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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Caleb Landry Jones and Arielle Holmes (Radius-TWC)“If you loved me, you’d come watch me die.” Harley (Arielle Holmes) threatens to prove her love for Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones) by slitting her wrists. This amour fou is made even more harrowing by the fact that these young star-crossed lovers are homeless addicts living in New York. Ronald Bronstein’s script is adapted from Holmes’ unpublished memoir, Mad Love in New York City, which documented her experiences as a homeless teen scraping by in Manhattan. Holmes was panhandling when her drawings attracted the attention of a jewelry designer, which led to an unpaid internship and a chance meeting with directors Ben and Joshua Safdie. The film’s performances are erratic, sometimes resorting to the kinds of volatile shouting matches you might expect from a desperate street scene, but the cast looks like authentic modern-day urchins, in some cases because they are. Prolific indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams gives the film a startling documentary look, and Isao Tomita’s dense electronic score captures the disorienting, unstable fever of this sad lot. Heaven Knows What is clearly inspired by the French New Wave, but it’s dedication to its authentic, unwashed milieu keeps it from feeling second-hand.Read more about Holmes’ story here.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Gemma Arterton (Music Box Films)Martin (Fabrice Luchini) is a middle aged ex-Parisian who returned to the French countryside to man his family’s bakery. He lives a quiet, unexciting life with his wife (Isabelle Candelier), but that life is thrown into melodramatic disarray by their new British neighbors, Charles (Jason Flemyng) and Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton). Anne Fontaine co-wrote and directed the film, adapted from Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, and Fontaine and cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne seem to adore Gemma as much as Martin, who tries to banish Humbertian desires by setting her up with a young stud. If Flaubert drew rich literary characters, Fontaine’s are simply catalog models, albeit the models of a rustic upscale catalog bathed in soft-focus gauze. Arterton may be best known as a Bond girl, but the chick flick format doesn’t give her much more of an inner life other than ennui. The movie isn’t nearly as annoying as its title might suggest, but I have a feeling I’d be more annoyed if I remembered Madame Bovary better. Though Gemma Bovery draws its connection between food and sex too obviously, it’s a watchable bauble because of its attention to bread and desire. Its characters eventually rise to something resembling humans until a too-pat resolution throws them into literary contrivance all over again.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row and Cinema Arts Theater.
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(Edie Baskin/Live From New York)Director Bao Nguyen’s brisk documentary about the long-running comedy show begins with screen tests of some of the early cast members. But after a brief foray into those early years, self-congratulation and complacency sets in, much like it has for many of the show’s four decades on the air. Books like Tom Shales’ 2002 “uncensored history” of SNL provided a fascinating look at the tempestuous personalities and relationships behind the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, but this documentary too often seems like exactly the kind of they would—or should—parody. Ninety minutes isn’t enough time to dig into the show’s many phases, but the filmmakers have inadvertently revealed how much SNL has devolved from counterculture milestone to pandering institution. For a better (if not exactly revelatory) look at the history of American humor, stay tuned for Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, coming to AFI Docs next week.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
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Axel Tosca in CU-BOPThis weekend the AFI Silver hosts the 15th annual survey of films from and about the Caribbean. Festival highlights include Behavior (June 13 at 2:30 pm), a drama about the Cuban education system; Cu-Bop (June 12 at 7 p.m.), a documentary about Cuban jazz musicians César López and Axel Tosca; and On the Road, Somewhere, a coming-of-age movie about a teenager in the Dominican Republic preparing to make life decisions when he graduates from high school. See a complete list of titles and showtimes here.
Watch trailers for Behavior, Cu-Bop and On the Road, Somewhere.
June 12-14 at the AFI Silver.
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War! Ungh! What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING!The Washington Psychotronic Film Society helps you beat the heat with this Japanese monster movie from the golden age of Japanese monster movies. In the words of the WPFS, “two creatures are extracted from the cells of a giant Frankenstein creature and become ginormous superfreaks themselves. They end up slapping the bejeezus out of each other while destroying Japan. A scene where one of the big freaks plucks a nightclub singer out of a window spawned a song by the musical group DEVO called ‘The Words Get Stuck in My Throat,’ from a song in the movie.” Directed by prolific monster movie auteur Ishirô Honda, the film stars Russ Tamblyn as a doctor.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, June 15 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121, 1400 Irving Street NW
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Also opening this week, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard take on Jurassic World; and a troubled teenage girl faces ghosts in When Marnie was There, the latest and possibly last animated feature from Studio Ghibli. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
