Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani (Mary Cybulski / Amazon Studios & Bleecker Street)
Adam Driver, who can also be seen in Martin Scorsese’s Silence this week, is having a career decade—from prominent roles in Hollywood blockbusters like The Force Awakens to the lead in films by indie auteurs like Jim Jarmusch. In Jarmusch’s latest, Driver plays a Paterson, New Jersey resident named Paterson who drives a bus for a living and writes poetry on the side. Paterson lives with his graphic designer wife Laura (About Elly‘s Golshifteh Farahani). The movie has been hailed for its depiction of mundane working class life, and I love the idea of following a bus driver along his route and observing the regular Joes who are his peers and passengers. But the movie is still Jarmusch country, and although he doesn’t commit the kind of groaning self-consciousness that led his characters to stop and ogle Jack White’s house in Even Lovers Left Alive, the movie feels less like an honest study of the working-class than a self-conscious study of the creative-class. Driver lends his character a dignity without condescension, but Jarmusch can’t help subverting even that, as Paterson’s poetry (written by Ron Padgett) is recited against backdrops of breaking waves and inspirational text in Hallmark-ready fonts. Paterson is most sincere when it steps back from art and artifice, but those moments are sadly too rare.
Watch the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8pGJBgiiDU.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
Jackie Chan (Well Go USA)
In this action thriller set in 1941, Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) leads a group of rebels plotting to sabotage the Japanese military during the second Sino-Japanese War. Director Ding Sheng (Police Story 2013) doesn’t navigate his huge cast with much finesse, and the action sequences, while well-choreographed, are sloppily edited. Furthermore, martial arts legend Jackie Chan is now 62 years old and uses a stunt double. But despite a plodding start, the movie eventually becomes a serviceable throwback to the days when he did his own stunts. Even though you know it’s not Chan performing the film’s final, death-defying leap, you’ll still wince and thrill at the spectacle.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Loews Rio
HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY
What do The Apartment, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Ten Commandments have in common? These classic films were all worked on by storyboard artist Harold Michelson and film researcher Lillian Michelson, who eloped in 1947 headed for a behind-the-scenes career in Hollywood. The Washington Jewish Film Festival begins its winter repertory season with this 2015 documentary, featuring interviews with the unheralded couple at its center as well as more celebrated Hollywood luminaries like Danny DeVito, Mel Brooks, and Francis Ford Coppola.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, January 10 at 7:30 p.m. at Edlavitch DCJCC, 1529 16th Street NW
A Chicago gangster gives up his penchant for chin music but is pulled back into crime when his little brother is kidnapped. Lew Ayres and James Cagney star in this largely forgotten Warner Bros. crime drama from 1930 that was a precursor to the iconic gangsters of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. The Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress will be screening this rarely revived pre-code title in a new 35mm print from their Packard Campus Film Preservation Lab.
Thursday, January 12 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.
Forget it, Pia, it’s Nevada Heat!
Telly Savalas and Pia Zadora; need we say more? Next week, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society offers this 1982 thriller also known as Fake-Out, starring Savalas as a Lieutenant who tries to convince gangster’s moll Zadora to sell out her sweetie.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, January 9 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel
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Also opening this week, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are Jesuit priests in Martin Scorsese’s epic Silence, a drama of religious persecution in 17th century Japan. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
