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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Chris Stamp, Pete Townshend, and Kit Lambert (Pictorial Press/Sony Pictures Classics)

Lambert and Stamp

Kit Lambert was the well-to-do son of a composer. Chris Stamp was a working class kid from London’s East End. This unlikely duo were aspiring filmmakers when they found their great subject as managers of The Who. Lambert and Stamp sounds fascinating on paper, and director James D. Cooper has great material to work with, but many of the interviews feel loose and unstructured, the storytelling sorely in need of tighter editing. There’s something wrong when the most animated subject in a rock and roll documentary is an aging fan (Irish Jack). Cooper doesn’t sell the names on the marquee, but when the film turns its sights more directly on The Who, it starts to take shape. Still, a sequence that should be a climactic chapter on Lifehouse, the project that would become Who’s Next, moves on without delivering a payoff. Lambert and Stamp is still a must for Who fans, but at nearly two hours, it seems both too long and unfinished.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and AMC Lowes Shirlington

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Lembit Ulfsak reminds us that tangerines, they are better than war, no? (Samuel Goldwyn Films)

Tangerines

A Chechen soldier demands of an Estonian farmer, “What are the crates for? Bombs?” “No, Tangerines.” Ivo is an Estonian elder trying to harvest tangerine crops during the Georgian Civil War when he takes in wounded soldiers on opposing sides of the conflict. Good cinematography doesn’t make up for a contrived sit-com setup, further hampered by ham-handed dialogue. Director Zaza Urushadze reminds us that fruit is better than war in this simplistic tale of Why Can’t We Get Along.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row

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Raf Simons looks at a vintage Dior dress (CIM Productions)

Dior and I

A fashion designer best known for minimalist menswear did not seem like the best choice to take over the house of Christian Dior in 2012. Director Frédéric Tcheng follows Raf Simons as he works with veteran Dior seamstresses to design and manufacture his first haute couture collection in eight weeks. If this doesn’t sound like your bag, it won’t be, but fans of The House of Eliot, Project Runway, and lively techno will enjoy this fashion procedural.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.

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(Criterion Collection/PhotoFest)

F for Fake

The National Gallery of Art celebrates what would have been Orson Welles’ 100th birthday with a screening of his last completed feature. Ian Buckwalter included the film in a 2010 Popcorn & Candy column, writing that, “The film, part documentary, part essay, part calculated sham, is … essentially all about film’s manipulative nature. Welles buries his thesis within a movie that is ostensibly fact-based, about renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory, phony Howard Hughes biographer Clifford Irving, and a series of drawings by Picasso. How he brings this around to the artful lying of the storyteller/filmmaker would be giving away too much of the dazzling structure here, but where Welles differs from a magician is that he reveals his manipulations (some of them anyway), and demonstrates exactly how he accomplishes them. His bending of truth with clever editing and calculated misdirection is done so gracefully, so subtly, that it becomes immediately apparent that it’s really not asking for too much to want it done well (even if not as well) elsewhere. F for Fake is nothing less than a sly blueprint on how to make a convincing sham; if only more filmmakers took the time to try to be half the genius-charlatan that Welles was.”

Watch the trailer.
Sunday, May 3 at 4:00 pm and Wednesday, May 6 (Welles’s 100th birthday) at 12:30 pm at the National Gallery of Art, West Building Lecture Hall. Free.

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Courtesy of the Freer

The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow

The Freer’s annual Korean Film Festival launches this weekend with an-all day program of Korean cultural activities including gallery conversations, cooking demonstrations, dance performances, and this 2014 animated film about a satellite that falls to earth and takes on the shape of a girl. The Freer writes that ” ‘[s]he’ falls in love with a singer-songwriter boy, who has been turned into a cow after his heart is broken. The cow is pursued by a giant furnace, but luckily a wizard named Merlin, who has taken the form of a roll of toilet paper, is there to help.”

Watch the trailer.
Sunday, May 3 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free

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Also opening this weekend, arthouse favorite Stellan Skarsgård stars in Avengers: Age of Ultron. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.