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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Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon (Roadside)

Indignation

Director James Schamus is 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. In a four-star review for RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny writes that the film is “so insistently out of step with contemporary American cinema as to be considered practically defiant.” As a film scholar, Schamus wrote about Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc), and Kenny asserts that Indignation “harks back to the stark plainness of a work like Ordet and sometimes even recalls the overt theatricality of [Dreyer’s] last film Gertrud.” If you’re a cinephile, your head is probably austerely exploding right now.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row.

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Gong Li in A Terra-Cotta Warrior

The Blade and A Terra-Cotta Warrior

The 21st annual Made in Hong Kong Film Festival wraps up this weekend with a 35mm double bill of martial arts classics from directors who were part of the great Hong Kong new wave. The Blade, from director Tsui Hark (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain) updates the 1967 wuxia The One-Armed Swordsman with what Subway Cinema calls “a phantasmagoric action film” that “moves like an out-of-control freight train.” A Terra-Cotta Warrior, directed by Ching Siu-tung (A Chinese Ghost Story), is described as “was one of the most exquisite fantasy films to come out of Hong Kong in the 1990s”—which is saying something!

Watch the trailers for The Blade and A Terra-Cotta Warrior.
The Blade screens at 1:00 p.m.; A Terra-Cotta Warrior screens at 3:30 pm. At the American History Museum’s Warner Bros. Theatre. Free. Please arrive at least a half hour early to allow extra time to get through museum security.

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Shih Jun (Janus Films)

Dragon Inn

In the Ming dynasty, the family of a wrongly executed official is on the run, and its pursuers cross paths at a seemingly tranquil inn. Director King Hu’s 1967 wuxia 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 has taught generations of action directors, from Quentin Tarantino (who has dipped into this well multiple times) to The Walking Dead. This 4K digital restoration ran briefly at E Street this spring; but don’t miss your chance to see it on the AFI Silver’s huge main screen.

Watch the trailer.
Friday, August 5-Saturday August 6. Tuesday, August 9 and Thursday, August 11 at the AFI Silver.

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Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia)

Mt. Pleasant’s independent Suns Cinema screens this 1981 animated film directed by “the Walt Disney of Hungary,” based on a book by Romanian-born László Arany and inspired by Hunnic and Avaric folk tales. As the New York Times explains in a piece on director Marcell Jankovics, the film “stars a horse-suckled hero, his two brothers, and a combative hobgoblin who loves to eat piping-hot porridge atop the bellies of his defeated enemies.”

Watch the trailer.
Tonight, August 4 at 8 p.m. and Wednesday, August 10 at 8 p.m. at Suns Cinema, 3117 Mt. Pleasant St. NW.

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At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul

Just in time for the Olympics, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society screens a low-budget classic of Brazilian horror from 1964. José Mojica Marins directed and stars as undertaker Zé do Caixão, also known as Coffin Joe. This sinister presence wants to beget a son to continue his superior blood line, and seeing the perfect mother in his friend’s fiancée, he kills anyone who stands in his way. In a 2011 profile of Mojica, The New York Times explains that, “in the name of authenticity rats, spiders, and scorpions were allowed to roam the studio.”

Watch the trailer.
Monday, August 8 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel

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Also opening this week: criminals become crime fighters in Suicide Squad; and Kevin Spacey becomes a cat in Nine Lives. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.