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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(Zipporah Films)Director Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary subject is the Queens neighborhood that may well be the most diverse in the world. Its residents speak over 160 different languages, and even though In Jackson Heights is over three hours long, it only covers a handful of those. But this film, the final part of community trilogy that includes Aspen and Belfast, Maine, observes the American melting pot at its multicultural best. Wiseman trains his eye on the varieties of Jackson Heights experience, from the different groups meeting in a Latino community center and a synagogue, to efforts to support small business owners against landlords who want to drive them out, to a tutor who helps cab drivers from different countries with English terms like “neighborhood.” Not all of the people who take the podium at these community meetings are great storytellers, but such is the nature of community meetings, isn’t it? Wiseman will appear via Skype at the Sat, Nov 14, 7:15 show.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver.
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Laia Costa (Adopt Films)A young woman from Madrid (Laia Costa) meets a group of men outside a Berlin nightclub. What starts as a night of just hanging turns into an adventure she didn’t plan for. Director Sebastian Schipper made this 138 minute thriller in a single take, following his actors on 22 different locations. Victoria wants to come on like a like a French New Wave thriller in the form of an uninterrupted two-hour slice of nightlife, but it takes a full hour for the movie to generate any real energy. The unfocused script doesn’t give the actors much to chew on. The film’s most effective element is ultimately independent of the one-shot setup: the atmospheric score by NIls Frahm gives emotional shape to loosely-written scenes, but only after the fact.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row
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Yoko Shiraki (Courtesy of the Freer)The Freer’s Seijun Suzuki retrospective resumes this weekend with the first in a series of 35mm rarities from the director’s vast filmography. The editor of a golfing magazine picks a professional model (Yoko Shiraki) to groom for a sports career, guessing that the sight of a bikini-clad young woman on the golf course will increase circulation. But the model-turned golfer soon becomes the target of a blackmail scheme. Midnight Eye’s Jasper Sharp writes that the movie “[comes] across like a deranged hybrid of Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me (1971) and Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).” Sunday, the Freer screens 35mm prints of two rare Suzuki crime dramas from 1960 The Sleeping Beast Within (November 15 at 1 p.m.), which the Freer calls a “proto-Breaking Bad [that] moves to an energetic pulp fiction beat”; and Smashing the O-Line , about “a reporter so ambitiously amoral that he’ll sell out anyone—including his partner and the drug dealer he’s sleeping with— to get a scoop.”
Watch the trailer.
A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness screens Friday, November 13 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Richard Arlen and Louise Brooks (Paramount Pictures/Photofest)To celebrate the release of a new biography of director William Wellman, the AFI launches the series Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel with a 35mm print of this 1928 film based on Jim Tully’s “hobo autobiography.” The iconic Louise Brooks stars a cross-dressing hobo fleeing her past in this “boxcar-riding romantic adventure” from 1928. The film will be accompanied by live music from Donald Sosin. William Wellman, Jr. will be on hand to introduce the film. Presented in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art.
Friday, November 13 at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Romy Schneider and Michel Piccoli (Rialto Pictures)The AFI’s retrospective of director Claude Sautet continues with a 35mm print of this 1971 crime drama, never released in the United States. The great Michel Piccoli stars as Max, a Paris detective who attempts to entrap an ambitious prostitute (Romy Schneider) with hints that a bank is just asking to be robbed. The LA Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote that this “is no ordinary crime film. It’s also a finely drawn character study that is fascinated by the nuances of personal behavior.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, November 15 at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Also opening this week, Antonio Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips and Juliette Binoche are all Chilean in The 33, a dramatization of the 2010 mining accident that trapped 33 men for more than three months. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
