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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Andrew Bolton (Magnolia Pictures)Does fashion belong in an art museum? Director Andrew Rossi (Page One) looks at the uneasy but lucrative marriage of haute couture and the art world in this stylish, entertaining documentary. The primary focus is on Andrew Bolton, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, as he puts together the 2015 exhibit China:Through the Looking Glass. Bolton set precedent for fashion at the Met with the blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit Savage Beauty in 2011. That was the only Met exhibit that ever sent me into Stendahl syndrome, but the success of that show became an albatross for Bolton as his subsequent exhibits are inevitably spoken of as a relative a disappointment. Rossi’s film is a slick procedural that follows not only the production of the China show (under artistic director Wong Kar-wai, yet!), but the meticulous process of vetting the annual Met Gala under its director, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour. The First Monday in May is occasionally hilarious (Wintour is the subject of a particularly sharp juxtaposition) and consistently fabulous.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing
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James MasonUlysses Diello (James Mason) is valet to Britain’s Turkish ambassador to Turkey. But under the spell of Polish Countess Anna Staviska (Danielle Darrieux), he plots to sell government secrets to the Nazis. The AFI’s series devoted to film composer Bernard Hermann continues with a 35mm print of this noirish thriller from director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve). Make it a Mankiewicz double-bill (separate admission) with a 35mm print of Fritz Lang’s 1936 Fury, screening after Five Fingers on Sunday and Monday night.
Watch the trailer for Five Fingers.
Sunday, April 17 and Monday, April 18 at the AFI Silver.
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As part of this year’s National Cherry Blossom Festival, the American Art Museum, hosts an afternoon of anime features in conjunction with the Freer. This 2015 film from director Keiichi Hara tells the story of O-ei Hokusai, daughter of the Japanese woodblock artist whose prints The Great Wave off Kanagawa and series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji have been exhibited at the Freer. O-ei, who sometimes collaborated with him. The American Art Museum will also screen the 2011 Studio Ghibli favorite From Up on Poppy Hill (Saturday, April 16 at 3 p.m.) and the 2011 anime feature A Letter to Momo (Saturday, April 16 at 5 p.m.) Though you should probably spend at least part of the day outside.
Watch the trailer for Miss Hokusai.
Sunday, April 16 at 1 p.m. at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. Free.
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A Page of Madness
This silent-era collaboration between Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunori Kawabata (Palm-of-the-hand Stories) and director Teinosuke Kinugasa is considered “a watershed moment in Japanese avant-garde art of the 1920s”. The movie tells the story of a man who works as a janitor in an asylum to take care of his insane wife.
Jazz drummer William Hooker will perform live accompaniment with the 35mm print. Hooker will also be on hand for the AFI’s early silent show Saturday evening, a DCP of the 1920 Lon Chaney crime drama The Penalty (Saturday, April 16 at 7:30 pm).
A Page of Madness screens Saturday, April 16 at 9:45 p.p. at the AFI Silver.
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Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society presents schlockmeister Larry Cohen’s prescient satire of consumerism. A natural fount of bubbling sweet white stuff is found in Alaska and marketed as a dessert. But is the stuff…alive? Michael Moriarty (whose aw-shucks with a hint of menace would have made him perfect for The Killer Inside Me) investigates the mysterious substance for a rival company only to find himself face-first in it. Could this satirical story of the killer inside us have foretold 21st century cupcake mania?
Watch the trailer.
Monday, April 18 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel
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Also opening this week, Criminal, in which CIA agent Ryan Reynolds gets his memory implanted into problem felon Kevin Costner with the help of scientist Tommy Lee Jones. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
