Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Brahim Haggiag (Rialto Pictures)
Landmark’s E Street Theater premieres a new 4K restoration of a 50-year old film that may be as relevant as ever. Christopher Nolan told critic Mark Kermode that he screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s study of insurrection for the crew of The Dark Knight Returns. There may be no better fictional document of uprising than this arthouse classic, so realistic that the film begins with a title card explaining that it’s a work of fiction. In his 2004 Great Movies essay, the late Roger Ebert wrote that the film, “carries a terrible weight of logic. The strength of The Battle of Algiers, the reason it is being viewed in the Pentagon 35 years after its making, is that it is lucid and dispassionate in its examination of the tactics of both sides.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
The studio deemed that images of the monster were too cute to show the public. (Funimation)
A violent eruption bursts out of Tokyo Bay. What could it be? Also known as Shin Godzilla, the 31st movie in the long-running franchise hits American shores with limited screenings and limited entertainment potential. The evolving CGI monster is one of the better designed creatures in the series, its evolving movements at times suggesting a giant mangy cat with gills. Unfortunately, the movie gets weighed down by the banal tropes of a hundred other monster movies: the dry conference rooms and wooden dialogue (“I’m having supercomputers run parallel analysis!”) of scientists and military men who plot to save Tokyo from this crooked-toothed beast.
Watch the trailer.
Screens October 11 at Landmark E Street Cinema, AMC Hoffman and Regal Majestic, with additional screenings during the week at Regal Springfield Town Center and Regal Bowie Stadium. Check theaters for showtimes.
(Courtesy the Freer)
This weekend the Freer launches a celebration of Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, who died last year at the age of 95 but hadn’t made a film in 50 years. This 1946 drama, which will be screened in a 35mm print, was the only time she worked with Akira Kurosawa, and not coincidentally, it’s the only film in the director’s filmography with a female protagonist. Hara stars as a woman who “evolves from a bourgeois student to the wife of a dissident author to a committed social activist.” Also screening at the Warner Brothers Theater this weekend, a digital cinema package of Late Autumn (Sunday, October 9 at 2), one of a number of collaborations between Hara and director Yasujiro Ozu.
No Regrets for Our Youth screens Saturday, October 8 at 2 p.m. at the National Museum of American History’s Warner Brothers Theater. Free.
“Hard Core” (Courtesy the Estate of Walter de Maria/National Gallery of Art)
Dwan New York City
In conjunction with the National Gallery of Art exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, the East Building Auditorium is screening a series of films related to the gallery, including works produced and directed by gallerist Virgina Dwan herself. This program includes documentation of Walter De Maria’s installation Beds of Spikes (1969) and his avant-garde Western Hard Core (1969), made in the Black Rock desert, Nevada, with Michael Heizer as a gun-slinging cowboy. Also included in the program is part of the conversational Carl Andre: A Video Portrait, produced by Dwan in 1976—”just one document reflective of her many relationships and sustained friendships with the artists she represented.”
Sunday, October 9 at 4 p.m. in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
I’ll let the Washington Psychotronic Film Society describes this 2005 homage to ’60s exploitation movies: “This beach party rock-and-roll monster movie set in1966 features all-girl garage rock band The Violas on tour when their van breaks down in a small southern beach town. A mass of mysterious debris shows up on the beach. A little girl’s parents disappear. It’s all a too much for the local police, so they call in scientist John Patterson to help figure things out. Will The Violas’ van get repaired? Will lead singer Theodora hook up with John or local mechanic Hector? Will Hector’s party be a hit? And will anyone survive the terror of the Florida Everglades version of Bigfoot, the legendary Skunk Ape?”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, October 10 at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also at the movies this week, see our coverage of the Double Exposure Film Festival and our review of the surreal coming of age drama Girl Asleep. Plus, come back tomorrow for a review of director Nate Parker’s drama Birth of a Nation.
