Director Gustav Möller offers a tense thriller with "The Guilty," which stars Jakob Cedergren as a Copenhagen police officer determined to help a woman who he believes has been kidnapped. (Photo courtesy of Magnolia)

Capital Projections: ‘I’m listening’ edition

By Pat Padua On Oct 19, 2018 Last updated Oct 18, 2018

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.

THE GUILTY

Asger (Jakob Cedergren) is a Copenhagen police officer demoted to desk duty while he awaits a disciplinary court hearing. His transgression is unclear, but he doesn’t seem very professional, handling emergency dispatch callers with unhelpful scolding. Yet when he gets a call from a woman who he believes has been kidnapped, his law enforcement instincts kick in. Director Gustav Möller sets this tense thriller entirely within the confines of a control room. With frequent close-ups of Asger talking into a headset, it’s up to Cedergren to carry the movie — which he does. For 85 minutes, you stay fascinated with Asger as he shifts from an unsympathetic, uninspired employee to a concerned public servant determined to do whatever he can to help his caller.

Watch the trailer.

Opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.

ODDSOCKEATERS

This 2016 animated film from the Czech Republic argues that when socks go missing, it’s because colorful creatures greedily feast upon them. No, this isn’t the latest from the Washington Psychotronic Film Society (see below for something even stranger), but part of a program organized by the Embassy of the Czech Republic in collaboration with The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. After the screening, Illustrator and film director Galina Miklínová will lead a “Make Your Own Oddsockeater” workshop.

Watch the trailer.

Sunday, Oct. 21, at 1 p.m. in the Myers Room at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, 701 21st St. NW. Admission is free, but registration is required here.

THE BIG COUNTRY

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of William Wyler’s classic Western, the director’s daughter Catherine will introduce a 35mm screening of this widescreen Technicolor epic on Saturday at the National Gallery of Art. Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, Burl Ives and Jean Simmons lead a cast in a distinctly American tale about competing ranches fighting over water rights. Slant writes that it’s “one of the kinkiest and angriest westerns of the ’50s, second only to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.”

Watch the trailer.

Saturday, Oct. 20, at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.

INFERNO

The AFI Silver’s Noir City DC festival continues this weekend with a 1953 thriller that has been called one of the best 3D features ever made. Robert Ryan stars as Donald Witley Carson III, a business tycoon traveling in the desert with his wife (Rhonda Fleming) and a mining engineer (WIllian Lundgren). After Carson falls off his horse and breaks his leg, his companions leave — purportedly to go to find help. The billionaire soon concludes, however, that the two are having an affair and have simply left him behind to die. Inferno has been screened several times at the Silver, but it’s paired this time with a new digital restoration of Man in the Dark, a 3D noir that hasn’t been screened in decades. It stars Edmund O’Brien as a criminal who undergoes a procedure that dampens his felonious urges — and, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend (genre favorite Audrey Totter), makes him forget where he hid the payload from a big heist.

Watch the trailers for Inferno and Man in the Dark.

Sunday, Oct. 21, at 8:45 p.m. and Monday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $15.

ZUMA

The Washington Psychotronic Film Society is often pigeonholed as a clearinghouse for the excesses of exploitation cinema, but it’s the range of wildly inventive mythology from around the globe that makes its programmers insatiable consumers of cinema. For next week’s show, they’re tapping the imagination of Filipino comic books with this 1985 fantasy. As the group writes: “Unleashed into the modern world, Zuma, son of Aztec serpent god Kukulkan, sports a pair of snakes on his shoulders, is nigh-invulnerable, and subscribes to an all virgin heart diet. As the bodies pile up, the authorities hunting him down pull out their ace card: Zuma’s besnaked daughter Galema!”

Watch the trailer.

Monday, Oct. 22, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.

Film