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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(Oscilloscope)Twelve-year-old Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is the eldest daughter in a family of beekeepers who live in the remote Umbrian countryside. When a television crew comes looking for the region’s “Most Traditional Family,” the modern world threatens to spoil this uneasy idyll. Director Alice Rohrwacher’s coming of age movie won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, but as I wrote in my review of the film for Spectrum Culture, “it could have used a little more blood and bitterness.” Read my full review here.
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Opens today at Landmark West End Cinema.
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(Film Movement)Hussein (Hussein Salameh) and his little brother Theeb (Jacir Eid) are orphans living in a quiet Bedouin village when a British Army officer and his guide come looking for an escort to a well. This “Bedouin Western” from British-born Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar is set during the Arab Revolt in 1916. I didn’t get a chance to preview the film, but the New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote that, “The wide-open spaces of Jordan, where Theeb was filmed, are as awe-inspiring in their breadth and aridity as the vistas in a spaghetti western. The film’s acute sense of this unforgiving environment is underscored by a soundtrack in which gunfire and voices ricochet eerily through the spiky canyons and arid mountain passes.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Anthony EdwardsMonday night, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society makes you thankful it’s not the end of the world. This is how I describe director Steve De Jarnatt’s romantic apocalypse Miracle Mile, which I wrote about last year for Spectrum Culture. “Imagine you meet the girl of your dreams at 10 o’clock, and at 11 o’clock find out the world is going to end at 12 o’clock. This 1988 thriller was a box office bomb that’s as much fatalistic romance as cautionary tale. The film still works as a harrowingly effective B-movie apocalypse, but time has given it added resonance that even the director may not have expected.” Read my Spectrum Culture piece on the film here.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, November 30 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121.
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Werner Herzog (The Criterion Collection)The Goethe-Institut is in its last days at its 7th Street offices—stay tuned for more about their move next week. To send off the institution’s wonderful film auditorium, which will be sorely missed, they’ve been screening a selection of greatest hits. Monday’s film is Burden of Dreams, director Les Blank’s essential documentary about the seemingly insurmountable production problems behind the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The film includes footage of the film’s early stars, Mick Jagger and Jason Robards, who left the production to be replaced by Herzog’s “best fiend” Klaus Kinski. Say auf wiedersehen to a great space for movies with one of the great documentaries.
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Monday, November 30 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
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(First Run Features/Jan Svankmeyer)Director Jan Švankmajer’s 1987 adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic is at once one of the most radical and faithful to its source. In a Spectrum Culture piece on the film, I wrote that, “Animators like Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay (whose work is unthinkable without Švankmajer’s precedent) leave unforgettable impressions in short animations but sometimes struggle when expanding their vision to a full-length film. Alice is full of remarkable moments, but the director works against his own aesthetic instincts. Before a screening of the film at the Barbican Art Gallery, Švankmajer told interviewers his Alice is not a fairy tale but a dream. The dream elements of Alice are terrific, but I wish he didn’t keep pinching himself.” Read my full article here.
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Thursday, December 3 at 7 p.m. at the Hirshhorn’s Ring Auditorium. Free.
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Stay tuned next week for a preview of the AFI’s annual European Union Film Showcase. And in case you missed it, read my review of the terrific Rocky sequel Creed, which opened on Wednesday.
