Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Yang Mi (Well Go USA)
With a stellar supporting cast and a great soundtrack, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is one of the summer’s most anticipated action movies (see Gothamist for a review). But this Hong Kong sleeper produced by Jackie Chan and opening locally on one suburban screen deserves some love, too. Yang Mi stars as scientist Xia Tan, who’s part of a team on the verge of perfecting a long-elusive technology: time travel. Naturally, a rival company led by Wallace Huo wants the technology for itself, and kidnaps Xia Tan’s young son in exchange for priceless scientific data. The only way to keep her son safe? Use the untested technology on herself. Sure, there are plot holes, and it would have been even better if it were directed by a master like Johnnie To (whose Drug War is one of the great action movies of the century). Yet with the kind of brutal action typical of Hong Kong cinema and a surprising gallows humor, Reset (also known as Fatal Countdown: Reset) is a nail-biter that asks how far a mother will go to save her child from danger.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday at Regal Cinemas Rockville
Lily James and Jai Courtney (A24)
When this film premiered at the Washington Jewish Film Festival this spring, Mark Lieberman wrote, “The central problem with this World War II drama lies in the casting. Jai Courtney plays the ostensible protagonist Captain Stefan Brandt, a Nazi soldier tasked with standing guard over Germany’s former monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II (Christopher Plummer), who fumed in exile in the ’30s as the country fell to a dictatorship. Courtney doesn’t work nearly hard enough to earn sympathy for his character, and even worse, he’s not dastardly enough either, coming across as a blank unworthy of the affections of the Kaiser’s heady maid Mieke (Lily James). And yet writer Simon Burke and director David Leveaux rest their hopes on Courtney’s charm and chemistry with James to carry the movie past unremarkable sets and costumes, goofy dialogue and plot twists visible from miles away. There’s fun to be had observing the carefree Kaiser, as Plummer injects him with bubbly insouciance. But even that performance lacks nuance. In striving to be old-fashioned in storytelling and scope, The Exception ends up being a plain drag.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at The Avalon.
Evgenia Brik and Oleg Dolin (Snapshot)
An aging TV star is kidnapped by fans in this multi-layered narrative about five Muscovites whose lives come together one fateful day. Irish-born director Johnny O’Reilly has lived much of his life in Moscow and has a clear affection for the capital. While he gets good performances out of his sprawling cast, the ensemble feels flat and unengaging at times. Noel Murray of the Los Angeles Times writes that the movie, “is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
Gina Gershon and Nicolas Cage (Lionsgate Premiere)
Nicolas Cage continues his extended tenure in cinematic purgatory with this erotic thriller (so they tell me) about Angela (Gina Gershon) and Brian (Cage), who befriend a mysterious young woman (Nicky Whelan) who they hire as a nanny for their only child. Jonathan Baker’s only other directorial credit is a 1989 video tennis comedy starring Dick Van Patten, and since it’s never a good sign when previews are not made available to critics, it may be inconceivable that this movie could be any good. But did I mention that Faye Dunaway is in it? Playing Cage’s mother? Two of the greatest hams of their generations in one simmering potboiler? Get the popcorn already.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Rio, Gaithersburg.
(IFC Films/Photofest)
In early films like Tales of the Gimli Hospital (1988), director Guy Maddin used old film stock to create strange fables that seemed to emerge from an alternate RKO universe. But in later years, he became more mannered, and films like Brand Upon the Brain (2006) could be all but unwatchable. But he summoned something like reality for this semi-autobiographical quasi-documentary about the town where he grew up. As part of a film series celebrating Canada’s sesquicentennial, the National Gallery of Art will screen a 35mm print of one of Maddin’s best films.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 1 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium.
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Also opening this week, Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning and Collin Farrell star in The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola’s remake of Clint Eastwood 1971 film about a Union soldier who takes shelter at a Virginia girls’ school. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
