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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(Cartuna)The modern man seeking a medical cure for diminished virility has a number of options at his disposal. This lively documentary looks at a once popular treatment devised nearly a hundred years ago by John Romulus Brinkley, who transplanted goat testicles onto humans. Brinkley had high profile patients like Huey Long and Rudolph Valentino—and even Woodrow Wilson, according to rumors. But it naturally ran afoul of the American Medical Association and the Federal Radio Commission, which later became the FCC. Director Penny Lane uses a minimum of talking heads and a lot of animation to paint a vivid picture of this charlatan’s impressive medical and media empire—the would-be doctor’s attempts to advertise his $750 operation made him a pioneer of early radio. An exclamation point helps distinguish this film from the 1987 Barbra Streisand vehicle and serves as a visual metaphor for a deflated, gullible populace.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI Silver. Director Penny Lane will be on hand for a Q&A at the t the 8:00 p.m. show on July 2.
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(IFC Films)The 1958 film The Littlest Hobo inspired two television series that followed a German shepherd who moved from town to town saving lives in peril. The new film from Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) is unlikely to launch a franchise. A dachshund moves from owner to owner, including a veterinary nurse (Greta Gerwig), a screenwriter (Danny DeVito), and a bitterly aging woman (Ellen Burstyn). The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane writes, unsurprisingly, that “The ending of Wiener-Dog is spectacularly heartless, yet there’s no mistaking the yelp of its admonition: life’s a bitch.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing
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(Cohen Media Group)On a search for his missing daughter, Alain (François Damiens) and his son journey through a part of Eastern France that resembles an old Western. And in fact, director Thomas Bidegain’s debut feature is a loose remake of the John Ford classic The Searchers. Bidegain is best known as a screenwriter for Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone). The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang writes that, “this is no simple, reassuring tale of abduction and rescue. Its strength lies in the way it continually collapses the distance between people and cultures, forcing its characters to reckon with what they perceive as strange and unfamiliar.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row.
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)Over the next few weekends, the National Gallery of Art will screen newly preserved films from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, including a new 35mm print of a rarely screened classic of American independent cinema. Spring Night, Summer Night (1967) was the only feature by director J. L. Anderson, who with writer-producer Franklin Miller, set a neorealist story of ill-fated lovers in rural southeastern Ohio. The film was at one point scheduled to play the 1968 New York Film Festival, but was dropped to make room for John Cassavetes’ Faces and was never well-distributed. UCLA film programmer Paul Malcolm writes that the film is “finally ready to take its place in the pantheon of American independent cinema.”
Sunday, July 3 at 4:00 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
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The Washington Psychotronic Film Society celebrates our nation’s independence with two icons of American spirit: Crispin Glover and a waterskiing cat. Trent Harris directed this 1991 comedy-drama, starring Glover as the reclusive Rubin and WKRP‘s Howard Hesseman as Ed, a middle aged divorced loser who travels across the Utah desert with him to find a place to bury Rubin’s dead cat. Happy Birthday, America!
Watch the trailer.
Monday, July 4 at 8:00 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this weekend, the buddy-movie/sort-of-coming-of-age comedy The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, starring Sam Neill as a cantakerous New Zealander who goes on the lam with his precocious adopted son. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
