Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Humprey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck in ‘The Two Mrs. Carrolls’ (October 16 and 18)
Noir City DC
The AFI Silver’s annual film noir festival returns this weekend. The series has been a great way to see 35mm prints of rarely revived titles, and while this year’s program leans more to digital restorations and more celebrated favorites, there are still some lesser-known noirs in the mix. The Two Mrs. Carrolls (showing in a 16mm print on October 16 and 18) stars Humphrey Bogart as an American painter living in England who falls in love with Barbara Stanwyck, But is this sensitive artist … a murderer? The relationship seems to anticipate Bogie’s better known role in Nicolas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In A Lonely Place (showing in a 35mm print on October 15).
Watch the trailers for The Two Mrs. Carrolls and In a Lonely Place
Noir City DC runs from October 15-27 at the AFI Silver. Check the full festival listing here.
Gael García Bernal sneaks up on Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the hopes of finding out who Negan killed
Moises (Gael García Bernal) is among a group of hopeful immigrants trying to cross the border into America. But after they’re dropped off in the middle of the desert, Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) stars shooting them down one by one. Director Jonás Cuarón, son of Alfonso Cuarón, sets up a tense battle in a spare desert setting, creating an immigrant horror story that’s one part Border Incident and another part The Hills Have Eyes. The filmmakers make great use of a forbiddingly dry landscape, but the movie gets weighed down by heavy-handed dialogue, as when Sam tells his dog Tracker, “I used to love this place. Now I hate it … I’ve got to get out of this hell.” Desierto is an effectively tense thriller that would have been even more powerful if it had been even more minimalist.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Regal Majestic
(Shout Factory)
In 19th century Saint Petersburg, the young aristocrat Sacha dreams of finding her lost grandfather Oloukine, whose ship disappeared during an Arctic expedition. Long Way North is the feature debut of animator Rémi Chayé (The Secret of Kells), The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan writes that the film, “excels at providing a great sense of the stunning, unnerving vastness of the north.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up, AMC Hoffman, and AMC Potomac Mills.
The Freer’s Setsuko Hara series continues with a 35mm print of the actress’s final collaboration with director Yasujiro Ozu. The film is one of Ozu’s typical examinations of family and generational conflict. Hara plays the daughter of a businessman who tries to find suitable husbands for his daughters, but rekindles an affair with a former mistress. Note: the film will be screened at the National Portrait Gallery.
Sunday, October 16 at 4:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. Free.
Shaw’s Bistro Bohem continues its film and beer series with this 1972 comedy about a teenage witch (Petra Černocká). Sentenced to 300 years detention, she flees the land of witches for a human school, where her classmates coax her into turning the human faculty into rabbits.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, October 18 at 7 p.m. at Bistro Bohem, 600 Florida Avenue, NW. Free, but reservations are required: call 202/735-5895 or email bistrobohem@gmail.com
Virginia Maskell and Peter Sellers
Next Thursday, the Library of Congress’ Mary Pickford Theatre screens a 35mm print of this rarely revived Peter Sellers film. Adapted from Kingsley Amis’ novel That Uncertain Feeling, the film stars Sellers as a librarian who strays from his wife (Virginia Maskell) for an affair with designer Mai Zetterling. The Pickford curator writes that, “the film superbly captures the dissatisfaction of lower middle-class life in 1960’s provincial Britain, as well as the tragicomic trials and tribulations of the male mid-life crisis, the portrayal of which Sellers developed and refined throughout his career. Never released on DVD in the U.S. “
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, October 20 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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Also opening this week, the documentary memoir Cameraperson, from cinematographer Kristen Johnson, who has shot footage in combat zones for 25 years. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. Also check out DCist’s interview with Craig Atkinson, director of Do Not Resist, a documentary about the country’s increasingly militarized police.
