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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Cohen Media Group Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
“Hey Rocky, watch me make a sow’s ear of of this silk purse!” Director Chuck Workman’s workmanlike profile of Orson Welles is a sadly mediocre homage to one of cinema’s greatest magicians. And it figures—Workman puts together montages for Oscar broadcasts, and the cheesy framing device used here looks like something out of awards fluff. It’s too bad, because there are clips here Welles fans will drool over, including snippets from unfinished films and passing footage of the Voodoo Macbeth that he made for the Federal Theatre Project. Welles fanatics will find few revelations here; Workman tries to cover the entire career of a man whose individual films can (and have) been the subject of entire films themselves. Standard-issue insipid inspirational soundtrack music makes one long for the kind of tirade Welles was famous for.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Dakota Fanning (Adopt Films)Art critic John Ruskin was 29 when he married 19-year old Euphemia Gray, the daughter of family friends. But for reasons we may never really know, they never consummated. This unhappy union has been the subject of books, plays, an opera, and a silent movie, the most infamous speculation being that Ruskin was horrified by his wife’s pubic hair. It’s the kind of material that should make a fascinating movie, simmering with whatever desires or repulsions fueled or quenched the pair. I haven’t had a chance to screen it, but the buzz is that this is a tepid costume drama of a most curious scandal. Directed by Richard Laxton from a script by Emma Thompson (who won a copyright dispute brought by the author of a play about the affair), the film stars Thompson’s husband, Greg Wise, as Ruskin, with Dakota Fanning as Effie. Read more about the scandal and a less hairy reasoning at The Guardian.
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(Studiocanal)George Romero called it, “the movie that made me want to make movies,” but don’t expect zombies. This weekend, the AFI Silver presents a new 4K digital restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 adaptation of the Offenbach opera. This vividly colorful musical features cast members returning from Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, including Moira Shearer, Lumilla Tchérina, Robert Helpmann, and Léonide Massine. The AFI’s repertory offerings this weekend also include a 35mm print of another classic musical, the 1935 Fred and Ginger vehicle Top Hat (April 3-4 and 6-7).
Watch the trailer.
Tales of Hoffmann Opens April 3 at the AFI Silver.
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Noah Wiseman (IFC Films)If you missed one of last year’s best horror movies at the West End Cinema (RIP), now’s your chance to see this dark feast for the eyes and ears on the AFI Silver’s biggest screen. In December, I wrote, “the central performances are strong, particularly [Noah] Wiseman, whose big eyes and shaggy hair make him look like a little ’60s rock star and an endearing, if troubled, imp. [Essie] Davis walks through the film in a haze like a depleted shell … the film is rich in mental metaphor, the monster knocking at the door only exist[ing] from the power we give it. The Babadook has its share of horror movie tropes, but what makes it work is the reality of its underlying trauma, which is something most horror movies are afraid to give you.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 3 and Saturday, April 4 at the AFI Silver.
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Jason Moran (Emily LaDue)Jazz pianist Jason Moran recently brought his multimedia work In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959 to the Kennedy Center. This weekend he appears at the National Gallery of Art to introduce a 2010 documentary about his tribute to Thelonious Monk’s historic 1959 concert. Arthur Ryel-Lindsey of Slant wrote that, ” to call the result a concert film is too simplistic: The individual musicians’ reactions to and analysis of Moran’s direction blend into long, detailed, unrelenting montages of the musical numbers in creation, letting the true depth of Monks’s music hammer home without impediment. And once you’ve listened to enough Monk, music never sounds the same.” This program is presented in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Watch a clip.
Saturday, April 4 at 11 a.m. at the National Gallery of Art, West Building Lecture Hall.
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Also opening this week. The Salt of the Earth, director Wim Wenders’ documentary about photographer Sebastião Salgado. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
