Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Hiroshi Abe and Taiyo Yosizawa (Film Movement)
Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) has fallen on hard times. He wrote a best-selling novel 15 years ago, but now hustles as a private detective and gambles his meager earnings away at the race track. When his father dies, he’s desperate to reconnect with his family—especially his young son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa). The latest from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a typically heartbreaking family drama, but with a gentle humor not seen in his last film Our Little Sister. That humor, combined with Hanaregumi’s aching, restrained score, makes this film of beautiful small gestures all the more powerful. Don’t miss it!
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema
Kiernan Shipka (A24)
Kiernan Shipka saw a lot of things a little girl shouldn’t see as Mad Men‘s Sally. Now she trades that mid-century domestic horror for a tale of two girls left alone at a prep school when their parents fail to pick them up. Writer-director Oz Perkins, the son of Anthony Perkins, has moved on from acting roles in Secretary and talking animal movies like Quigley (in which Gary Busey is reincarnated as a pomeranian), and despite the delayed release of this first feature, made in 2015, and a second feature that went straight to Netflix, the buzz is good. The A. V. Club wrote that with “a thrilling disregard for the prevailing rules and trends of modern horror, Perkins [is] one of the genre’s most exciting new voices.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-Up
(The Criterion Collection)
This weekend, the National Gallery of Art is screening a new 4K digital restoration of director Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 classic. This 18th century Japanese ghost story follows a potter who’s seduced by a mysterious princess—but is she alive? Black and white cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa sets a gorgeous, ominous mood that should be experienced on the big screen.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, April 2 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium. Free.
(Film Society of Lincoln Center
To celebrate the opening of Kung Fu Wildstyle, a month-long exhibit at the Sackler exploring the relationship between Asian martial arts films and African-American music, the music collective Shaolin Jazz presents a special edition of its Can I Kick It? series. DJ 2-Tone Jones will mix a score to accompany a screening of this 1972 classic.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, April 1 from 8 p.m. – 1 a.m. (screening begins at 9:30 p.m.) at Hyphen DC, 1402 Okie St. NE. Free.
(WPFS)
I’ll let the Washington Psychotronc Film Society describe this 1986 exploitation film also known by the less vivid title, Prison Ship: “John Carradine sentences a beautiful, sexy, fiery blonde babe to a prison spaceship full of more babes run by a busty, tough, sex-starved warden and her sadistic, one-eyed lackey. Meanwhile, twisted, sadistic lunatic Ross Hagen wants revenge on the heroine for mutilating his hand.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, April 3 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel
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Also opening this week, Scarlett Johansson stars in Ghost in the Shell, the latest adaptation of the Japanese manga. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
