Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

—

Christopher St. John

Top of the Heap

George (Christopher St. John) is a black cop who’s passed over for a promotion in this 1972 blaxploitation film. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society writes that the film’s protagonist “has had enough of his job, his wife and his life in the inner city. So instead he’s going to run through the jungles of Africa, seduce a nurse, and help the Man fake a moon landing. Or so he imagines.” The film was made in D.C. at a time when 14th Street was known for adult theaters (you can see the old Casino Royal in one nighttime shot) and everybody’s favorite French bistro was still a giant laundromat. Christoper St. John wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the film.

Watch the trailer.
Monday, January 11 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121

—

Roddy McDowall and Tuesday Weld

Lord Love a Duck

On Friday nights this month I’m hosting a series of 35mm film screenings at the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress. Time Capsule: 1966 looks at the music of the era through four very different films. Tickets are no longer available for tomorrow night’s screening of the concert film The Big T.N.T. Show, though standbys are encouraged. You can still get tickets for next week’s screening of director George Axelrod’s anarchic black comedy Lord Love a Duck, starring Roddy McDowall as a 38-year-old teenage Svengali who takes Tuesday Weld under his wing, promising to make her a star. Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building (101 Independence Avenue SE). Doors open 30 minutes before screening. Seating is very limited, but standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30 p.m. Available seats will be released five minutes before show time. For information, call (202) 707-5502. Learn more about the Library of Congress’ 2015-16 concert season here.

Watch the trailer.
Friday, January 15 at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free, tickets available (no service charge!) here.

—

Anthony Quinn (Twentieth Century Fox)

Zorba The Greek

Katherine Quinn, the widow of actor Anthony Quinn, will appear at the National Gallery of Art this weekend to introduce a new digital restoration of one of her late husband’s finest films. Director Michael Cacoyannis’ much-loved adaptation of the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis tells the story of Zorba (Quinn), a boisterous Cretan musician who teaches the reticent Basil (Alan Bates) how to get down, Greek style.

Watch the trailer.
Sunday, January 10 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium, Free.

—

(Wildgaze Films)

What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

The Washington Jewish Film Festival continues its year-long programming with a screening of this provocative documentary, which had only a brief commercial run last year. In my Washington Post review, I wrote that the film “documents the uneasy friendship between human rights lawyer Philippe Sands and the sons of two high-ranking Nazi officials who played a role in the murder of his ancestors….But the film is not just about a very specific and difficult conversation. Ultimately, it is also about the failure of conversation itself.”

Watch the trailer.
Monday, January 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the DCJCC, 1529 16th Street NW

—

(National Film Archive of Iran)

The Cow

During the Freer Gallery’s renovation, its popular Iranian Film Festival will be hosted by the National Gallery of Art. This week’s film is a DCP screening of a 1969 classic. Film critic and jazz scholar Ehsan Khoshbakht writes, “There are other films about men and cows, but unlike The Cow they can hardly be called love stories, nor are they works that so powerfully explore madness, solitude, and obsession. This milestone of Iranian New Wave cinema tells the story of a poor villager (played by stage actor Ezzatolah Entazami in one of Iranian film’s greatest performances) whose only source of joy and livelihood is his cow, which provides milk for the village. (Not surprisingly, when the film came out, the Left believed that the ‘milk’ symbolized oil.) One night the cow is mysteriously killed, and that’s when the madness, or transformation, begins.”

Saturday, January 9 at 1 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.

—

Also opening this week, two wildly different approaches to animation: director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion drama Anomalisa; and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s epic adventure The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio is mauled by a CGI bear. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.