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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(GKIDS)This year’s Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature include the usual Pixar favorite (Inside Out), the usual Studio Ghibli longshot (When Marnie was There), and the not-so-usual arthouse favorite (Anomalisa). It also includes this lesser-known title from Brazilian artist Alê Abreu. The animator uses a variety of animation techniques to chart a young boy’s move from an idyllic countryside animated in pastels and crayon to a cityscape made from a combination of computer graphics and collage. The boy’s rural paradise comes off a bit maudlin, and the character’s blank eyes don’t convey much emotion when his parents are forced to separate, but ironically the movie becomes more engaging when the boy travels to a technologically advanced world that we are presumably supposed to find appalling. Abreu’s modern world is one oversaturated by mass media, and the boy is naturally mesmerized by the new colors of the city. But the technology that almost does him in isn’t a smartphone—it’s a toy kaleidoscope.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up and Angelika Mosaic.
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Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson (The Weinstein Company)Detective Ethan Hawke investigates the case of a man who has abused his teenage daughter (Emma Watson) but has no memory of it. Director Alejandro Amenábar has been at the helm of well-regarded arthouse fare like The Sea Inside (2004), but the cold opening (and in February yet) of this film (it wasn’t previewed for critics) leads one to conclude that the terrible buzz on this is well-earned. Last year Hawke, plugging not a movie but a book, told an audience at the Sixth and I Synagogue that having kids to feed means that he’s happy to take any acting job that comes his way, and by all accounts (the film currently scores a mere 5% on Rotten Tomatoes) this is another desperate paycheck. Co-starring David Thewliss, who can also do much better.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up
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This month, my colleague Solomon HaileSelassie hosts the science fiction film series Music for Martians at the intimate Mary Pickford Theatre at the Library of Congress. This week’s program is a 35mm screening of the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic Predator, directed by John McTiernan (Die Hard) and with a score by Alan Silvestri. Tickets are already sold out for this film and the remainder of the series (including next weekend’s double bill of Total Recall and Alien, both in glorious 35mm prints), but standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30 p.m. as 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, February 5 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Tickets are sold out but a standby line forms at 6:30 p.m.
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(Strand Releasing)The series, Athens Today: New Greek Cinema continues at the National Gallery of Art this weekend with a road movie about two brothers searching for their biological father. Guy Lodge writes that xenia, which refers to Greek hospitality towards strangers, is “an appropriate title for a film that gladly accommodates all manner of curiosities, from giant talking rabbits to chest-rug dream sequences to a cameo from venerable Italian pop diva Patty Pravo.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, February 7 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
The Washington Psychotronic Film Society educates its audience next weekend with this 1964 entry in the mondo genre directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero (So Sweet So Dead) and Albert T. Viola (Preacherman Meets Widderwoman) and narrated by Boris Karloff. The Society writes, “Our world… What a wild and fascinating place it is! Filled with love, hate, lust and all the hungers and driving passions by which the strange creature called man is possessed. Nothing invented by the human mind can be as macabre, grotesque, and thrilling as the behavior of people in so-called ‘real life.’ SEE! uninhibited native ceremonies, German sword-fighters, nubile Asian women wrestling in a bondage fetish club, a Hong Kong opium den, wife-sharing in London, dwarf love, white female sex slavery, black-market smuggling, marijuana, cross-dressing crooners, lesbianism, raincoat-clad peeping toms, bodybuilders, desert Bedouins, Jehovah Witnesses, luxury pet dogs, camel urine hair dye, an elephant hunt, an exorcism in India, compulsive smokers, the Berlin Wall, a macumba session and choir, a German beer-house, football hooligans, bikinis and MUCH, MUCH MORE!” The WPFS notes that this screening is “not for the faint of heart! A jive-ass nurse will be in attendance, just in case some doofus pops his doodle.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, February 8 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121.
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Also opening this week, Josh Brolin stars as Eddie Mannix, who tries to keep Hollywood stars like George Clooney out of trouble in the Coen Brother’s new satire Hail Caesar! We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
