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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Golshifteh Farahani (Cinema Guild)Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) arranges a group vacation to the seashore with friends and their young children, and hopes to set up her newly-divorced friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) with her daughter’s kindergarten teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti). But she doesn’t know much about about Elly, an alienated outsider among a group of old friends. Director Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film is just now being distributed stateside after the critical success of A Separation and The Past. About Elly isn’t as good as either of those stark observations of disintegrating relationships, but Farhadi skillfully herds his ensemble cast into a convincing group dynamic that turns sinister.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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James Marsden and Jack Black (IFC)Eternal nobody Dan (Jack Black) heads his high school reunion committee. He wields his executive power as if it’s the one area of his life he can control, protecting the reunion’s Facebook password like it’s a family secret. When he sees former classmate Oliver (James Marsden) in a national commercial for Banana Boat sunscreen, Dan thinks it’s his graduating class’s crowning achievement and is determined to get Oliver to come to the class reunion at any cost, even if it means playing along when he learns something about Oliver. The D Train is an uncomfortable bro comedy about self-doubt and the meaning of success. But despite decent leads and a strong supporting performance from Jeffrey Tambor, this exercise in discomfort turns into the usual easy redemption.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema, AMC Georgetown, Angelika Mosaic, Arclight Bethesda and other area multiplexes.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin (Tracy Bennett/Roadside Attractions)A zombie virus has spread throughout the land, its victims rounded up for quarantine and even worse fates. But Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is reluctant to let his infected 16 year-old daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) go. Ahhnold is the best thing about the film, which plays against the Governator’s screen persona by putting him in a position where he refuses to kill someone, i.e. his zombie daughter. Schwarzenegger’s worried brow has aged so he plays worried better than ever, but he’s lost in a maudlin script that has none of the dark humor that made Shaun of the Dead‘s similar zombie conflicts so moving.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Georgetown and AMC Hoffman; also available on VOD.
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Kherington Payne and Lucas Till (Dean Buscher/Eone)Josh (Lucas Till) is a teenage DJ in New York, a magical New York where everyone seems to own a car and an evil black DJ feeds him pills that send him climbing the rafters and taking a bad stage fall. A court order sends him back home to North Dakota to live with the father (Tom Everett Scott) who abandoned him before he was born. The big city DJ wows the small town high school, whose dance team had been struggling until they caught wind of his Skrillex-y beats. But somebody doesn’t want Josh to get involved with the dance team. This strange variation on the Step Up formula is set in a town whose cemetery is filled with the graves of young soldiers who perished in the Gulf War, and whose residents (like mourning mother Laura Dern) refuse to talk about it. The whole town seems lost in a fog summed up by this exchange between Josh and his soccer-loving Gulf War vet counselor (Josh Duhamel): “I’m not afraid of anything! Except maybe love.” Bravetown is ridiculous, but I kind of love the earnestness of a movie that thinks the best way to remember its fallen veterans is to dance for them—in desert camo.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Georgetown
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The World’s Longest Dreadlocks (Joshua Weinstein)This weekend, Artisphere hosts director Sam Green’s live cinema experience. Inspired by The Guinness Book of Records, Green narrates film footage that tells the story of Guinness record holders, from the woman with the longest name to the world’s tallest man to the man most struck by lightning. The director writes describes the work as a “poetic meditation or a poem about humanity and the riddle and joy and wonder and tragedy of being alive.” TCB (Todd Griffin, Catherine McRae and Brendan Canty) will perform the live soundtrack.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, May 9 at the Artisphere, 1101 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Va. $18.
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Also opening this week, Kristen Wiig stars as an Oprah-obessed lottery winner who gets her own talk show in Welcome to Me. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
