“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the characters in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, have sharp wits. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the actors who portray those characters, are humorous.

Let me backtrack. In 2006, Winterbottom directed Coogan and Brydon in The Cock and Bull Story, in which the comic pair ostensibly played themselves, in a film that depicted the behind-the-scenes difficulties on the set of a fictional production of Tristram Shandy. It was essentially a metafictional movie about a fictional production of a metafictional novel. That snake is still eating its own tail.

Super 8 isn’t the only movie this week engaged in some heavy nostalgia. For his first feature as a director, Richard Ayoade — who has directed and starred in plenty of British television comedy, including stateside cult hits like The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd — adapts Submarine, a coming-of-age novel from Welsh poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne. But while Dunthorne’s novel is set in the present day, Ayoade changes the setting to 1986, and beyond that, gives it the same near-fetishistic attachment to ’60s style that gives Wes Anderson films their feel.

August 24, 1814 — the day that the British came to Washington and lit it ablaze. Certainly the most memorable moment of the War of 1812, the Burning of Washington was conducted by British forces in retaliation for Americans’ burning of the city of York (now Toronto) in 1813, and remains the only time since the 1780s that the American capital has been occupied under a foreign flag.

It seems like a slur to call the Red Riding trilogy a “TV movie”, but that’s where it first aired, on Britain’s Channel 4, a year ago. The trio look, feel, and were produced as big screen features though, and it’s nice to see that IFC has picked them up for limited screenings throughout the U.S., hitting D.C. this week. These films deserve to be viewed in a theater. Based on a quartet of…