Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
(Focus World)
In what is not just another coming-of-age movie, teenage veterinary students hunger for raw meat in the feature debut from director Julia Ducournau. For horror movies, hype is everything, and reports of fainting audience members have always been guaranteed to pack them in even if the movie turns out to be kind of lame. So when audience members fainted at Toronto Film Festival screenings of this gory French film, it was the kind of publicity that horror filmmakers dream of. But SFist’s jaded critic reported, “I ate a sausage pizza while watching it, and I felt fine.” Still, the movie “does live up to some of the hype — even if the smelling salts are purely optional.” Read the full review at SFist here.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
Kim Min-hee and Jung Jae-young (Grasshopper Film)
The AFI Silver has been looking back at 2016 movies you might have missed, and one of the best of these is a drama from director Hong Sang-soo that barely made it to D.C. screens last year (blink and you missed it at the Korean Film Festival). Jung Jae-young (Castaway on the Moon) stars as a film director who has a tumultuous relationship with a female artist (Kim Min-hee, in a very different performance from her turn in The Handmaiden). The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes that, “Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama … Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 26 at 5 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
Yayoi Kusama (Courtesy The Freer)
If you can’t get into the Hirshhorn’s blockbuster Yayoi Kusama show, or if you’re waiting with your hard-to-get timed passes in hand, you can watch this 2008 documentary that follows the Japanese artist over an 18-month period in which she obsessively made a series of drawings called “Love Forever.” The screening is presented by the Hirshhorn in partnership with the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 26 at 3 p.m. at the Hirshhorn’s Ring Auditorium. Free, but you should probably get there early.
(The Criterion Collection)
This weekend, the National Cherry Blossom Festival hosts a tribute to legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune with a 35mm print of director Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai masterpiece. Mifune stars as a samurai without a master who manipulates two feuding villages for his own gain. Inspired by American westerns, the film in turn inspired Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, March 25 at 2 p.m. (allow extra time to get through security) at the American History Museum’s Warner Bros. Theater. Free.
(Agitpop/Cult Epics)
In this punk musical, a defense contractor who survived a nuclear holocaust spends the post-apocalypse holed up in a bunker full of electronic instruments that he uses to pay homage to what used to be America. Directed by Renee Daalder (whose 1976 proto-slasher Massacre at Central High was a fascinating look at teenage fascism) , the film’s musicians include a 12-year old Beck, the Avengers’ Penelope Houston, and members of Los Lobos. Thanks to The Washington Psychotronic Film Society to bringing the best in doomsday entertainment to D.C.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 27 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week, Woody Harrelson stars as a middle-aged man who meets the daughter he didn’t know he had in Wilson, adapted from the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
