Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Tom Holland (Chuck Zlotnick/Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Tom Holland is the third actor to play Spider-Man this century, and while DCist was one of the few fans of the 2012 reboot with Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland is getting good grades for his awkward teenage superhero. Of Homecoming, Gothamist writes, “When the movie sticks to the smaller scale of Parker’s adolescence—high school parties, class field trips, bodega cats and thai food outings—it is a gem of a comic book movie, which seems equally inspired by Hughes’s ’80s high school comedies and the original ’60s Spider-Man comic run.” The movie, “really balances its tones well, nails its emotional beats, and justifies the third incarnation of Peter Parker as relatable, complicated, and worthy of the Spidey mantle.” Read the full Gothamist review here.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tonight at area theaters.
(East Village Entertainment)
Zaradasht Ahmed’s grueling documentary immerses the viewer in the world of Iraqi medic Nori Sharif, who works in an emergency room in the small town of Jalawla. Tending to injuries amidst sectarian conflict in the wake of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, he faces further challenges with the advance of ISIS in 2014. The Washington Post writes that, Sharif remains a compassionate, relentlessly upbeat observer of the trauma engulfing his town — and the surrounding Diyala province, known as the ‘triangle of death’ because of the violence it has attracted — until he is touched by it himself.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up.
Colm Meaney and Freddie Highmore
In this fictionalized conversation between anti-Catholic firebrand Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall) and IRA leader Martin McGuinness (Colm Meaney), two mortal enemies are forced to share a car trip (driven by Bates Motel‘s Freddie Highmore). Set in 2006 as the two worked on negotiations to end the decades-long Troubles, the film is in theory a welcome tale of reconciliation in contentious times. But its good intentions are undone by screenwriter Colin Bateman’s heavy-handed preaching. For instance, McGuinness tells his cranky travel-mate, “We’re all just trying to get home,” and after a dramatic pause, he adds, “Isn’t that profound?” If a script doctor took a scalpel to this movie and muted the platitudes and cliches you’d be left with Silent Journey (and let us not even speak of the symbolic dying moose). As it is, neither Spall’s hammy impersonation of Paisley nor John Hurt (in one of his final roles) can overcome the consistently cringe-worthy dialogue and sweeping inspirational music at nearly every turn. Stay home and track down Good Vibrations, about Belfast record store owner Terri Hooley, instead; it’s a great rock ‘n’ roll movie that isn’t explicitly about the conflict in Northern Ireland, but it addresses it with far more subtlety.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark West End Cinema.
Dylan Authors and Julie Sarah Stone (TIFF)
In this Canadian coming-of-age movie set in 1976, Kit (Dylan Authors) runs off to Sydney, Nova Scotia with his friend Alice (Julia Sarah Stone) for a beach party and, one presumes, furtive adolescent sex. But when Alice realizes that her sort-of-boyfriend’s sexuality isn’t what she assumed, it turns into a different trip. Director Bruce McDonald (Pontypool) gets good performances out of his cast, especially Stone, who seems well-rounded despite having little more to do than react. But despite a good folk-rock and country soundtrack and evocative black and white cinematography that establishes a strong sense of place, the film never gets past its stock characters and cliched situations. McDonald will appear for a Q&A after Friday night’s screening.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, July 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
(WPFS)
This 1984 cheapie also known as Hyperspace begat Lord Buckethead, who in this iteration is a traveler foiled in his search for a distant galaxy. Winding up instead on Earth, he encounters princess Paula Poundstone and scientist Chris Elliott. Antics ensue. According to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, the movie features, “a crew of jawas, flying shopping carts, and a funeral for a cow. You too will be left asking ‘Who’s responsible for this?'”
Watch a clip.
Monday, July 10 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
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Also opening this weekend, Emmanuelle Davos tries to find the hit-and-run driver who killed her son in Moka. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
