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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(L-R) Bunzo and Rinko Kikuchi (Amplify)The best movie opening this week (and one my favorites of the year so far) has a plot line that could have gone precious and maudlin. As I wrote in my Spectrum Culture review, “A 29-year-old Japanese woman living in Tokyo takes the opening title card of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo to heart: “This is a true story.” Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) has studied an old VHS tape of the film so much it has deteriorated into a snowy, glitchy shadow. She’s convinced it really is a true story, and crafts a treasure map to find exactly where Steve Buscemi buried a briefcase full of cash. Kumiko leaves her pet rabbit Bunzo behind and abandons her miserable office job, using the company credit card to fly to America, where she hopes to find that buried treasure. The plot synopsis of the Zellner Brothers’ [new film] reads like that of a funny and charming film, and it is. But its cute plot line isn’t a conduit for mere whimsy. It’s instead a sobering look at depression and the quest for meaning in a cold, cold world.” Read the rest of my Spectrum Culture review here.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Seymour Bernstein (IFC Films)Ethan Hawke directed this documentary portrait of pianist and music teacher Seymour Bernstein. If Bernstein’s gentle manner seems the polar opposite of J.K. Simmons’ volcanic instructor in Whiplash, that doesn’t mean he’s not exacting. The movie might not have been made without Hawke’s help, but Hawke’s occasional appearances in the film seem gratuitous. Which is too bad, because elsewhere he has a keen eye for quiet detail, the camera touching on pots and pans in Bernstein’s one-room apartment as though it were the set of The Magnificent Ambersons. The film’s title seems smart-alecky, evoking J. D. Salinger for the portrait of a man who has little to do with Salinger except perhaps for echoes of old Manhattan. With those caveats aside, I recommend the film as an introduction to a charming subject.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row
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David “Ziggy” Gruber (right) chats up a customer (Cohen Media Group)David “Ziggy” Gruber came from a long line of Jewish New York deli owners, but his father wanted him to go beyond that. After graduating from cuilnary school in England, Ziggy was hired by a three-star Michelin restaurant, and his career seemed well on its way. But on a visit back home, he attended a deli convention and was concerned that the only deli men left were in their 80s. Who would carry on the tradition? He did, taking deli staples to a stripmall in Houston, which Gruber explains is “like Deliverance for Jews.” Director Erik Anjou’s documentary is comfort food filmmaking, a straightforward observation of an old school subject whose brother tells us, “since he was a little kid, he’s been an 80-year-old Jew.” Old Jews including Larry King, Jerry Stiller and Fyvush Finkel expound on the pleasures of the deli, but Ziggy’s personality (and salty food porn) carries the film as the kind of old school New Yorker you didn’t think existed anymore, much less in Texas.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up, AMC Mazza Gallerie and AMC Shirlington
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The AFI’s series Leading Ladies of Hollywood’s Golden Age continues this weekend with a pair of films starring Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar for her performance in director Michael Curtiz’s 1945 classic. The AFI will be showing a 35mm print of Mildred Pierce, and a 16mm print of Crawford’s pre-code vehicle Rain (March 28, 30 and April 2). Next week’s Leading Ladies offerings also include films starring Bette Davis (a 35mm print of The Letter, March 27, 29, and 31 and a DCP of All About Eve, March 28 and April 2); Lillian Gish (35mm prints of Night of the Hunter on March 27 and April 1 and 2; and the silent The Wind with live musical accompaniment on March 29); Jean Harlow (35mm prints of Bombshell on March 28 and 31 and Red Dust on March 29 and 31).
Watch the trailer for Mildred Pierce.
Mildred Pierce screens March 29 and 30 at the AFI Silver.
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The Goethe-Institut’s Film | Neu series begins next week with director Benjamin Heisenberg’s 2014 comedy about Nick (Georg Friedrich), a con man on the run who breaks into what he thinks is an abandoned house. The hideout turns out to belong to a psychiatrist (André Wilms) who mistakes the con-man for a caretaker. The Hollywood Reporter writes that the film, “is easy on the eye…[but] it is also hobbled by uneven shifts of tone and momentum, lurching off into superfluous subplots and labored slapstick.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 30 at the Goethe-Institut.
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Also opening this week, The Wrecking Crew, a documentary about the mostly unheralded session musicians who played on hundreds of hit records in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
