Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Hayley Squires, Briana Shann, and Dylan McKiernan (Joss Barratt/Sundance Selects. A Sundance Selects release.
When the film premiered at last year’s European Union Showcase, we wrote, “Winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the latest from director Ken Loach is a Dickensian story of welfare bureaucracy in contemporary Britain. Middle-aged carpenter Daniel Blake (Dave John) has just suffered a heart attack, and although doctors advise him to rest, the state declares him fit for work, denying him hardship benefits unless he learns to use a computer, goes to resume workshops, and applies for jobs he has no intention of taking. In the midst of all this, he meets Katie, a single mom in a similarly Kafkaesque mess. Together they attempt to navigate the system…to little avail. Although heavy-handed at times, I, Daniel Blake reminds us of the many well-meaning, hardworking poor people that get stuck in this bureaucratic hell.”—Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema
(Cheng Cheng Films)
Didi (Dee Hsu) is an aspiring actress struggling in the shadow of a more successful sister (Lin Chi-ling), but she finds refuge in a nightly dream of a space station noodle shop. This fantasy-comedy is the directorial debut from Taiwanese film host Kevin Tsai, but the Taipei Times reports that, other than the impressive rotating set piece at its core, the movie is “otherwise a rather pedestrian, over-the-top sap fest that has become typical of Taiwanese comedies.” Despite that warning, the film’s trailer still looks promisingly insane, and if I were you, I’d take a chance.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Regal Rockville Center.
(IFC FIlms)
The National Gallery of Art’s series of New Romanian Cinema wraps up this weekend with Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2009 drama about an officer assigned to watch a suspected drug user. The subject of this film—surveillance—is perfect for this national cinema’s droll temperament, but although the act of surveillance informs the film’s typically slow pace, as critic J. Hoberman notes, the film was “made by one who grew up in a police state and watched it fall apart.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 4 at 12:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art.
Bárbara Lennie (Miami Film Fest)
The AFI Silver’s weekend-long festival Spanish Cinema Now opens Friday with the directorial debut of director Nely Reguera, who will appear at the screening for a Q&A. The movie follows thirty-something Maria (Bárbara Lennie), who wants to be a writer but won’t let anyone read her first novel. The Hollywood Reporter writes, “this quiet Spanish take on Bridget Jones is well-played, likeable, free of self-indulgence, and also rather anodyne.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, June 2 and Sunday, June 4 at the AFI Silver.
(Courtesy of the Freer)
This weekend the Freer’s series Utamaro’s World on Film continues with a 35mm screening of director Yasujiro Ozu’s 1934 silent, which he remade in 1959 as Floating Weeds. The movie follows the complicated love lives of a group of itinerant actors, whose elderly patriarch visits an ex-lover, much to the chagrin of his mistress. With live accompaniment by guitarist Alex de Grassi, whose score “is a hypnotic blend of composed passages and improvisation—no two performances are alike.”
Friday, June 2 at 7 p.m. at the National Museum of American History, Warner Bros. Theater.
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Also opening this week: Wonder Woman. We’ll have a full review later today.
