Capital Projections: A long winter 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.
ARCTIC
The recent warm spell may have made us forget about winter, but this chilly survival tale brings back the season with a vengeance. Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale and Hannibal) stars as a cargo pilot whose plane crashes in the Arctic. With minimal dialogue, writer-director Joe Penna’s first feature is a tense and restrained story of Man vs. Nature — and it’s up to Mikkelsen to make it work, which he does, convincingly immersing the viewer in his desperate straits. In my Washington Post review, I wrote that the Danish actor “exudes the steely determination of a young Clint Eastwood — you could call Arctic a cold spaghetti western — as well as a sublimated energy that recalls the intensity of Klaus Kinski, but with that late German actor’s turbulent volatility turned inward.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday at Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema and Angelika Film Center Mosaic. $12.50.
OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2019
This year’s Oscar broadcast will go on as scheduled (but without a host) on Feb. 24, so moviegoers have a few more weeks to catch up on all the categories to make well-informed wagers. And as they do every year, Landmark Theatres will screen the short subject nominees. This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts include the Disney/Pixar frontrunner Bao, directed by Domee Shi, featuring a lonely housewife who’s surprised to find that one of her steamed dumplings has sprung to life; and the underdog Animal Behavior, directed by Alison Snowden and David Fine, who remind us in this look at interspecies group therapy that butts are inherently funny (perhaps more so for pigs more than gorillas). Landmark Theatres are also screening programs of live action and documentary shorts.
Watch the trailer.
Starting Friday, programs of animated and live action shorts will screen at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema. A program of animated documentary shorts will screen at Landmark West End Cinema. $12.50.
3 FACES
The Freer Gallery of Art’s 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival, which runs at the gallery and at the AFI Silver Theatre through Feb. 26, continues this weekend with the latest from director Jafar Panahi — a tribute to the road movies made by his late mentor, Abbas Kiarostami. Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari play fictionalized versions of themselves journeying to Northern Iran to investigate a video that seems to depict a young woman commiting suicide. In 2010 the Islamic Revolutionary Court banned the Iranian director from making films for 20 years, but Panahi has repeatedly defied that order, managing to produce and release This is Not A Film while he was under house arrest in Tehran. This is now his fourth film since the ban, and it won the award for best screenplay at Cannes last year.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Feb. 10, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
DOWN IN THE DELTA
Next week the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress (disclosure: I work there, but this is not my program) commemorates Black History Month with a 35-mm print of the only film directed by poet Maya Angelou. The 1998 drama stars Alfre Woodard as a concerned mother who sends her troubled children away from the Chicago projects to live in rural Mississippi with their Uncle Earl (Al Freeman Jr.). Wesley Snipes co-stars as Earl’s son, an Atlanta lawyer. The script was not written by Angelou but by Myron Goble, who won a screenwriting contest that led to the film. In his 3.5-star review, Roger Ebert wrote when Down in the Delta was first released that the film “illustrates that a strong story, deeply felt, and engendered outside the Hollywood assembly line, is likely to get its effects from observation, instead of by following the lazy outlines of formulas from the screenwriting tutors. Study this film side by side with Patch Adams, the Robin Williams vehicle that opens on the same day, and you will see the contrast between characters who are alive and those who are puppets.”
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m. in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Admission is free. Seating is first-come, first-served. For the best seating options, patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 to 30 minutes before the scheduled start time.
JAN PALACH
This year marks the 50th anniversary of a Czech student’s act of protest: On Jan. 16, 1969, 20-year-old Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the reforms of the Prague Spring. Director Robert Sedlácek’s 2018 biopic dramatizes the last six months of Palach’s life. Filmuforia writes that the filmmakers “steer away from hagiography, sensationalism or dry political drama to tell the human story exploring the complex personality and motives of the 20-year old student of history and philosophy.” The Avalon is screening the film as part of its regular Lions of Czech Film series, presented in partnership with the Embassy of the Czech Republic.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre. $12.75.
THE FINAL PROGRAMME
Science fiction author Michael Moorcock collaborated with such music groups as Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult, but this 1973 comedy thriller was the only big-screen adaptation of his work that he ever allowed — and he subsequently disowned it. Jon Finch, who starred in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, plays rock star-physicist Jerry Cornelius, who hopes to repopulate a dying world with an immortal self-replicating hermaphrodite. The Guardian wrote that the movie “may not have much respect for its source material, but it does gloriously capture the satirical humour and pop-art stylings of the time” — which sounds like just the kind of program you’ve come to expect from the Washington Psychotronic Film Society.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 11, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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