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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(Kino Lorber)

The Wanted 18

During the Palestinian uprising in the late ’80s, residents of Beit Sahour hid 18 cows from Israeli officials who declared their small dairy a threat to national security. Directors Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan took this volatile situation as an opportunity to make a “documentary moooovie”—with talking claymation animals. The fifth annual DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival opens tonight with a film that may sound misguided on paper, but its conceit accentuates the absurdity of the situation. And the trailer makes clear that this is not just a talking animal movie, as if there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve been hoping to see this, but never expected would show up here. Tonight’s opening night show is already sold out, but an additional screening has been scheduled for this weekend.

Watch the trailer.
Saturday, October 3 at 3:45 at the Goethe-Institut.

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Hailee Steinfeld, Muna Otaru and Brit Marling (Drafthouse FIlms)

The Keeping Room

As General Sherman burns his way through Georgia, two Yankee soldiers (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) rape and pillage their own way through the countryside. But Augusta (Brit Marling) won’t have it, and defends her farmhouse with her sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and their slave Mad (Muna Otaru). This revisionist Western is atmospheric and features good performances from Marling and Worthington, though the hand-held camerawork is a mild distraction from what should be a steadfast portrayal of defiance. Still, the film’s languid rhythms keep it from gaining steam power until the final act. In this year’s revisionist Western sweepstakes, The Keeping Room sits solidly between the too self-conscious Slow West and the gripping Mads Mikkelsen oater Salvation.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row.

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(Cinema Guild)

The Princess of France

A young Buenos Aires director plans a radio play of Love’s Labors Lost, but his actresses have a dynamic that complicates the classic drama with modern drama. The AFI’s Latin American Film Festival continues this weekend with a new Shakespearean film from Matías Piñeiro, director of the self-conscious, Twelfth Night-inspired Viola. Piñeiro will appear for a Q&A after this weekend’s screening. Also in the festival this week, director Pablo Larrain’s The Club (Friday, October 2), about exiled priests training a greyhound; and the documentary Horizons (Tuesday, October 6), followed by a Q&A with Septime Webre of the Washington Ballet and a reception sponsored by the Embassy of Switzerland.

Watch the trailer for The Princess of France.
Saturday, October 3 at 2:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.

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Andrea Drahota and Gojko Mitic

Chingachgook, The Great Snake

As part of their Picturing America series, the Goethe-Institut screens this kitschy East German adaptation of a noble savage novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Gary Giddins, in an article on East German Westerns, wrote that the 1967 film has “whole sequences [that] suggest an escapade choreographed by a semi-comatose Bob Fosse and directed by a hyperventilating Ed Wood Jr.” The Goethe-Institut’s lease on their Seventh Street space expires at the end of the year, which means you only have a handful of opportunities left to check out one of the area’s best repertory screens. If Joaquin doesn’t wash us all away on Monday, this sounds like a politically incorrect must-see.

Watch the trailer.
Monday, 5 October 2015, 6:30 pm at the Goethe-Institut.

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courtesy Alpha Violet

The Summer of Flying Fish

This weekend, the National Gallery of Art celebrates the Festival del film Locarno, which has lured cinephiles to southern Switzerland since 1946. This 2013 film from Chilean director Marcela Said (who earned a degree in aesthetics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) was a recent festival favorite. Program notes describe the film as about “the strong-minded teenage daughter of a rich, eccentric Chilean landowner [who] enters the world of the indigenous Mapuche Indians, at odds with her father’s system of values.” The film will be introduced by Locarno’s artistic director, Carlo Chatrian.

Watch the trailer.
Sunday, October 4 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium.

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Also opening this week: Matt Damon is left far from home in director Ridley Scott’s The Martian; and Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn are gambling buddys in Mississippi Grind. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.