Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Elisabeth Moss and Claes Bang (Magnolia Pictures)
Christian (Claes Bang) is the curator at a modern art museum in Stockholm. A typical exhibition is dryly and accurately titled, “Mirrors and Piles of Gravel,” but the minimalist piece he’s set to promote next is a conceptual piece that comes with the instruction, “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.” Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) directed this wicked if obvious satire of the art world, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Like mother!, The Square has become one of the year’s more divisive films (I hated mother! and loved this, while a number of respected peers take the opposite position). Elisabeth Moss and animal actor Terry Notary co-star in a stylish, cynical dramedy whose two-and-a-half hour run time flew by for me.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row, Angelika Mosaic, and Cinema Arts Theatre.
Takuya Kimura and Hana Sugisaki (Magnet Releasing)
Manji is a master samurai who would have been content to die after he watched his little sister die in a heartbreaking attack. But a mysterious old woman feeds him bloodworms that heal even the most brutal wounds—making him an unkillable foe. When a young girl asks Manji’s help to avenge her father’s death, hundreds of deaths and buckets of blood ensue. One-time boy band singer Takuya Kimura plays the scarred immortal with a surprising ruggedness that at times recalls Seijun Suzuki regular Jô Shishido. If the well-choreographed swordplay is poorly edited (what do they think this is, an American picture?), Audition director Takashi Miike, in his 100th film, keeps things moving for nearly two and a half hours of splatter. Revenge is slow, long, and sticky.
Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing.
(KeyFilm.com)
When the patriarch of the Ullrich family dies, Phillip (Laurence Rupp of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) is charged with taking over his father’s business in Vienna. But the transition of power is complicated when dead ancestors start showing up. Cineropa.org writes that the film is, “a supernatural comedy whodunit, but the kind that is shrewd enough to realise that the dark secrets of a family can never be isolated from the rottenness of society itself.” Night of 1000 Hours is one of the highlights of the Goethe-Institut’s Film|Neu festival, which has showcased new films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for 25 years. See the full schedule here.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, November 4 at 9 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(National Film Foundation of Russian Federation)
This weekend the AFI’s Silent Cinema Showcase screens a 35mm print of the debut film from one of the most influential of Soviet filmmakers. Sergei Eisenstein was only 26 when he directed this tale of a factory uprising in Tsar-era Russia. The New York Times’ Dave Kehr writes that while “the film offers few examples of [Eistenstein’s] ‘dialectical’ collision of shots to create new ideas, it does suggest a director with a very distinctive approach to cutting film.” This 1925 silent will be accompanied by live music from the Alloy Orchestra.
Saturday, November 4 at 4:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
(IMCDB)
I’ll let the Washington Psychotronic Film Society describe their next offering, a 1976 film from director Frank Agrama (Dawn of the Mummy). “A female film crew travels to Africa where they discover the female natives worship a female giant ape. The ape then falls in love with the male star of the film, Ray Fay. Get the feeling that perhaps the writing credits were exaggerations?” Producer Dino De Laurentis, who was working on his own King Kong remake and at the time owned the rights to the 1933 original, took legal action against this UK spoof, preventing a theatrical release. Queen Kong has a Japanese following, and in a reversal of the Woody Allen spoof What’s Up Tiger Lily?, which added English dialogue to a Japanese B-movie, Japanese comedians reportedly came up with their own dialogue for this stinker and released in on DVD.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, November 6 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.
—
Also opening this week, New Zealand actor-director Taika Waititi puts a comedic spin on the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Thor: Ragnarok. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
