Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Taraji P. Hensonn, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae (Hooper Stone/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)
This holiday crowd-pleaser charts the early NASA careers of math-whiz Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), computer specialist Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer), and engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), African-American women whose work was critical to sending John Glenn (Glenn Powell) into orbit. Henson’s central performance is largely restrained, but when the moment strikes her, she lets out all the fury you expect from Empire‘s Cookie. Director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) can’t help but throw in a few cornball moments, but he successfully navigates what is essentially a thriller about complicated math problems.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Christmas Day at a theater near you.
Bryan Cranston and Megan Mullally are consulted by a freshly showered James Franco (Scott Garfield/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)
Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston), who runs a struggling print shop in Michigan, is horrified that Laird (James Franco), who’s made a fortune from his video game business, wants to marry his daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch). Franco is his usual hammy self as a foul-mouthed bro who has his heart in the right place but simply tries too hard. In honor of meeting the man whom he hopes will be his father-in-law, Laird has the family Christmas card photo tattooed on his back. At its core, Why Him? is a sweet movie about family and the need to belong; the thing is, it’s suspended in the moose’s urine of a gross-out comedy. If your idea of a holiday classic is incomplete without various bodily fluids, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this movie; others may wish it had dialed down the toilet jokes.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a theater near you.
Delphine seyrig (The Criterion Collection)
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
Director Chantal Akerman was only 25 years old when she made this study of a middle-aged widow (Marienbad‘s Delphine Seyrig) and her daily routine, which includes cleaning, preparing food for her adolescent son, and turning tricks. The National Gallery of Art will be showing a digital restoration of this mundane but mesmerizing classic on Christmas Eve, when most moviegoers will probably be too busy preparing for the holidays to see a 200-minute film. But in a sense, the movie is about taking the time and patience to appreciate our daily work and the work of those around us.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, December 24 at 1 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
What if we had never been born? Frank Capra’s 1947 drama is a perennial holiday favorite that we take for granted will be heartwarming fare to watch by the fireplace, but it’s far more than just Christmas fluff. In Spectrum Culture’s survey of the Best Actors of All Time, I wrote that, “In early scenes, small-town hero George Bailey (James Stewart) is the picture of American spirit and ingenuity, determination and altruism. Stewart’s metamorphosis comes from the corruption and cynicism that changes not just good-hearted people like Bailey but cinema itself: money. The desperate need for it, the greed that transforms Stewart from a carefree innocent to a man of experience and defeat. What’s heartbreaking about Stewart’s performance is that, at whatever age you are when you watch it, you identify with some stage of his character arc; he takes you along for the full nightmarish ride from Bedford Falls to Pottersville … In a performance for the ages, Stewart convinces you of someone you are or someone you want to be or someone you are afraid to turn into.”
Watch the trailer.
December 22-24 at the AFI Silver.
Jaclyn Smith, Art Carney and Paul Williams
THE NIGHT THEY SAVED CHRISTMAS
On Christmas Eve, an oil company gets ready to set off dynamite at the North Pole, unaware that the explosions endanger Santa Claus (Art Carney) and his busy operation. This 1984 made-for-TV movie stars Paul Williams as Santa’s chief elf Ed, and if the premise and the special effects seem cheesy (especially with HD resolution that makes it looks much sharper than it did when first broadcast), the childllike wonder that can open us up over the holidays makes this unusual fantasy a watchable throwback to a very different era of entertainment.
Watch it in full on YouTube.
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Also opening this week, Dev Patel stars in Lion, a drama about a boy lost in India who tries to find his family years later. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
