Capital Projections: Tender Juggalo 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.
FAMILY
The promising first feature by writer-director Laura Steinel is a poignant coming-of-age comedy. Yet its emotional development doesn’t just come from a misfit preteen — the adults grow up, too. Kate (Taylor Schilling of Orange Is the New Black) is a successful career woman, but she has no friends. She’s a jerk to everyone in her office, with any attempts at conversation coming off awkward or mean. Worse, she’s estranged from her brother (Eric Edelstein), who has given up trying to get his busy sister involved in his life. But a family emergency leaves Kate the only person available to take care of her brother’s 12-year-old daughter Maddie (Bryn Vale). Schilling navigates Steinel’s perceptive, funny script with conviction and vulnerability. For all her character’s professional success, it’s clear that in some ways this highly paid adult is almost as lost as the awkward, bullied tween. It’s an encouraging message for viewers of any age who feel they can’t handle the world. Family uses humor to ask compassion for people who may seem horrible but are nursing hidden wounds. When Maddie runs away from Kate’s care to see bad-boy rappers Insane Clown Posse in concert, the film’s adults are horrified, but Steinel resists using the notorious group as an easy target. The movie somehow finds tenderness even in the Gathering of the Juggalos, the annual festival headlined by the ICP.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, April 26, at Landmark Bethesda Row and AMC Hoffman Center. $12.50.
STOCKHOLM
If Ethan Hawke held you hostage, would you resist? That’s the question asked by writer-director Robert Budreau in this unusually lighthearted true-crime drama. The film is based on the 1973 case that introduced the world to the Stockholm syndrome, the psychological phenomenon in which a kidnapping victim forms a bond with their captor. Hawke stars as Lars, a Swedish-born, Texas-raised thief who swaggers around a bank vault — and draws the fawning admiration of Bianca (Noomi Rapace), a teller who finds the charismatic villain more sympathetic (and responsive) than her husband. The movie is entertaining enough, thanks to Hawke’s effective performance, but as I wrote in my Washington Post review, it’s “a bit too on the nose in its effort to explain the psychological mechanism at its center” — ultimately detracting from its overall success as either comedy or drama.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, April 26, at AMC Hoffman Center. $12.69.
RED JOAN
Every neighborhood seems to have one: that nice widow down the street who pretty much keeps to herself. You might wave to her as she tends to her garden. What if that seemingly benign acquaintance had a sordid past as a spy? This mildly paced drama from Trevor Nunn, a stage director who has helmed a number of Shakespeare adaptations for TV, tells the story of Joan Stanley (Judi Dench), whose peaceful retirement is interrupted when British intelligence arrests her for allegedly having passed atomic bomb technology onto the Soviets decades earlier. Why did she do it? Apparently, for love. As authorities question the elderly suspect, she thinks fondly on her young self (played by Sophie Cookson) enthralled by charismatic young activists at Cambridge, where her physics studies proved useful to political radicals looking to gain advantage for their allies. Based on a novel by Jennie Rooney, Red Joan was inspired by the life of “granny spy” Melita Norwood, a British civil servant who moonlighted as a KGB agent, providing state secrets to the Soviets for decades before her activities were exposed in the ’90s. For all the international intrigue behind the true story, the movie is bland, with Dench relegated to a supporting role while her younger counterpart is romanticized in muted flashbacks that don’t convey much passion or danger.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, April 26, at Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
INCEPTION
Christopher Nolan, one of Hollywood’s most vocal champions of analog technology, has vowed to continue shooting his movies on celluloid as long as there are film projectors to screen them. So it’s apt that the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is screening the writer-director’s 2010 thriller in a 35mm print. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a corporate thief with a deviously unique M.O.: He is able to enter the minds of other men to steal their ideas. This skill sends him on a complicated heist in which he’s tasked with infiltrating a mark in order to plant an idea that can make Cobb rich. The multilayered narrative has given Inception a reputation for sophistication that it perhaps doesn’t deserve — how mysterious can it be if the Ellen Page character is there at every moment to explain what just happened? Nonetheless, the film does have a visual dazzle and dramatic ambition all too rare in blockbuster-fixated Hollywood.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 26, at 6:20 p.m. in the Warner Bros. Theater at the National Museum of American History. $12.
MEET JOHN DOE
For a director known as one of Hollywood’s great sentimentalists, Frank Capra sure had a cynical streak. This 1941 comedy is one of a number of films that reveal Capra’s distrust of the media. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Ann Mitchell, a newspaper reporter who drums up circulation when she concocts a letter to the editor written by a fictional sad sack who announces that, to protest social injustice, he will jump from atop City Hall on Christmas Eve. When readers fall for the hoax, ready to offer work and housing to the unfortunate letter-writer, the paper scrambles to hire somebody willing to claim that he is John Doe, ultimately selecting John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), an injured former baseball player who needs the money. WIlloughby takes to his role so well that a political movement forms around him, but then a rival newspaper threatens to expose him as a fake. Meet John Doe provides a curious mirror to Inception, with its warning of mass delusion coming not from the terrors of modern technology but from an old-fashioned Everyman who comes across as benign as can be. The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will be screening a 35mm print of this timeless and relevant American classic.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, April 28, at 11 a.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
STREET OF SHAME
This 1956 drama from director Kenji Mizoguchi, who died of leukemia just six months after its release, reportedly led to the passing of an anti-prostitution law in Japan. The film chronicles the lives of women working in a brothel called Dreamland, which operated in a neighborhood that had served as Tokyo’s red-light district for three centuries. In an essay for the Criterion Collection, critic Michael Koresky explains that the film’s depiction of the trade is more nuanced than one might expect. “At first,” he writes, “we feel assured in our stance against a system that allows and profits from the subjugation of women, but as the film continues … our reactions change and evolve.” The Freer and Sackler galleries will screen a 35mm print of Street of Shame as part of a monthly series of Japanese classics.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, May 1, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
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