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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Agyness Deyn (Magnolia Pictures)Director Terence Davies’ adaption of a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon tells the epic story of Chris (Agyness Deyn), a bonnie lass living in rural Scotland at the turn of the 20th century. Struggling against a tyrannical father and a Great War on the horizon, Chris holds down the family farm at Blawearie. She lives a hard life amid a gorgeous landscape that Davies regularly dissolves into his heroine, as much earth as human. The director’s films always look picture perfect, and this is no exception. I’m no fan of his 90s landmark The Long Day Closes, his latest drops the self-consciousness for an old-fashioned visual feast shot in glorious 70mm (though I am not aware of any 70mm screenings in the area, or anywhere). While viewers in the know may complain about Deyn’s wavering Scottish accent, it sounds bonnie enough to me, and the performances are uniformly strong, especially Mullan as the volcanic patriarch. I was only able to preview the film with a digital screener, but this movie is meant to be seen on the big screen.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row
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Shih Jun (Janus Films)The best movie opening this week was made almost 50 years ago. In the Ming dynasty, the family of a wrongly executed official is on the run, its pursuers crossing paths at a seemingly tranquil inn. Director King Hu’s 1967 wu xia is a masterpiece of the genre, part western, part martial arts picture. Even if you’ve never seen it before, you’ve seen the lessons it taught generations of action directors, from Quentin Tarantino (who has dipped into this well multiple times) to The Walking Dead. The new release is a 4K digital restoration from the original film negative. Don’t miss it!
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Kim Min-hee and Jung Jae-youngThe Korean Film Festival continues this weekend with a festival favorite from director Hong Sang-soo (Night and Day). Jung Jae-young (Castaway on the Moon) stars as a film director who has a tumultuous relationship with a female artist (Kim Min-hee). The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes that, “Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama … Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, May 22 at 1 p.m. at the National Museum of American History’s Warner Brothers Theater.
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Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones and Joseph CottenThe AFI’s Gregory Peck series continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this Technicolor western from 1946. Peck stars in a rare bad guy role as one of two brothers (the other is Joseph Cotten) who romance the half-native American orphan Jennifer Jones. Directed by King Vidor, the film was dismissed as Lust in the Dust because of its overheated melodrama. Also in the Peck series this weekend, the epic William Wyler western The Big Country (Sunday, May 22 at noon), which won Burl Ives an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, May 21 at 11 a.m. at the AFi Silver.
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(Shout Factory)It stands for Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research, and it’s on the loose! As the programmers at the Washington Psychotronic Film Society put it, “When development of an android cop complete with mustache gets rushed to satisfy a credit-hungry politician, the prototype officer emerges from a lab and begins executing people for breaking the law–traffic law. Pretty soon, it has an innocent woman running for her life while its creator races to shut it down. There’s no hiding it: This one’s a cross between Robocop and The Terminator on a shoestring budget. A jive-talking janitor, a muscle-bound scientist, and a wise-cracking robot assistant round out the cast of misfits, and a plethora of mullets reminds that, yes, this was made in the ’80s.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 23 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel
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Also opening this weekend, Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star in The Nice Guys, a buddy movie action picture from writer-director Shane Black. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
