While the week between Christmas and New Year’s is far from a dead zone for movies, most of the new fare that’s going to be brought out before year’s end has already come out, and those that the studios did save for Christmas day release look wholly uninteresting, from sequels to films that were horrible missteps to begin with, to overly earnest inspirational fare. Instead, we’ll join the living in the past bandwagon and revisit…

Mid-December has arrived, and with that comes the inevitable flood of best-of lists. The Washington Area Film Critics’ Association has, for the previous five years of its existence, been in the habit of trying to get their own list out ahead of most of the other critics’ societies. We can’t really blame them. Considering the fact that none of the critics from the city’s biggest newspaper are members, not to mention the fact that the…

I was beginning to wonder if the Coen Brothers had lost it. About halfway through their ill-advised remake of the Ealing classic The Ladykillers, I was gripped by the same sort of sadness that comes with the childhood realization that your parents aren’t infallible, nor do they have all the answers. For the first time in their filmmaking career, they seemed not just human, but deeply flawed. Redemption is a world away from directing Tom…

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Major Release: No Country for Old Men We’ll be covering the latest release from the Coen Brothers in more depth tomorrow, but in the time being, we’ll tell you this: not only have the filmmakers recovered from the mediocre doldrums of their last couple of outings, but they have returned with a bloody vengeance with a…