Reel DC: Bad neighbors edition
Reel DC is The DCLine’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
All is not cool in Iceland. Atli (Steinþór Hróar Steinþórsson, who looks like a slightly tougher Michael Cera) moves back in with his parents after his wife kicks him out of their apartment. Meanwhile, Atli’s elderly parents are caught in a squabble with their neighbors over an old tree that, the neighbors complain, throws too much shade on their porch. Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson (whose film Either Way was remade as Prince Avalanche) directed this deadpan black comedy, which plays like a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote feature directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer).
Watch the trailer
Opening today at Landmark West End Cinema.
The AFI Silver continues its centennial celebration of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman with what may be his best-known film. Max Von Sydow stars as a knight who has returned from the Crusades to plague-ridden Denmark, where the black-hooded personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot) challenges him to a game of chess. This seemingly bleak concept was, according to the director, “made under difficult circumstances in a surge of vitality and delight,” and its closing shot is one of the most iconic in cinema.
Next week the AFI is also screening Bergman classics Wild Strawberries, The Magician and The Virgin Spring. This weekend you can see three of the director’s lesser-known early works at the National Gallery of Art, which will present free screenings of A Ship to India, Music in Darkness and Port of Call.
The Seventh Seal screens Friday, July 13, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, July 14, at 5:25 p.m.; and Wednesday, July 18, at 7:20 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $13.
The AFI pays homage to the late George A. Romero with 50th anniversary screenings of the 1968 masterpiece that launched a thousand zombie movies. The concept is simple: Seven people, most of them strangers, huddle in a rural farmhouse to take shelter from a wave of flesh-eating monsters. The film’s shoestring production and sometimes disorienting visuals makes the survivors’ stress palpable in ways that a conventional thriller with a real budget couldn’t hope to convey, and that’s part of why the movie retains its visceral impact half a century later.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, July 14, at 9:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $13
For more than two decades, the Freer Gallery of Art’s annual Made in Hong Kong Film Festival has brought to Washington the best of a film industry that makes American horror and crime movies pale by comparison. Continuing through Aug. 12, the 23rd edition of this local favorite launches tonight with a thriller from prolific action director Herman Lau (The Legend is Born: Ip Man). Andy Lau of Infernal Affairs (which Martin Scorsese remade as the far inferior The Departed) stars as a bomb-disposal expert faced with the biggest job of his life: to defuse the mass of wires rigged to blow up the city’s Cross-Harbor Tunnel.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, July 13, at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
The Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress (disclosure: I work there) pays homage to director Jonathan Demme, who died last year, with a 35-mm print of his 1979 Hitchcockian thriller. Roy Scheider stars as a government agent whose wife is killed in a failed attempt on his life. Janet Margolin co-stars as a mild-mannered museum worker who turns out to have an unusual secret. As part of a Spectrum Culture survey of Demme’s work, I wrote that the film “most comes to life when it immerses us in the synagogues of the Lower East Side — the kind of misfit community that the director was so fond of.”
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, July 19, 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-served basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society offers a musical treasure for fans of the ’60s British Invasion. David Hemmings stars as Dave, a young man whose parents have moved from London to purchase an old seaside hotel in Brighton. His folks have trouble getting tourists interested in the property, but fortunately Dave’s rock band is there to help. Hemmings and co-star Steve Marriott reprise their roles from the 1963 film Live it Up!, but this was Marriott’s last acting role, as he was about to put aside drama for rock ‘n’ roll as a founding member of the Small Faces. Be My Guest featured legendary rock figures as well as its share of forgotten names, with appearances by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Nashville Teens, Kenny & The Wranglers, the Plebs, the Niteshades, and the Zephyrs.
Watch a clip.
Monday, July 16, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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