Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Adèle Haenel (Christine Plenus/IFC)
Jenny (Adèle Haenel) is a young doctor practicing in a low-income neighborhood in Belgium. She’s dedicated to her patients, and instructs an intern who’s struggling on the job to “be stronger than your emotions.” Yet her own emotions take over after she refuses to help an immigrant girl who knocks on her office door after hours. When the girl turns up dead, Jenny is determined to find out who she was, which leads to a moral journey wracked with guilt. Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose Two Days, One Night was one of our favorite movies of 2014, build an economical tension from the doctor’s quest for justice, and as usual, they shape uniformly naturalistic performances that make you feel as if you’re watching a documentary. Haenel in particular captures her character’s professional and personal conflicts with an effective restraint.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Pop-up.
(Akka Films)
Now in its seventh year, the D.C. Palestinian Film & Arts Festival opens with the U.S. premiere of a harrowing documentary that earned plaudits from such directors as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Director Raed Andoni recruited former prisoners of Al-Moskobiya, the Israeli interrogation center where he himself was jailed at age 18. In a warehouse on the West Bank, Andoni, with the help of his recruits, recreates the West Jerusalem prison where they were tortured. The Hollywood Reporter writes that the film, “is a little rambling and diffuse in intent. If it has any firm take-home message, it shows us how bottling up trauma can he highly damaging, and also how Palestinian prisoners use art, poetry and music to escape inside themselves during the soul-crushing grind of confinement.” See the whole festival program here.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(jonathanrosenbaum.net)
This weekend, the AFI presents 70mm prints of two films from Russian director Yuliya Solntseva, whose 1961 war film The Story of the Flaming Years (screening Sunday and Monday at the Silver) made her the first woman to win the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Married to director Alexander Dovzhenko, Solntseva was a longtime assistant to her husband, and after his death in 1956, she took on his unfinished projects. Among these was this 1964 fantasy inspired by Dovzhenko’s childhood. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls The Enchanted Desna, “among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made.”
Sunday, October 1 at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
(Paramount)
As I wrote in 2014, Interstellar “can be hokey, overbearing, sentimental and obvious, and it runs nearly three hours. But for all its flaws as heavy-handed science fiction, Christopher Nolan’s ambitious blockbuster succeeds on a level that has been largely foreign to the celluloid-loving director: the emotional.” And it’s the last movie that will be screened at the Natural History Museum’s Samuel C. Johnson IMAX Theater, which, as we reported this summer, closes after September 30. To send the massive screen out in style, Interstellar will be screened in the 15-perf 70mm format, which is the platonic ideal of film presentation (and remains Nolan’s preferred format, as with his recent Dunkirk). While 70mm was once a common format, albeit one usually reserved for prestige pictures, such screenings have become harder to come by, so it is a rare weekend indeed when Washington area theaters give you the opportunity to see not one but three movies in this format.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, September 30 at 5:50 p.m. at the National History Museum’s Samuel C. Johnson IMAX Theatre.
(Den of Geek/Excalibur Films)
In between stints as The Saint and James Bond, the late Roger Moore made a psychological thriller that gave him the chance to play what would be his favorite role. Moore stars as a London businessman who is declared clinically dead after an auto accident and wakes up with the ability to be in two places at once. Released in 1970, this was the final film directed by one-time Ealing Studios regular Basil Dearden (Dead of Night), who coincidentally died in an auto accident a year after completing the film.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, October 5 at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
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Also opening this week, Tom Cruise stars as airline pilot turned CIA operative in American Made. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. And stay tuned next week for our preview of this year’s Spooky Fest at the AFI Silver.
