of the past. The movie works best when its leads brew chaos in symmetrical army barracks, but flounders in the sentiment of Bill’s home, land, love, and life. Longtime fans of the director won’t expect another masterpiece like Point Blank, but Queen and Country is mostly watchable, and its final shot, of a movie camera capturing an off-screen idyll, seems like a valedictory statement for the end of a long career.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
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Emo Rugene and Conrad Makeni in VEVE (March 15 and 19 at the AFI Silver)Spring film festival season kicks in with two of them opening in the coming week. The AFI Silver launches its 11th annual showcase of African cinema tonight with the Ethiopian film Triangle—Going to America, a tale of immigration that spans three continents. Director Theodros Teshome will appear at screenings tonight and on Saturday, March 14. Other festival highlights include Veve (March 15 and 19 at the AFI Silver), a collaboration between Kenyan filmmakers and director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) The 23rd annual Environmental Film Festival begins onTuesday, March 17 with opening night programs at the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Embassy of Australia and the Embassy of Canada as well as daytime programs at the National Geographic Society and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. This year’s festival includes AFI screenings of three different cuts of director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner (March 20-21).
Watch the trailer for Veve.
The New African Films Festival runs from March 12-19 at the AFI Silver. View the complete schedule here. The Environmental Film Festival runs from March 17-29 at multiple venues around town. View the complete schedule here.
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The Freer launches the series Discovering Georgian Cinema this weekend with director Aleksandr Rekhviashvili’s 1981 homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Way Home is the final part of a trilogy that, according to notes by BAM/PFA, “represents Rekhviashvili’s poetic contemplation of Georgia’s past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the 1950s and 1960s) and of sets by Amir Kakabadze (the son of Georgian avant-garde painter David Kakabadze).” The Freer will be screening a 35mm print of this rarely screened film.
Friday, March 13 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, Eva, a 2011 science-fiction title from Spain that is only now getting distributed in the states. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
