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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Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Led Zeppelin Played Here
The newly reopened Old Greenbelt Theater, with a renovated lobby and upgraded facilities to include 4k digital projection as well as 35mm, launches its Cult Classics series tomorrow night with a double bill from Prince George’s County’s resident documentarian, Jeff Krulik. In 1986, Kruilk and John Heyn, a Lewis and Clark for their time, drove around the parking lot of the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland before a Judas Priest concert. A great documentary was born. Heavy Metal Parking Lot will be shown with Krulik’s most recent documentary, Led Zeppelin Played Here, about a concert that may or may not have happened at the old Wheaton Youth Center on Georgia Avenue. That structure, Krulik told DCist in 2013, “is just as much a character in my documentary as any person; to me the building speaks volumes since it’s still basically intact, with its modernist curvy 1963 architecture and a gymnasium that looks the same as when Led Zeppelin did, or did not, play their first local concert on January 20, 1969.” The screening will be preceded at 9:30 by a live performance from the Silver Spring School of Rock performing a set of Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest covers.
Watch the trailer for Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
Friday, July 17 at 10:00 pm at The Old Greenbelt Theater, 129 Centerway, Greenbelt, MD
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Leon Russell (Janus Films)The late director Les Blank was a folklorist with a camera, capturing the rich rural American culture of food and music in documentaries like The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Spend it All. But his feature length portrait of Leon Russell is more ambivalent about its subject, and that’s probably why it took 40 years for Russell to allow it to be released. Originally made in 1974, the film ostensibly follows Russell in concert and at his recording studio in Northeast Oklahoma. But as is his wont, Blank frequently cuts to impressionistic shots of wildlife and to other musicians who for the most part come off better than Russell. Among them are Willie Nelson and George Jones, in great form here as his music is stripped down from the countrypolitan strings that saddles his recordings in this era. The result doesn’t exactly flatter Russell, but it’s a great music documentary finally seeing commercial release.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up.
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(Rialto)Landmark reopens the West End Cinema this weekend with a new 4K restoration of the 1949 classic that’s on many lists of the greatest films of all time. Joseph Cotten stars as a pulp writer who travels to Vienna to look for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Welles is barely in the movie, but his pivotal “cuckoo clock” speech and the skewed cinematography by Robert Krasker casts a Wellesian tone over the whole film. With Anton Karas’ great zither score. Also opening at the Landmark West End this weekend, Boulevard, featuring the final performance from Robin Williams, starring as a man forced to confront his sexuality. I haven’t had a chance to watch it; the buzz is that Williams turns in a fine performance in an ultimately banal film.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark West End Cinema
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One of the biggest movies in the world opened last week with nary a peep from the English-language press. Tollywood (the Telegu Bollywood) star Prabhas plays dual roles as superhuman hero Shiva and his father King Amarendra Baahubali in a movie that’s been compared to The Lord of the Rings, but awesomer. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like a must see. This is the first part of a projected five-hour epic that is the most expensive movie in the history of Indian cinema. It’s likely to turn up streaming on Netflix at some point, but see it on the big screen while you have a chance.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Hoffman.
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Also opening this week: Paul Rudd joins the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Ant-Man. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
