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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Subir Banerjee as Apu (Janus Films)In recent years the Criterion Collection has trickled out lesser known films from director Satyajit Ray while cinephiles awaited a long-rumored restoration of his classic trilogy. The negatives for The Apu Trilogy were damaged in a fire in 1993, and after painstaking restoration work from surviving print materials, these classic films are finally ready for their digital spotlight. Pather Panchali (1955) introduces Apu in the symbolic gesture of opening his eye, launching the director’s neorealist study of the boy in his impoverished village and following him in subsequent films as he moves from the idyllic village to the modern world. E Street will show all three of these essential films, including Aparajito (1957) and The World of Apu (1959) during the week—check listings for specific showtimes. This weekend you can plan an Apu marathon and see all three films (with separate admission for each) starting at 4:15 pm Saturday and 1:30 pm Sunday. Read about the restoration here.
Watch the trailer for the Apu Trilogy restoration.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark’s E Street Cinema.
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(Drafthouse Films)If you missed E Street’s midnight screenings of this cult classic a few months ago, the AFI Silver has brought it back for moviegoers who need to get to bed earlier. As I wrote in April, “Noel Marshall has only one credit as a director, a film financed in part by proceeds made from a little film he produced called The Exorcist. Roar, originally released in 1981, is unlike any other film—thank God! It started as a six-month production slated to cost $3 million, but it took 11 years and another $11 million to finish a movie that some think should have sent the director to prison. The trailer proudly boasts that no animals were harmed making this film—but that 70 members of the cast and crew were harmed. I didn’t actually count the names in the credits, but I reckon they’re about 70. The plot, as it were, turns on wildlife preservationist (Marshall) and his real-life family, then-wife Tippi Hedren, stepdaughter Melanie Griffith, and his sons John and Jerry. Marshall’s family pays him a surprise visit in Africa (though the film was largely shot in a California location that is now the Shambala wildlife sanctuary). The film strikes an odd balance between a gory nature video and an extended Benny Hill sketch in which his entire family runs for their lives. At one point, Marshall was hospitalized for six months; Hedren developed gangrene; Griffith required facial reconstructive surgery after being mauled; both Marshall sons suffered concussions; and cinematographer Jan De Bont (who went on to direct Speed) required 220 stitches after a lion tried to carry him by his scalp. Nobody really has to act here, and they don’t. But Marshall, in his only acting credit, has a strange charisma, like a deranged hippie woodsman set loose in the jungle with gorgeous wildcats as his untrained menagerie … in it’s terrible way, it’s essential filmmaking.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at the AFI Silver.
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Brooklyn street style circa 1986. Photograph by Jamel Shabazz. (c) 2015 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.Can you tell the difference between old school hip-hop fashions from Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens? You can if you watch this lively documentary looking at the history of not just hip-hop but African-American fashion, from Sunday finery to Little Richard (fondly described as the black Liberace) to wildly decorated street gang jackets to the varieties of hip-hop experience. Director Sacha Jenkins talks to musical figures like KRS-One and Kanye and also spends time with former Vogue editor André Leon Talley and photographer Jamel Shabazz.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up.
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Josh Hutcherson and Benicio Del Toro (Radius-TWC)The subtitle tells you what this film is after: the corruption of natural wonders at the hands of drug lord Pablo Escobar. Del Toro is well-cast as the doughy and quietly brutal coke baron, but he plays a supporting role to Nick (The Hunger Games‘ Josh Hutcherson), a surfing Canadian tourist who falls for Escobar’s niece Maria (Claudia Traisac). Hutcherston is fine as the innocent tourist, and even though using him as a device to tell the story of a monster may be suspect, it works well enough. The movie’s first half lags as it sets up Nick and Maria’s relationship, but it gains steam with a harrowing sequence of events that begins when Escobar asks his nephew-in-law to take on some of the family business. This is the first feature from actor/director Andrea di Stefano, and he can’t sustain interest for a full two hours, but that central sequence shows promise.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up.
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Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling and Jason Schwartzman (The Orchard)We meet Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) trying to have sex while their young son is napping downstairs. Actually, we hear them first, inviting the moviegoer into a voyeurism that they may not be willing to go through with. The couple have moved to a new California town and are looking to make friends when, at a playground, they meet Kurt (Jason Schwartzmann) and Charlotte (Judith Godrèche), whose son has hit it off with their son. A dinner date turns into something entirely different in this uncomfortable sex comedy, Schwartzman turning into a kind of Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell for the hipster set, replacing that character’s prosthetics with a monstrous prosthetic penis. If that’s the level of discomfort you want in an uncomfortable comedy that places a giant accent on the uncomfortable, this is the movie for you. The excellent soundtrack includes Giorgio Moroder-era Sparks and private press soul man Archie James Cavanaugh.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema and Angelika Mosaic.
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Also opening this week, Mark Ruffalo is a manic-depressive father in Infinitely Polar Bear. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
