Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
(IFC Films/Sundance Selects)
CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY
In the 1960s, city planner Robert Moses, who had successfully built massive New York City projects like the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, expressways around New York City, wanted to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have razed parts of Greenwich Village and Soho. But with a vision of urban life that favored pedestrians over the automobile—”the ballet of the good city sidewalk”—activist Jane Jacobs helped engage citizens to fight a seemingly unbeatable foe. NPR’s Bob Mondello writes that director Matt Tyrnauer tells this story as if city planning was a contact sport.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(PhotoSynthesis Productions/Journeyman Pictures)
ANGKOR AWAKENS: A PORTRAIT OF CAMBODIA
Through interviews with survivors of the Khmer Rouge (and Cambodia’s Strongman/Prime Minister Hun Sen), American scholars and officials, and sometimes brutal depictions of genocide, Robert H. Lieberman’s documentary paints a heartbreaking portrait of a Cambodian people known for a joyful demeanor that can turn suddenly violent. The film takes on similar territory as the excellent 2015 documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, but without the comfort of music, and little overlap: one common thread is John Gunther Dean, former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia; his appearance here is a candid reminder that this national tragedy was set in motion by a secret bombing campaign ordered by the U.S. government. Unforgettable and nightmarish, Angkor Awakens breaks no stylistic ground, but it’s one of the most powerful films I’ve seen this year.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(GKIDS)
MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA
Growing up can feel like you’re in the middle of a disaster movie starring your explosive changing body, so graphic novelist Dash Snow’s feature film debut treats high school it’s the S. S. Poseidon. The New York Times’ Glen Kenny writes that “its brightly colored visuals grow ever more psychedelic and phantasmagoric. This makes the mode of narrative and humor—which I’ll call strained, half-curdled, self-regarding millennial whimsy—go down a little easier.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, action hero? (Film Movement)
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant) takes on an acting role as a leopard-skin-suited private eye in this cyberpunk thriller from writer-director Wolf Gremm. The 1982 film imagines West Germany in 1989 as a country free of political and social ills, but a string of bombings unsettles the populace. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote that, “The focal point of the film is Fassbinder’s easy, neo-Wellesian control of every scene in which he appears—a control that has as much to do with wisdom as with weight.” The AFI will be screening a 2K digital restoration—there’s your future, Fassbinder.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 8 and Thursday, May 11 at the AFI Silver.
It was the ’70s. (YourStupidMinds)
The Washington Psychotronic Film Society presents this 1973 exploitation that follows the ribald, kick-ass adventures of Tara B. True. Starring Joyce Jillson, the Peyton Place star who went on to some notoriety as a television astrologer/psychic who advised the Reagans; and with John Carradine as a creepy old guy into S&M.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 8 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week: Guardians of the Galaxy 2. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
