Capital Projections: Troubled teens edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
MADELINE’S MADELINE
Like any other New York teenager, Madeline (Helena Howard, in her screen debut) fights with her mother (Miranda July) and wants to be more independent, but makes mistakes along the way. What makes Madeline — and the movie about her — so different is her mental illness, which fuels daring work in an experimental theater troupe run by her acting coach (Molly Parker). The coach may understand the troubled teen better than Madeline’s mother — but that doesn’t mean she understands her at all. Madeline’s Madeline is far from your ordinary coming-of-age movie. Cinematographer Ashley Connor’s disorienting work immerses you in Madeline’s confused mindset, which leads to powerful images but can make the impressionistic narrative hard to hang onto. Nevertheless, the movie is held together by Howard’s breakout performance. Director Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) has made a bold if aptly frustrating film about growing up and the creative process.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at the Avalon.
THE APPARITION
French journalist Jacques (Vincent Lindon) isn’t a practicing Catholic — his spiritual journey, such as it was, pretty much ended after his First Communion. So he’s surprised when the Vatican sends him to rural France to investigate Anna (Galatéa Bellugi), a young woman who claims that she’s seen the Virgin Mary. This is director Xavier Giannoli’s first film since Marguerite, the 2015 drama loosely based on the deluded ambitions of would-be opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins. While that film offered an irreverent portrait of a misguided innocent, The Apparition has a respectful, if skeptical, view of its milieu. While the crass commercialization of Anna’s alleged visions casts doubt on the young woman and her handlers, it may well revive Jacques’ dormant faith. At nearly 2 1/2 hours, the movie can be trying, but when it steps aside from mere procedure into the personal dramas of its lost souls, Giannoli reveals something profound.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema.
STRAIGHT CRANKIN’
Mayor Muriel Bowser presents the premiere of a feature-length documentary on the city’s signature rhythms. The movie was produced by the city’s Office of Cable Television, Film, Music & Entertainment, the website of which doesn’t offer any specifics about who’s included or who even directed the project. Such lack of information isn’t very encouraging (the agency has yet to respond to an email), but one hopes the end product does justice to the region’s homegrown beat.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. Free, but an RSVP is required by signing up here.
EYES WIDE SHUT
The AFI’s Stanley Kubrick series winds down with the 1999 drama that was the director’s final film. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as a young New York couple whose marriage threatens to unravel as they begin to explore other sexual partners. The leading couple’s star power lends an uncomfortable charge to their descent into depravity, and the fact that London’s Pinewood Studios makes a poor substitute for Greenwich Village gives it the feel of an anxiety dream. In his 3.5-star review, Roger Ebert wrote that “Kubrick’s great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor’s strange encounters.“
Watch the trailer.
Friday, Sept. 7, at 7 p.m. and Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $13.
TANYA’S ISLAND
Director Alfred Sole had a way with models-turned-actresses. He got a strong performance out of the young Brooke Shields in the 1976 horror movie Alice, Sweet Alice. In this 1980 fantasy starring model-turned-singer Denise Katrina Matthews (better known as Vanity), results are perhaps less successful. Vanity plays a model who lives with an abusive surrealist painter named Lobo. She dreams about escaping to a deserted island, where she falls in love with an ape-man who emerges from one of her violent lover’s paintings. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society warns viewers that this film contains “mature subject matter for immature adults.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Sept. 10, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
This post has been updated to correct the name of the theater showing The Apparition.
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