Writer-director Kim Nguyen's new film "The Hummingbird Project" stars Jesse Eisenberg as a Wall Street entrepreneur who runs afoul of his boss when he and his cousin go rogue with their scheme to build a fiber-optic line able to offer high-frequency traders an advantage over competitors. (Photo courtesy of The Orchard)

Capital Projections: Life in the fast lane edition

By Pat Padua On Mar 22, 2019 Last updated Mar 21, 2019

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 HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT

With the help of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, actor Jesse Eisenberg made Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a compelling dramatic figure in the 2010 drama The Social Network. A new film from writer-director Kim Nguyen puts the actor at the center of another technological thriller, but the results are much less satisfying. Eisenberg stars as Vincent Zaleski, who teams up with his cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) in an attempt to build a fiber-optic line capable of transmitting stock exchange data from New York to Kansas in just 16 milliseconds. In conjunction with sophisticated algorithms, such numbers provide high-frequency traders a miniscule but significant advantage over their competitors by giving them a hairbreadth jump on changing stock prices. But their scheme runs afoul of Eva (Salma Hayek), a securities trading exec who’s upset that her rogue employees didn’t give her company dibs on this action.

The Hummingbird Project is filled with characters driven by a highly specialized passion. Yet even though the principal actors effectively convey their own excitement and anxiety, it’s hard for the viewer to get caught up in this crazy scheme. Still, Nguyen isn’t simply depicting arcane Wall Street intrigue. The land rights for this fiber-optic line run right through Pennsylvania Dutch country, and naturally an Amish elder (Johan Heldenbergh) is reluctant to sell out, baffled why the world has to be in such a hurry. The metaphor is all too obvious, yet if Nguyen had focused on that struggle between the new world and old traditions, he might have had a better movie on his hands.

Watch the trailer.

Opens Friday, March 22, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema. $12.50.

RED COW

Israeli writer-director Tsivia Barkai Yacov, who grew up in a settlement of Orthodox Jews, made this coming-of-age drama about 17-year-old Benny (Avigayil Koevary), who lives in such a community in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Benny takes care of a newborn calf, the prize of her devout, widowed father (Gal Toren), and dutifully attends classes in religious instruction. But trouble comes when Benny finds herself attracted to a female classmate (Moran Rosenblatt). Screen Daily wrote: “Urgent in tone yet measured in pace … the film vibrates with disarming authenticity.” The Avalon is screening Red Cow as part of its monthly Reel Israel series.

Watch the trailer.

Wednesday, March 27, at The Avalon Theatre. $12.75.

LOSING GROUND

This domestic drama from 1982 is one of only two films directed by Kathleen Collins, a playwright, poet and civil rights activist who died in 1988 at the age of 46. The movie tells the story of a college professor (Seret Scott) and her artist husband (Ganja and Hess director Bill Gunn), whose relationship becomes strained during a summer trip away from the big city. Slant Magazine wrote that “the difficulty of pigeonholing such complex, low-key work led to a serious lack of exposure for Collins, who never directed again, dying from breast cancer only six years after the completion of the film.” The screening at Suns Cinema, a tiny indie theater and bar in Mount Pleasant, will be introduced by DC-based film educator and programmer Nzingha Kendall.

Watch the trailer.

Wednesday, March 27, at 8 p.m. at Suns Cinema. $12.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

In tandem with the release of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir, writer-producer Victoria Riskin’s new book about her family, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is hosting a retrospective of work featuring Riskin’s legendary parents. (It’s too bad the AFI didn’t use Film Forum’s title for the series, Bob and Wray: A Hollywood Love Story, but maybe they figured Washington-area audiences wouldn’t get the reference to the comic duo Bob and Ray.) While the couple never worked together, either actress Wray or her screenwriter husband contributed to many of their era’s most beloved movies, from Riskin’s scripts for director Frank Capra to Wray’s signature role in King Kong (also screening this month at the AFI). Made one year before the giant ape turned her into a Hollywood icon, the 1932 adventure The Most Dangerous Game puts Wray in a different kind of danger, casting her as a wealthy ingenue trapped by a mad hunter (Leslie Banks) who finds sport in killing humans. Victoria Riskin will introduce Saturday’s screening and will be on hand for screenings of several other films this weekend; check the series page for more details.

Saturday, March 23, at 4 p.m. (with Riskin in person); Monday, March 25, at 5:15 p.m.; and Wednesday, March 27, at 5:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

As moviegoers wait patiently for this summer’s release of Quentin Tarantino’s Manson Family epic Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is hosting a retrospective of the director’s work. As much a fantasy as a war adventure, this quasi-historical film from 2009 imagines that, in Nazi-occupied France, a group of Jewish soldiers plotted to assassinate Nazi leaders. Tarantino’s most recent movies have suffered from the director’s tendency to undermine dramatic propulsion with grating self-consciousness — for instance, the Klan riders who stop to examine their hoods in Django Unchained and the post-intermission narration in The Hateful Eight. But from its thrilling opening set piece to its morally conflicted conclusion, Inglorious Basterds marked the last time Tarantino was firing on all cylinders. The Warner Bros. Theatre will be screening a 35mm print.

Watch the trailer.

Saturday, March 23, at 9:25 p.m. in the Warner Bros. Theatre at the National Museum of American History. $12.

CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL

South Park and The Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were students at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1993 when they created this piece of semi-historical musical comedy. Cannibal! Is very loosely based on the story of ill-fated prospector Alferd Packer, who in 1874 set off from Utah with five traveling companions, all headed to Colorado in search of gold. Only Packer made it back alive, having survived the snowbound conditions by living off the flesh of his fellow prospectors. The New York Times wrote that “the movie is not completely appalling,” which is higher praise than the Gray Lady ordinarily bestows on such exploitation pictures. The screening is a presentation of the not completely appalling Washington Psychotronic Film Society.

Watch the trailer.

Monday, March 25, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.