Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini (Amazon Studios and Cohen Media Group)
A couple performing in an amateur production of Death of Salesman is rattled by an attack at home. The 21st annual Iranian Film Festival kicks off with a sneak preview of the latest film from director Asghar Farhadi (The Separation). With the festival’s usual venue, the Freer, still closed for renovations, screenings will be held at the AFI Silver and the National Gallery of Art. In addition to the best of new Iranian films, the series features highlights from the long career of director Abbas Kiarostami, who died last year. Mark your calendars for screenings of Kiarostami’s best work like Close-Up (February 4 at the AFI), Through the Olive Trees (February 12 at the AFI), and a 35mm print of Taste of Cherry (February 25 at the National Gallery of Art). (Note: we originally announced 35mm screenings of Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees but due to a scheduling conflict, those will be digital presentations.)
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, January 22 at 5:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
Stuart Margolin and Linda Thorson (Photo courtesy of DCJFF)
In this 2016 drama from Canada, an aging opera lover (Linda Thorson, best known as the woman who replaced Diana Rigg on The Avengers) unexpectedly finds love with Polish tailor Isaac (Stuart Margolin), her cranky fellow resident at a nursing home. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Margolin, best known from The Rockford Files.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Edlavitch DCJCC.
Jean Marais (The Criterion Collection)
A poet (Jean Marais) journeys to Hades to retrieve his dead Eurydice (Marie Déa) in this surrealist classic. In conjunction with the National Gallery of Art exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-1971 the gallery continues its series of films selected by gallerist Virginia Dwan with a 35mm print of director Jean Cocteau’s 1950 adaptation of the classical Greek myth.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, January 22 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art East Building Auditorium. Free.
(Photo courtesy of the Embassy of the Czech Republic)
A con man joins forces with a group of factory workers and local news media to defeat a fascist plot to overthrow the government. Bistro Bohem’s Film and Beer series returns with this 1937 comedy from director Martin Fric, who made 100 movies over a 40-year career, before committing suicide after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Embassy of the Czech Republic compares the movie to Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, and notes that the negative for this rare film was destroyed during Nazi occupation.
Tuesday, January 24 at 7 p.m. at Bistro Bohem. Free, but reservations required. Call (202) 735-5895 or email bistrobohem@gmail.com. Guests must arrive by 6:45 p.m. to keep their reservation.
(Photo by via Movieposter.com)
From the director of Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson) and the writer of It’s Alive (Larry Cohen) comes this lurid tale about a deranged American man (Scott Hylands) who stalks the British woman (Carol White) who aborted the child he fathered. Roger Ebert wrote that despite the fact that the movie “has a lot of things wrong with it…it does function on the promised level,” which is all you ever ask from the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. With music by John Williams.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, January 23 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week, Vin Diesel reprises his role as a daredevil NSA spy in XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
