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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(Collection of Tab Hunter)Born Arthur Kelm, Tab Hunter was a screen idol too pretty to be taken seriously as an actor. Even his mother thought his first screen performance was lousy. Hunter has meant different things to different generations of moviegoers, from the crooning dreamboat of the ’50s to an ’80s cult following in the wake of a career-reviving appearance in John Waters’ Polyester. But there’s more to Hunter than his looks and his long-rumored and eventually admitted homosexuality. Director Jeffery Schwarz (I Am Divine) has a great subject in Hunter, a candid and gracious entertainer who weathered a career full of highs and lows, including a stint in dinner theater (which brought him to Manassass in the ’70s). Stay tuned tomorrow for DCist’s interview with Hunter.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up. Tab Hunter will attend screenings on October 25 at 11:45AM & 1:45PM
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Peter Sarsgaard (Magnolia Pictures)As I wrote in a review for Spectrum Culture, “for his 1961 experiments at Yale University, psychologist Stanley Milgram set up volunteers in a small room where they were told to administer a battery of questions to an unseen volunteer in the next room. “Teachers” were instructed to deliver an electric shock when “students” answered the questions incorrectly, and were directed to increase the intensity of the shock after each successive wrong answer, even if the person in the next room had stopped responding. What the “teachers” didn’t know at the time was that the “students” were actually in on the experiment. Director Michael Almereyda’s film, Experimenter, dramatizes Milgram’s social experiments with cinematic artifice that is so old-fashioned it becomes experimental itself. Experimenter is one of two films this year to dramatize a psychological experiment. More successfully than The Stanford Prison Experiment, Almereyda’s film resonates with a social media culture that seems more and more prone to groupthink. But the director is after more than just social commentary, and he gets it; he’s made a fascinating, provocative film about movies and illusion.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Elisha Cook, Jr.The AFI’s 20th annual Noir City DC festival continues this weekend with something you don’t expect from classic noir: one of the great drum solos in movie history. Ella Raines stars as a secretary who searches for the mysterious woman who can prove her boss (Alan Curtis) didn’t commit murder. One of the keys to this mystery is a jazz drummer played with bug-eyed intensity by legendary character actor Elisha Cook, Jr. The AFI will be screening a 35mm print of director Robert Siodmak’s first great noir. Also screening in Noir City in the coming week: director Edward G. Ulmer’s raw classic Detour (October 24 and 28), Robert Aldrich’s atomic-age thriller Kiss Me Deadly (October 23 and 29), the delirious Technicolor (DCP, unfortunately) of Leave her to Heaven (October 25 and 27),
Watch the trailer.
Friday, October 23 and Sunday, October 25 at the AFI Silver.
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(GKids)The talent pool for this animated anthology of the works of Edgar Allan Poe sounds like a no-brainer: Christopher Lee. Bela Lugosi (taken from a scratchy record). Roger Corman. Guillermo del Toro. But director Raul Garcia has enlisted animators and voice talent with little idea what to do with them, overwhelming powerful dramatic voices (and del Toro’s more tentative voice) with clumsy quasi-cubist design and the most obvious musical and sound effects cues. Worse, a running framework between the five stories adapted here features cringe-worthy dialogue between Poe’s soul (in the form of a raven, natch) and the spirit of Death. It’s only 70 minutes, but I thought it would never end.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Hoffman
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The Freer’s Seijun Suzuki retrospective continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this 1963 yakuza film with a twist. Katsuta (Nikkatsu idol Akira Kobayashi) is a fierce bodyguard charged with defending his boss against a rival gang, but a woman from his past appears to test his resolve. As the Freer notes, “Suzuki uses this traditional story to experiment with color and to indulge his interest in Kabuki theater techniques and effects, most notably in the stunning final battle, in which the scenery falls away to reveal a field of pure blood red.” The Freer will also be showing two more 35mm prints in the series this weekend, Story of a Prostitute (October 25 at 1 p.m) and Fighting Elegy (October 25 at 3 p.m.).
Watch the trailer for Kanto Wanderer.
Kanto Wanderer screens Friday, October 23 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this weekend, Bill Murray stars as a washed-up concert promoter who takes his talent (Zooey Deschanel) to Afghanistan in this generation’s Ishtar (except not as good), Rock the Kasbah. We’ll have a full review tomorrow, as well as an interview with Tab Hunter.
