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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Shu Qi (SpotFilms)In ninth-century China, Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) returns from exile, where a nun trained her to be a peerless martial arts killer. But she is conflicted about her latest target: the man she was betrothed to marry. This is the first film in eight years from Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a critics’ fave whose films’ slow pacing can be challenging, especially to moviegoers who expect their wuxia to be full of rapid-fire action. Like all of the director’s films, this is indeed a slow burn. But it’s one of the most beautifully photographed films you’ll see all year, and its flashes of martial arts action make it one of Hou’s more accessible films.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema and the AFI Silver
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Sebastián Silva (The Orchard)Freddy (director Sebastián Silva) and Mo (Tunde Adebimpe) are a gay couple trying to have a baby with their friend Polly (Kristen Wiig). But as the friends run into increasingly volatile trouble with a Brooklyn neighbor known as The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), what seems like a study of a progressive family becomes an anxious thriller of gentrification and anger management. It’s an intriguing concept that seems to turn identity politics on its head, but the execution is sloppy, its fuzzy cinematography well in line with indie cinema but not lending itself well to the movie’s provocative plot turns.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up.
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When the National Gallery of Art programmed a Seijun Suzuki series in the ’90s, one of the images that never left me was of a pair of brothers arguing in a car. It was the kind of sequence you’ve seen in hundreds of movies, a stationary auto on a soundstage with rear-projection showing the road moving past them as they drove. But the director turned a studio rainstorm into waves that grew larger and larger until they enveloped the car. That scene is from this 1964 crime drama, also known as Our Blood Will Not Forgive. Nikkatsu regulars Hideki Takahashi and Akira Kobayashi star as brothers from different sides of the law (a gangster and an ad man) who come together to avenge their father’s death. This weekend’s Suzuki films at the Freer will all be from 35mm prints. On Sunday, the Freer will screen the 1959 film noir Passport to Darkness (November 1 at 1 p.m.) and the 1957 adventure film Eight Hours of Fear (November 1 at 3 p.m.).
Friday, October 30 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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The AFI Silver is your one-stop theater for Halloween movies this weekend, with a screening of the silent classic Nosferatu (10/31 at 1 p.m.) with live musical accompaniment and two double features hosted by Count Gore DeVol, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Wolf Man and the classic 1931 versions of Dracula and Frankenstein. But the AFI is also bringing back a 35mm print of Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 study of Native Americans living in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district. The film was unseen for years, but was restored in 2008, and is a lost window not only into the life of those exiled from Southwest reservations, but (gentrifiers, take note) into a vital urban neighborhood that was redeveloped into oblivion.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, November 1-Monday November 2 and Wednesday November 4 at the AFI Silver.
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As the Washington Psychotronic Film Society puts it, “TV’s most popular new gameshow is making a killing in the ratings, but it’s murder on the contestants. Host Chuck Toedan [John McCafferty, who would soon appear on an episode of “Murder, She Wrote”] pits deathrow convicts against each other in life-or-death contests for a stay of execution. He’s made more than a few enemies along the way, from outraged viewers trying to ban his show, to the vengeful families of contestants who lost. Now there’s a hitman after Chuck, and he’ll need the help of his most outspoken critic to win at his own game.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, November 2 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121.
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Also opening this weekend, The Cut, a tale of Armenian genocide from director Fatih Akin (Head-On). We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
