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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Zoé Bruneau (Kino Lorber)

Goodbye to Language 3D

A married woman, a bachelor, and a dog – in 3D! – are the stars of director Jean-Luc Godard’s Cannes Jury award-winning film. Word on the streets is that the 84-year old director has redefined the language of cinema with what critic David Bordwell calls the best 3D movie he’s ever seen. I didn’t get a chance to preview it, but the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis called it “a thrilling cinematic experience,” and even if you’re not a fan of Godard (much of his work leaves me cold), this is a must-see for the cineliterate. My favorite review of the film comes from Laird Jimenez on Letterboxd: “If you rearrange the letters in ‘Godard’ you can spell ‘rad dog.'”

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row

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James Randi (Abramorama)

An Honest Liar

Directors Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein open their documentary profile of magician and debunker James Randi with a perfect clip: a sultry female singer coos “You’ve got the Magic Touch” to the escape artist as he hangs upside down and wrestles free from a straitjacket on live television. The rest of the film is a straightforward account of a man who exposed charlatans (he had a particular bone to pick with Uri Gellar), but fostered his own deceptions as well. Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge (you’d think he could have come up with a better stage name from that), Randi was once a pop culture fixture, appearing on an episode of Happy Days and setting up guillotine effects for Alice Cooper’s live show, so this documentary is not only a profile of the man but of a bygone entertainment era.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema

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Edith Bouvier Beale

Grey Gardens

As the West End Cinema enters its final week of operation (they plan to close on March 26), the theater presents a 40th anniversary run of one of the great American documentaries. Directed by David and Albert Maysles (who just passed away on March 5th) with Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, Grey Gardens follows Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as they live in the shambles of their Grey Garden estate in East Hampton. The film’s unforgettable characters inspired a Broadway show and a TV movie.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

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Alejandro and Brontis Jodorowsky

El Topo

The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune was one of my favorite films last year, its irrepressible star a more coherent storyteller in front of the camera than behind it. But nobody else makes movies like his. Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society reminds us of this with his 1970 midnight classic, which stars the director himself and his then-7-yr-old son Brontis in the first, but not last, role in which his father shot him naked.

Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 23 at Acre 21, 1400 Irving St. NW #109.

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Rutger Hauer and friend

Blade Runner (in three different versions!)

As part of this year’s Environmental Film Festival, the AFI Silver is screening three different versions of director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic – a 35mm print of the 117-minute 1997 Director’s Cut, a DCP of the 2007 Final Cut and a Blu-Ray of the 1982 Domestic Cut. Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? stars Harrison Ford as Deckard, charged with killing escaped replicants, including Rutger Hauer, whose dying soliloquy, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” may have eerily foretold latter-day career highlight Hobo with a Shotgun. I’m partial to the neo-noir narration of the Domestic Cut, but since they’re showing that on Blu-Ray, you should pick the 35mm print of the Director’s Cut, because who knows how many film prints will end up lost to time like tears in rain.

Watch the trailer.
The 1982 Domestic Cut (Blu-ray) screens Friday, March 20 at 7:15 and Wednesday, March 25 at 6:30; The 1991 Director’s Cut (35mm) screens Friday, March 20 at 9:45; The 2007 Final Cut (2K DCP) screens Saturday, March 21, 9:00. At the AFI Silver.

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Courtesy of the Freer

Blind Dates

The Freer’s series Discovering Georgian Cinema continues this week with director Levan Koguashvili’s “romantic tragicomedy” about “forty-something Sandro (Andro Sakhvarelidze), who lives with his parents and has no luck finding love. The plotline takes its twists and turns as Sandro and his best friend (Archil Kikodze) meet and date various women. Their misadventures and Sandro’s home life are beautifully observed by director Koguashvili, who has a gift for presenting fictional lives on screen with an air of authenticity and whimsy that captures life’s everyday challenges.” (Description by Susan Oxtoby from the Freer’s calendar). Screened in DCP.

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Also opening this week is director David Robert Mitchell’s atmospheric horror film It Follows. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.