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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(First Run Features/Column Film)Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, home to works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other Dutch masters, began an extensive renovation in 2003. Due to various setbacks and controversies, the institution did not reopen until 2013. Director Oeke Hoogendijk was there throughout the process, and the resulting film was originally a four-part television program that spanned four hours. This new version condenses that (if you call 132 minutes condensed) into a single film that’s essentially a feature length HGTV program set in the art world. But what production values! The film opens with a striking, immersive cacophonous shot of workers tearing down the old structure while 17th-century watchers peer from a canvas covered in plastic sheeting. That sequence suggests we’re in Leviathan territory, but the rest of the film unfolds with discussion among architects, museum officials and bicyclists upset at plans to close off a central bike track that runs under the museum. But its the sidebars that make the film most watchable, with plenty of shots of art restorers doing meticulous work and an endearing subplot with a curator who develops a kind of kinship with a pair of massive Japanese sculptures. The New Rijkmuseum obviously isn’t for everyone, but it’s more than just a highbrow renovation show; it’s attention to sound and space makes it a good cinema.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss (Universal Pictures)The AFI celebrates the 40th anniversary of this proto-blockbuster with a DCP and a week long run of what might be director Steven Spielberg’s finest two hours. Could a contemporary CGI beast possibly be as terrifying as the pneumatic prop “Bruce” (named after the director’s lawyer)? The toothy monster meets its match in a strong cast effectively led by supporting actor Robert Shaw as the quintessential old salt Quint. The movie can be thanked/blamed for everything from Star Wars to the Sharknado franchise, but you may not know that it inspired actor-director Jacques Tati to add a Jaws joke to a 1978 rerelease of his 1953 classic Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. If you aren’t already afraid to go into the water, see this and etc.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, July 3 through Thursday, July 9 at the AFI Silver.
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(Criterion Collection)Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
The AFI’s series Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986 launches this weekend with a 35mm print of director William Greaves’ 1968 film, which the Silver calls, “A docufiction, a narrative experiment, a film about making a film, a crew without a director, a time capsule of New York, a barometer of the culture … about which no superlatives can be overused and whose influence cannot be overstated.” Shown with Greaves’ short film “From These Roots,” a “crash course in Harlem history.” The festival runs through August, when the AFI will screen a 35mm print of the 1973 horror classic Ganja and Hess (August 16).
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 4 and Monday, July 6 at the AFI Silver.
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(New World Cinema)This week’s selection from the archives of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society comes from one of exploitation cinema’s most celebrated and reviled subgenres: the women in prison movie. Society curators ask, “Do nice girls finish last? New inmates at a women’s prison must survive sadistic warden and B-movie queen Sybil Danning, her henchwoman [and one time Warhol starlet] Pat Ast, and bully Wendy O. Williams.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, July 6 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121.
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Also opening this week, see my review of Terminator Genisys.
