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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(Showtime Networks)One of the highlights of this year’s AFI Docs lineup was this intimate, unusual, and moving documentary about one of the great movie icons. As I wrote about the film in June, “The late Marlon Brando made hundreds of hours of personal audio recordings over the course of his life, including oral memoirs, self-hypnosis guides, and even intimate documents of pillow talk with lovers. Director Stevan Riley uses these tapes, never before heard in public, as the basis of this impressionistic portrait of Brando by Brando. Home movies, backstage footage, and film clips provide visuals and are supplemented by rare interviews and an homage to acting teacher Stella Adler. But the most startling visual is what the disembodied actor calls the digitization of his face: in the ’80s, special effects whiz Scott Billups captured a ghostly image of Brando ruminating on the digital future of acting and reciting Shakespeare. Spend some time in a darkened theater with the floating computerized ghost of a legend.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
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Xavier Dolan (Clara Palardy/Amplify Releasing)Tom (director Xavier Dolan) is a city boy mourning his lover Guillaume (Caleb Landry Jones). To pay his respects, Tom travels to the remote farm where his lover grew up, only to find out that his mother had no idea her son was gay. Based on a play by Michel Marc Bouchard, the premise is similar to last year’s drama Lilting, but Dolan’s film was originally released in 2013 and is now getting distribution thanks to the critical success of his 2014 film Mommy. I haven’t had a chance to screen Tom at the Farm and haven’t seen any of Dolan’s films, but the film has decent buzz, earning probably exaggerated comparisons to Hitchcock (I wish critics would replace “taut Hitchcockian thriller” with the more likely to be accurate “lame Hitchcock cover band”) and perhaps more reasonable comparisons to Patricia Highsmith.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up
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Duane JonesAnthropologist Dr. Hess Green (Night of the Living Dead‘s Duane Jones) develops a thirst for blood after being stabbed by his assistant (Bill Gunn) with an ancient knife. The doctor soon falls in love with his assistant’s widow, Ganja (Marlene Clark). This weekend the AFI series Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York gives us a rare chance to see a 35mm print of director Bill Gunn’s experimental vampire film, recently remade by Spike Lee as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Note: this is the 110-minute cut of the film restored by the Museum of Modern Art.
Sunday, August 16 and Tuesday, August 18 at the AFI Silver.
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Jackie ChanThe Freer’s twentieth annual Made in Hong Kong film festival wraps up this weekend with a 35mm print of this 1994 martial arts classic, the winner of the Gallery’s “Choose Your Jackie” audience poll. As the gallery writes, “This display of Jackie Chan’s astonishing acrobatic skills is set in turn-of-the-century China, a turbulent time between the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China. Chan plays Wong Fei-hung, who is trained in the obscure martial art of drunken boxing. When he drinks alcohol, he untaps amazing strength and agility that allow him to fight dozens of men simultaneously. When the legendary martial artist finds himself embroiled in a plot by British imperialists and insidious locals to rob the country of its valuable cultural artifacts, he must use his unique style of martial arts to fight the conspirators and salvage the Chinese treasures before it is too late.” Also screening this weekend, young filmmaker Heiward Mak appears on Sunday with a DCP screening of her 2012 showbiz drama Diva.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, August 14 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Courtesy TitanusThe National Gallery’s retrospective of the Italian production house Titanus continues this weekend with a 35mm print of the second feature from director Elio Petri (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion). The Gallery’s notes describe the film as ” a modernist take on a working class life in crisis [that] mixes neorealism with social observation. Salvo Randone, a Sicilian stage actor, plays the aging tradesman Cesare who observes a man his own age keel over on a Roman tram. The event awakens in Cesare a sense that he needs to change his life.” Also screening in the series this weekend is the 1945 neorealist documentary Days of Glory (August 15 at 1 p.m.), with footage shot by Luchino Vischonti; and the doomed love affair of director Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (August 15 at 3 p.m.), with Jean-Louis Trintignant.
The Days are Numbered screens Sunday, August 16 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium. Free.
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Tab Hunter and DivineIt used to be that on any given weekend there was some independent D.C. movie theater (usually in Georgetown) showing a John Waters movie at midnight, sending dazed moviegoers reeling and occasionally vomiting into the street. While they can’t provide Smell-O-Vision cards, next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society offers one of the auteur’s milder and more popular titles, starring Divine as a bored housewife who takes up with Tab Hunter. With egg lady Edith Massey and a bit part from Jay Leno.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, August 17 at 8:00 p.m. at Acre 121.
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Also opening this week, director Guy Ritchie adapts Cold War TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for the big screen. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
