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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Jamie Dornan, Toby Jones, and Cillian Murphy (James Lisle/Bleecker Street)Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) are Czech soldiers who plot to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, “The Butcher of Prague,” in this World War II thriller from director Sean Ellis (Metro Manila). The movie dramatizes a lesser known facet of Nazi history, and it’s a fascinating story with a good cast, even if the accents can be distracting. But despite the best intentions of the filmmakers, the conspirators’ struggle is largely unengaging. Scenes of brutal torture by Nazi hands is difficult to watch, but the film doesn’t find a groove until it becomes merely a tragic historical moment translated in action movie tropes.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Theater, Landmark Bethesda Row, AMC Georgetown, Regal Majestic, and other area theaters.
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This weekend, the AFI hosts two silent movie screenings with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra. From 1926, The Black Pirate (August 13 at 2 p.m) stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the ur-swashbuckler that was one of the first films made with an early two-strip Technicolor color process. The rarer film is the 1924 sci-fi landmark L’Inhumaine, made by French director Marcel L’Herbier with the help of art-world luminaries like painter Fernand Léger, who designed a fantastical laboratory. The AFI will be showing The Black Pirate on Blu-ray, and L’Inhumaine on DCP.
Watch a trailer for L’Inhumaine.
The Black PIrate screens Saturday, August 13 at 2 p.m. L’Inhumaine screens Saturday, August 13 at 7:15 p.m. At the AFi Silver.
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Next week, the Library of Congress’ Mary Pickford Theatre screens a double-bill of rarely-screened B-Westerns from the 1940s. Saddles and Sagebrush (1943) stars Russell Hayden, whose 80 film credits seemed to be exclusively in forgotten oaters, but the movie may be most notable for an appearance by western swing legend Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Shown with The Bandit Trail (1941), which stars Tim Holt who’s probably best known as the kid who got his comeuppance in The Magnificent Ambersons. The films will be shown in glorious 35mm.
Thursday, August 16 at 7 p.m at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
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Next week Mt. Pleasant’s tiny Suns Cinema screens this Australian surf documentary from 1971. Bernard Zuel in the Sydney Morning Herald writes that the film’s music, “was a touchstone Australian album, the soundtrack to many a mull-up and a beacon of real age-of-Aquarius dreaming even as the age of Aquarius hit a brick wall. It was consumed by at least two generations of musicians and surfers who lived nowhere near our beaches, including the extremely unlikely figures of hairy man of alt.country Will Oldham, aka Bonnie ”Prince” Billy, and Oxford’s Radiohead boy, Thom Yorke.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, August 14 at Suns Cinema, 3117 Mt. Pleasant St. NW
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Tell Mr. Tiger he’s invited too.The Washington Psychotronic Film Society is the only motion picture venue in town that would bring you the dubbed 1990 version of Syylester Stallone’s early film No Place to Hide. As their curators explain, “It’s 1969, and Stallone is U.S. Army Private Jim Ramroc, who flees the Vietnam war to avoid getting shot. With the FBI, CIA, IRS and DC Record & Tape Club all hot on his heels, Ramroc tunes in, turns on and drops out, changing his name to Rainbo and joining a group of subversive, radical, dirty commie hippies plotting to overthrow the government with bombs, phone sex, platform shoes, Richard Nixon, radioactive dog poop, and World War III. Can their devious plan be thwarted? Can our freedom-loving democracy be preserved? Can you make any sense whatsoever out of this hilarious combination of redubbed outtakes, new footage, and a Really Big Star?”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, August 15 at 8 p.m at Smoke and Barrel
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Also opening this week, the stories of two very different singers: Miss Sharon Jones and Florence Foster Jenkins. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
