Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey (Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures Entertainment)
An August release date is often held in reserve for troubled productions and sub-par product. Though the abduction thriller Kidnap, which opens this weekend, isn’t as bad as it looks, this much-anticipated Stephen King adaptation looks like a typical August misfire. A mysterious gunslinger (Idris Elba) and the Man in Black Matthew McConaughey face off in what is apparently a confusing mess. Danish director Nikolaj Arcel previously made the historical drama A Royal Affair, but his most notable credit may be the screenplay for the 2009 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Variety writes that the project has been plagued by brutal test screenings, so the buzz is not good. Stay tuned for a review from SFist.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at area theaters.
Hampton Fancher (Grasshopper Films)
Michael Almereyda has made an experimental vampire movie with a Fisher Price video camera, a pretty good Hamlet, and the excellent psychological drama Experimenter. But his 2005 documentary of photographer William Eggleston took a fascinating subject and made a sloppily recorded mess, and his latest subject isn’t nearly as promising. Hampton Fancher struggled in an acting career that never seemed to go anywhere, but that was just one part of an entertainment lifetime that saw him choreographing his big sister’s strip-tease routines when he was ten years old. Oh yeah, he also went on to write the screenplay for Blade Runner. Fancher is full of stories, but in this documentary from Michael Almereyda (who made the excellent psychological drama Experimenter), he could have used a better editor. Escapes is loaded with footage from Fancher’s dozens of television appearances, which form a collage that sometimes too literally illustrates the stories he tells. While his interlocutor seems to let him ramble at length and without interruption, the film then resorts to extended sequences where photos from Fancher’s life are described with intertitles. This lazy assemblage still manages to convey the strange and charmed life of its loquacious subject, but it doesn’t do him any favors.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema
Qiu Yuen (Sony Pictures)
The Freer’s annual Made in Kong Kong Film Festival wraps up this weekend with a look at how the industry changed after the 1997 handover from Great Britain to China. The highlight is a 35mm print of this 2004 breakthrough from director Stephen Chow (The Mermaid). “Featuring a cast of legendary Hong Kong action stars, it pits the ragtag denizens of a rundown slum against the dapper and ruthless Axe Gang. A nonstop series of action sequences is fueled by some of the most outrageous special effects ever devised.”
Watch the trailer.
Friday, August 4 at 7 p.m. at the National Museum of American History, Warner Bros. Theater. Free.
Jake Macapagal (Captive Cinema Distribution Inc.)
For its series of International Crime Cinema, the AFi Silver screens this 2013 thriller about Oscar (Jake Macapagal), a Filipino farmer who leaves his rural home for what he hopes will be better prospects in the big city. British director Sean Ellis used a Canon digital SLR to make the movie on a low budget (although he still had to mortgage his house to finance it) in a country whose language he didn’t understand, and the result was a modest overseas hit that never saw a commercial release in D.C.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, August 5 at 9:40 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
Suzy Delair and Pierre Fresnay (Collection Musée Gaumont)
The National Gallery of Art dives into the vaults of French production company Gaumont for 12 Unseen Treasures, which offers up rarely screened titles like this 1942 crime drama from director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboloques). Pierre Fresnay (La Grande Illusion) stars as L’inspecteur Wenceslas Wens, a detective trying to catch a serial killer. Also screening this weekend, Razzia sur la chnouf (August 5 at 4 p.m.), a 1955 French gangster movie starring Jean Gabin; and Les tontons flingueurs (Monsieur Gangster) (Agst 6 at 4 p.m.), a 1963 gangster comedy.
L’assassin habite au 21 screens Saturday, August 5 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium, Free.
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Also opening this weekend, Step, a documentary about a girl’s high school step team in Baltimore. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
