Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
(Walt Disney Studios)
Race cars have personalities voiced by Owen Wilson, Cristela Alonso, Larry the Cable Guy, and Bonnie Hunt in the latest installment of Pixar’s less-fabled franchise. The Cars movies don’t have the emotional resonance of Toy Story 3 or Inside Out, but as SFist writes, despite the standard formula of “training montages, the aging champ clashing with his younger coach, throwing in the towel, and picking it up again,” the franchise “grows up with its audience.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at area theaters.
Monica Vitti and Richard Harris (The Criterion Collection)
Director Michaelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s trilogy pioneered a slow burn of alienated cinema whose repressed characters were often lost in a sea of brutalist architecture, all shot in glorious widescreen black and white. Could the director translate this stark aesthetic for his first color film? Antonioni’s 1964 masterpiece stars Monica Vitti and Richard Harris as lovers navigating a bleak, polluted industrial landscape. The National Gallery of Art will be showing a 35mm print as part of its series, New Waves: Transatlantic Bonds between Film and Art in the 1960s. John Tyson, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, will introduce the screening.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 18 at 1 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
(Cinelicious)
In this very approximate adaptation of Oedipus, Eddie (androgynous actor Peter, who later appeared in Kurosawa’s Ran) is a Tokyo “gay boy” who operates in a world of drag queens, drugs, and performance artists. Director Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film was a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, perhaps most clearly by its use of music such as the 17th century tune “Oh du lieber Augustin” (aka “Hail to the Bus Driver”)—an incongruous leitmotif that recalls Kubrick’s use of “La Gazza Ladra” as a soundtrack to ultra-violence. The AFI will be screening a new 4K digital restoration of this, until now, rarely revived film. Silver Spring will be the place to be for your ’60s Japanese cinema fix next week. The AFI is also screening two essential gangster films by director Seijun Suzuk—Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter (both screening on June 19, 21 and 22).
Watch the trailer.
Funeral Parade of Roses screens Monday, June 19 through Thursday, June 22 at the AFI Silver.
(Suns Cinema)
Director Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide) combines Shakespeare, Greek drama, and the Japanese dance theater form known as “Butoh” for this 1974 adaptation of the myth of Himiko, the shaman priestess of the Sun Goddess. It’s part of a Suns Cinema series dedicated to the Art Theatre Guild, a Japanese underground film company that produced subversive films from the early 1960s to the 1980s.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, June 20 at 8 p.m. at Suns Cinema, 3107 Mt. Pleasant St. NW.
(Xenon Pictures)
I’ll let the Washington Psychotronic Film Society describe this 1988 exploitation film: “Kung fu experts—from outer space, yet!—invade a small town to set up a wholly bizarre agricultural experiment. As the hapless authorities find themselves unable to stop the spontaneous combustion of townspeople and the proliferation of human hands growing in nearby fields, several local teens decide to gather forces and meet the threat head-on. Contains all the schlock movie staples—violence, gore, and … improper use of chainsaws!”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, June 19 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this week, Mandy Moore and her sister Claire Holt are trapped in a shark cage in the thriller 47 Meters Down. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. And don’t miss our coverage of AFI Docs.
