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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Joplin in Denmark (Jan Persson /Getty Images)Near the end of director Amy Berg’s moving documentary about the late psychedelic blues singer, Janis Joplin returns to her home town of Port Arthur, Texas for her 10th high school reunion. The film sets up Joplin as a young misfit, rejected by her peers as a child, so the reunion had the potential to be a triumphant round of “Look at me now!” But at a press conference at her reunion, Joplin can barely hold back the tears; the rejection still stings. Little Girl Blue surveys the growth of Joplin’s music, which finally comes into focus during a riveting live version of “Ball and Chain,” but the film trains an even more sensitive lens on her heartbreaking emotional arc.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Angelika Pop-up
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Christopher Abbott (The Film Arcade)In my review of the film for Spectrum Culture, I wrote, “Call it The Bro’s Progress. The generically titled indie drama James White observes a 20-something New Yorker (Christopher Abbott) who sleeps on his sick mother’s couch. As the movie starts, he’s not a caretaker so much as a guy trying to tune out life…James is an unreliable and unpredictable bro but Abbott makes this volatile character into a watchable, troubled puppy. Though writer-director James Mond’s script isn’t all there, he has the great luck to have Abbott (Martha Marcy May Marlene, which Mond produced) on board. The actor conveys plenty without words, in the lost and troubled look on his face in the club and in the worried look on his face as he’s taking a cab uptown. Abbott fills almost every frame of the movie that bears his character’s name, and he earns the marquee, even if the movie may not completely deserve him.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at ArcLight Bethesda
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(IFC Films)The Goethe-Institut will be leaving its Seventh Street home next month (read more about the move here), and sends off its state-of-the-art auditorium with a screening of director Wim Wenders’ masterful 3D dance film. In my 2012 review, I wrote that Wenders “uses 3D to reveal a spatial depth never before seen in dance films—and expands the stage to picture-perfect outdoor locations as well. This depth is not restricted to the body in motion, the kind of in-your-face tricks that pepper the typical 3D project. Wenders and cinematographer Hélène Louvart, along with 3D pioneer Alain Derobe, present loving closeups of the dancers’ diverse faces. Light plays on the contours of bone structure, and, in some cases, wrinkles, and show an appreciation of the body in all its form and ages that you’ll never see in Hollywood”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, December 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
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Jim Anderson, William Redfield and Garry Goodrow (Milestone Films)If you missed the AFI’s retrospective of experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke this spring, the National Gallery of Art gives you another chance to see two of her films as part of its month-series Twenty-Five Years of Milestone Film. The Connection is Clarke’s 1962 adaptation of Jack Gelber’s Living Theater play about a group of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The film co-stars pianist-composer Freddie Redd and alto sax great Jackie McLean. Also screening is Ornette: Made in America, Clarke’s 1985 documentary about saxophone legend Ornette Coleman, who died earlier this year (I’ve always found the spastic visuals of this one difficult to watch).
Watch the trailer for The Connection.
Ornette: Made in America screens Saturday, December 5 at 1 p.m.; The Connection screens Saturday, December 5 at 3 p.m. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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(Courtesy of the Freer)The Freer’s Seijun Suzuki series continues this weekend with a film that Japanese film critics named one of the best of the ’80s. The Freer describes it as “a metaphysical ghost story involving love triangles, doppelgangers, and a blurred line between the worlds of the living and the dead.” Also screening this weekend, Suzuki’s similarly themed 1981 film Kagero-za (Sunday, December 6 at 2 p.m), which critic Tony Rayns writes, “may well be Suzuki’s finest achievement outside the constraints of genre filmmaking.” The Freer will be showing rarely screened 35mm prints of both films.
Zigeunerweisen screens Friday, December 4 at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
