Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
Jonathan Gold (IFC Films)Director Laura Gabbert’s portrait of Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold was one of my favorite documentaries from last year’s AFI Docs—and one of my favorite movies of 2015, period. This weekend it comes back for a commercial run. Last year, I wrote that, “even though the film’s technique is straightforward, it reaches far beyond the dining table. Gabbert introduces Gold as a Falstaffian nerd sitting down at his laptop, which suggests the image of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Yet Gold is not only a good writer but a generous one, and has earned his fan base by championing the kinds of restaurants that, according to the film, few critics were writing about at the time: the hundreds of independent L.A. eateries driven by a constant and ever-changing stream of immigrants … Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern speaks of an American cultural tendency that breeds ‘contempt without investigation,’ but Gold investigates everything, his musical tastes sampled on a KCRW guest DJ spot that careened from The Germs to Dr. Dre to Elizabethan composer John Downland, who composed what Gold describes as the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ of 1620. He notes his debt to New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin, whose method of finding a decent place to eat in a strange town resonated with Gold: as Trillin asked motel clerks where to eat, he’d grab them by the necktie (this being an age when motel clerks wore neckties) and emphasizing, ‘Not the place you took your parents on their 25th wedding anniversary. The first place you went the night you came home after thirteen months in Korea.'” City of Gold is a rarity; it’s not just a great movie about food, it’s a great movie about writing.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing
—
Brigid Brannagh, Kris Lemche, and David Alpay (Best Served Cold Productions)The crew of a real estate reality show travels to Eastern Europe to follow up on a fixer-upper in the remote forests of Moldava. But when they run afoul of the locals and their legends of witchcraft, the TV crew is forced into hiding. This entertaining and eventually gory horror show is a found footage movie with one difference: there’s a reason everybody has a camera. There’s something else different about They’re Watching: it’s a pretty good found footage horror movie. After a preview of the coming carnage, the movie begins with a slick satire of real estate reality shows where prospective American home buyers look at a traditional old world kiln and decide it would be great for their pottery. The intruding Americans may make fun of the locals and their traditions, but the movie is clearly on the side of the locals, who are simply defending their territory from vapid newcomers. The movie descends into B-movie chaos, but that’s part of it’s charm, and I suspect that underneath the usual horror movie tropes this is really an allegory of gentrification and colonialism.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Hoffman and on VOD.
—
Dany Boon, Julie Delpy and Vincent Lacoste (Film Rise)Neurotic fashion industry veteran Violette (writer-director Julie Delpy) is a 40-year old single mother who has trouble dating. When she falls for Biarritz bumpkin Jean-Rene (Dany Boon), a computer geek who specializes in financial software, she seems to have found a good mismatch. But her teenage son Lolo (Vincent Lacoste) does everything to sabotage mom’s happiness. This is Delpy’s sixth feature film behind the camera, and like her last, 2 Days in New York (2012), its moments of genuine human observation get sidetracked by farce. Lolo is at times a candid look at dating for 40-somethings, and its dysfunctional family dynamic has intriguing Oedipal potential. But despite a strong cast, it descends too often into sitcom high jinks.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up.
—
(Fox Searchlight)The Puccio family lives in a posh Buenos Aires suburb. Arquímedes (Guillermo Francella) the proud father of five children, and his eldest son (Peter Lanzani) is a talented rugby player. But behind this wealthy facade lies a brutal crime family. The Clan is based on the true story of a family that orchestrated kidnapings and murders in the early ’80s. I haven’t had a chance to preview the film, but the New York Post’s Farran Smith Nehme writes, “Swift, confident, and exceptionally nasty, this Argentine film bears roughly the same relationship to the Martin Scorsese of Goodfellas that Brian De Palma does to, well, all of Hitchcock.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver and Landmark E Street Cinema.
—
(Film Forum)
The Spider and Trick for Trick
The AFI’s salute to Hollywood production designer William Cameron Menzies continues next week with this magical pre-code double bill on glorious 35mm. In The Spider (1931), Chatrand the Great (Edmund Lowe) trades his magician’s hat for a detective hat when shots are fired during his act. Moody lighting from great cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) makes this a must-see on the big screen. In the 1933 whodunit Trick for Trick, a magician’s assistant is murdered, and the prime suspects are her bosses Azrah (Ralph Morgan) and La Tour (Victor Jory, who 40 years later would turn up as an Ecuadorian shaman in the TV movie Devil Dog: Hound of Hell, which I wrote about here).
—
Also opening this week, a wealthy chanteuse doesn’t realize she’s a terrible chanteuse in Marguerite; and a Thanksgiving family reunion goes horribly wrong in Krisha. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow,
