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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Phil Spector, backed by guitarists Barney Kessel, Bill Pittman, Don Peake and Herb Ellis. Courtesy of the Ray Charles Video Museum.Next month, I’m hosting a series of 35mm screenings at the Library of Congress’ Mary Pickford Theater. Tickets will be available next week for the first in a series of films that looks back at the music of 1966. The Big T.N.T. Show was the sequel to the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show. Its line-up may not be as legendary as that of its predecessor, but it still gives you performances by The Byrds, The Ronettes (filmed not long before they broke up), Ray Charles, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Donovan, Joan Baez, and Bo Diddley. Host David McCallum was then-star of the television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which received a Hollywood reboot this year. Visit a time when music was not yet complicated by streaming services and TMZ.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, January 8 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. Free tickets (no service charge!) will be available from Eventbrite beginning January 6 at 10 a.m.
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Claude Rains and James StewartThe politically innocent head of the local chapter of the Boy Rangers, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), is sent to Washington to fill in for a deceased senator. One of the best loved of director Frank Capra’s films might make you believe in the political process again—or worry that the system in its current state is doomed. The Old Greenbelt Theatre will screen a 35mm print of this 1939 classic on Sunday, preceded by a Laurel and Hardy short, all for the bargain price of $7 for adults and $5 for kids.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, January 3 at 1 p.m. at the Old Greenbelt Theatre. 129 Centerway, Greenbelt, MD
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(Noon Pictures)On January 4th, the Freer closes its doors through 2017 for renovation and upgrades.So the twentieth edition of the gallery’s popular Iranian Film Festival will be hosted by the National Gallery of Art. The festival launches this weekend with the latest work from Iran’s most famous female director, Rakhshan Bani-E’temad. According to the Freer, “she has built a reputation as a defiant and clear-eyed chronicler of her country’s social ills, especially as they affect women. Retrospective in scope, Tales weaves together a series of short films (which are subject to less scrutiny from Iranian authorities than their full-length counterparts are) featuring a number of characters from Bani-E’temad’s previous work. The stories offer a surprisingly candid look at problems ranging from Iran’s corrupt bureaucracy to single motherhood to drug addiction and the AIDS crisis.“
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, January 3 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium, Free.
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(WJFF)Directors Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky tell the history of the Zionist movement in this 165-minute documentary. Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter writes that the film covers, “seminal events as the ’67 Six Day War (one commentator, describing himself as an atheist, nonetheless declares that “God lived” in that event); the ’73 Yom Kippur War; Sadat’s peace overture to Israel; and the 1978 Camp David Accords orchestrated by President Jimmy Carter,” but notes that “the film has the occasional feel of an overstuffed textbook. Some judicious editing would have been in order, especially in terms of excising some of the redundant commentary. But it ably fulfills its mission of delivering a comprehensive account of its subject, offering thoughtfully disparate viewpoints along the way. As such, it stands as a significant cinematic achievement.”
Tuesday, January 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the DCJCC, 1529 16th Street NW, $13
