Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, and Channing Tatum (Fingerprint Releasing/Bleecker Street)
Two brothers (Adam Driver and Channing Tatum) plan a bank robbery with the help of a demolition expert (Daniel Craig) in the latest film from Steven Soderbergh. Although the director announced his retirement from filmmaking a few years ago, he never really kept that promise, producing The Knick and working as cinematographer and editor on Magic Mike XXL. Now he’s officially back in the director’s seat ….for a heist movie? But from Out of Sight to the Ocean’s franchise, the director has long shown a flair for the sharply written, briskly paced crime picture, and by all accounts Logan Lucky is a return to commercial form. Stay tuned for a full review from SFist.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at area theaters.
(Shout! Factory)
Director Sunao Katabuchi’s animated feature charts the life of Suzu, a young woman who moves to the town of Kure in Hiroshima to live with her husband’s family. The film takes place in the years and days before the bomb, and as Suzu’s domestic drama happens closer and closer to the fateful day and air raids become a way of life, the film is quietly devastating, as if we’re watching a beautiful nightmare. Gorgeous hand-drawn animation compares white waves to leaping rabbits; when the attacks come down, that same animation keeps us at some distance from the action, its restraint preventing the film from sinking into maudlin sentiment. But however lovely the design, the film does not spare us the horror of life during wartime.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Mosaic.
Robert Pattinson (A24)
Robert Pattinson continues his transformation from Twilight-pinup to arthouse favorite in the latest film from directors Josh and Ben Safdie (Heaven Knows What). The former vampire plays Constantine, who’s trying to get his brother out of prison after a botched bank robbery. SFist writes that Good Time “will take your breath away…the film’s intensity makes it feel like what we’re watching is happening in real time, while the [New York] locations and settings drive home the authenticity.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and ArcLight Bethesda.
(The Criterion Collection)
Seven teenage girls visit a remote house where all Technicolor hell breaks loose in director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1977 cult classic. Part coming of age movie, part psychedelic horror, this isn’t just any haunted house movie—while you might find laser-eyed evil cats in other movies, no other film gives you a carnivorous piano hungrily chewing off a teenager’s fingers. The AFI Silver is screening Hausu on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.The New York Times’ Manhola Dargis wrote “the yelps you’ll hear and possibly emit, though, will be of surprise and delight, not terror.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, August 19, Monday, August 21, and Thursday, August 24 at the AFI Silver.
(Collection Musée Gaumont)
The National Gallery of Art’s series Gaumont at 120: Twelve Unseen Treasures continues this weekend with Raymond Bernard’s 1924 silent spectacle of 15th-century France. Gallery curators write that the film is, “a high point of the French silent cinema,[featuring] a pitched battle partially filmed with handheld cameras, a wolf attack on the ice, and a final showdown at the still-extant double-walled castle of Carcassonne with thousands of extras and an ax-wielding Sergyl.” The Gallery will be screening a 35mm print, with Andrew Simpson accompanying on piano.
Saturday, August 19 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium. Free.
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Also opening this week, modern architecture forms the backdrop of complicated relationships in Columbus, the feature debut from Seoul-born director Kogonada. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. And don’t miss our preview of the DC Black Film Festival, which opens tonight.
