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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Kara Wai and Carlos ChanMade in Hong Kong Film Festival
The Freer launched its popular showcase for Hong Kong cinema 21 years ago, a time when the nation’s vital film industry was in the shadow of an impending handover of sovereignty from the UK to China. Today, the industry is as prolific as ever, if at times slicker and more Westernized. The series begins Friday night with the world premiere of director Andy Lo’s Happiness. Kara Wai stars as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s who bonds with a young man (Carlos Chan) looking for the father that abandoned him. Wai also appears this weekend in the 1981 kung fu comedy My Young Auntie as a student who marries her teacher to prevent his inheritance from falling into the wrong hands. Happiness stars Kara Wai and Carlos Chan will appear for a Q&A after both screenings.With the Freer still under renovation, screenings will be held at the American History Museum’s Warner Bros. Theater.
Watch the trailer for My Young Auntie.
Happiness screens Friday, July 15 at 7 p.m. My Young Auntie screens Sunday, July 17 at 2 p.m. At the American History Museum’s Warner Bros. Theater. Free.
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Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon The Washington Jewish Film Festival offers year-round screenings, and next week they’ve scored a sneak preview of a new film from director James Schamus, best known as the screenwriter for ’90s arthouse fave The Ice Storm. His first feature behind the camera is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel. Set in 1951, the movie follows Marcus (Logan Lerman), a young man who avoids the Korean War by enrolling at a Christian college in Ohio, but finds himself at odds with pretty much everyone. Schamus will appear at the DCJFF for a Q&A after the screening.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, July 19 at 7:30 p.m. at the Washington Jewish Film Festival, 1529 16th Street NW. Update: tickets are now sold out. Very limited tickets will be made available at the door and a rush line will form at 6:45. p.m.
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Chow Yun-Fat (Well Go USA)A captured killer (Eddie Peng Yuyan) escapes police custody, setting into motion a interoffice conflict between rival police commissioners Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Ka Fai. This sequel to a 2012 hit film has a great cast, including a special appearance by ur-Hong Kong action hero Yun-Fat Chow (as an investigator who develops his own medium format film), and it’s stylishly photographed. But despite the talent involved, co-directors Lok Man Leung and Kim Ching Luk can’t make the talky script consistently spark. Still, even second-rate Hong Kong action movies are darker and more exciting than most of their Western counterparts, and odd scenes keep this mildly interesting, as a confrontation in a music and video store in which an elder commissioner chides a young officer by handing her an Elmo DVD: Telling the Truth. And if you want to see a good shootout from the industry that does them better than anyone, the mid-film confrontation here is as elegantly choreographed as any you’ll see this year.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Loews Rio
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Jean Peters and Louis JourdanThis weekend the AFI Silver continues its series dedicated to Glorious Technicolor, a film process that resulted in some of the most vivid, dreamlike color ever to grace the big screen. This week’s feature is a 35mm screening of a rarely revived swashbuckler starring Jean Peters as Captain Anne Providence, a pirate who seizes a ship and saves a dashing Frenchman (Louis Jourdan) from walking the plank. Directed by Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past), the film was loosely based on real life pirate Anne Bonny.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 16 at 1:30 p.m. and Thursday, July 21 at 7:00 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Gene Tierney ponders a timeless dilemma: So many records, so little timeGene Tierney is a kleptomaniac who falls under the spell of hypnotist Jose Ferrer in this 1949 noir that reunited the actress with Laura director Otto Preminger. Upon the film’s release, The Los Angeles Times’ Philip K. Scheuer wrote that, “like an impeccable spider, Ferrer busies himself weaving a web of intrigue about the lady.” But we probably had you at Tierney. The Mary Pickford Theatre showcases a brand new 35mm print of the film struck by the Packard Campus Film Preservation Lab from a nitrate negative, which means it should look gorgeous.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, July 21 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
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Shaw’s Bistro Bohem continues its monthly film and beer series with this Iron Curtain spy
comedy from 1967, made after director Václav Vorlíček had seen two of what were then just three James Bond movies. Jan Kačer stars as agent Cyril Juan Borguette (does he introduce himself as “Borguette…Cyril Juan Borguette”?), whose toybox of intrigue includes a weaponized alarm clock and deadly musical instruments. Yet these are apparently no match for Czech accountant Foustka (Jiří Slovak) and his little dog. The movie was a hit with Czech audiences largely unfamiliar with Sean Connery.
Watch a German-subtitled clip.
Tuesday, July 19 at 7:00 pm at Bistro Bohem, 600 Florida Avenue, NW
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Also opening this week, Our Little Sister, a new drama from Japanese director Hirozaku Kore-eda. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
