Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Ben Schnetzer and Nick Jonas (The Film Arcade)
Brad (Ben Schnetzer) is starting college at a university where his older brother Brett (Nick Jonas) belongs to a major fraternity. As new pledges move into the ritual called Hell Week, things get hairy. Based on a memoir by Brad Land about his experience at Clemson, the movie is directed by Andrew Neel from a script co-written by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express). The Onion A.V. Club describes the movie as a “ripped-from-reality drama…sensationalistic but a little anti-climactic—building and building in intensity, teetering into almost inevitable tragedy, and then landing on a final confrontation that’s just a touch unsatisfying, in the way real life so often is.” With a cameo by James Franco as a legendary frat alumnus.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up.
(WGBH EDU/ Michael Tuckman)
Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc. tackles the dangers of nuclear weapons storage in this adaptation of a 2013 book by Eric Schlosser. Both engaging and extremely suspenseful, the film tells the story of a maintenance accident in 1980 that nearly caused an H-bomb to go off just outside Little Rock, Arkansas. A mix of interviews with people who worked at the missile silo (most of whom were under 25 at the time) and a surprising amount of archival footage, Command and Control uses the incident to show how today’s world of advanced weaponry makes it alarmingly easy to destroy your own country. About 1,000 of these kinds of accidents occurred in the U.S. alone during the Cold War. We were lucky none of them turned apocalyptic, but as nuclear weapons continue to age in their silos around the world, it’s only a matter of time before one of them detonates. As Schlosser himself says, “The problem with luck is that it eventually runs out.”— Elena Goukassian, from our AFI Docs Preview.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau
A novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) is coasting on the success of a new novel while his marriage to a rich woman (Jeanne Moreau) falls apart. The second part of director Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated trilogy (between L’Avventura and L’Eclisse), this is one of two films starring Moreau that the AFI Silver will be showing this weekend in new digital restorations. Also screening, a digital restoration of Louis Malle’s 1958 film Elevator to the Gallows, starring Moreau as a woman who teams with her lover to plot the murder of her husband. With a score by Miles Davis.
Watch trailers for La Notte and Elevator to the Gallows.
Both films open tomorrow for a week-long run at the AFI Silver.
György Cserhalmi and Erzsébet Kútvölgyi (Magyar Filmunió, Hungary)
This weekend the National Gallery of Art screens two relatively short films from directors known for cinematic marathons. Filming in a Budapest castle, director Béla Tarr (who made the seven-and-a-half hour comedy drama Sátántangó) shot this made-for-Hungarian-TV Shakespeare adaptation in a single 70-minute take. The 1982 video will be shown with “The Day Before the End,” from Filipino director Lav Diaz. This 16-minute film is set in 2050 as the Philippines braces for a monsoon and young actors mutter passages from Shakespeare. This is a short breath for Diaz, whose 2004 film Evolution of a Filipino Family beats Tarr at the slow cinema horse races with a running time of nine hours. (If anybody knows where I can get a copy of that one, please send by Caribou Express.)
Sunday, September 25 at 4:00 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
Fabulous haircuts are evidently not among The Pleasures of the Damned.
The company that “restored” this long lost 1979 film, reportedly banned for 25 years, admits that director “Antonello Giallo makes Ed Wood Jr. look like Orson Welles.” But note that director’s surname; this is in fact a parody of Italian giallo, a specific genre with mystery elements, made in 2005 by Mark Leake. Sight unseen, I completely trust the Washington Psychotronic Film Society’s Carl Cephas when he says, “There isn’t enough water in the shower to wash the filth from my soul.”
Monday, September 26 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week, Denzel Washington leads a motley crew to the rescue in a remake of The Magnificent Seven; and Kim Jong Il kidnaps South Korean filmmakers to do his bidding in the documentary The Lovers and the Despot. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
