Capital Projections: Horror in pink edition
This week’s openings include a better-than-average Nicolas Cage freakout feature and a documentary about a Russian oligarch turned political prisoner. In repertory, an Iranian film takes us to a village whose residents seem invincible, and a classic of Filipino cinema immerses us in the squalor of 1970s Manila.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
COLOR OUT OF SPACE
Not counting voice work, Nicolas Cage has had 10 feature credits in the past two years — and most, like 2019’s A Score to Settle, were tepid melodramas redeemed at least briefly by a minute or two of the actor’s signature bug-eyed rage. Improbably, in the 2018 thriller Mandy, director Panos Cosmatos grabbed hold of the typical Cage revenge template and shook out of it a genuinely good film. Cage’s latest comes with a promising pedigree, and while Color Out of Space isn’t up to the visionary heights of the 2018 film, it raises its star up out of Z-movie hell into a solid B-movie.
Cage stars as Nathan Gardner, who’s living out his dream: He’s recently moved along with his wife and three kids to a New England farm where he’s trying to raise alpacas. Nathan hopes the quiet rural life will be good for his wife Theresa (Joely Richardson), who is being treated for cancer. Daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) ends up taking advantage of the natural setting to practice Wiccan rituals, while their son Benny (Brendan Meyer) prefers video games to the great outdoors. The Gardners’ not-so-idyllic life is disrupted when a meteorite lands in their yard, emitting a mysterious pink hue that gradually seeps into all life forms in the vicinity, transforming alpacas into skinless monsters and humans into grotesque masses of unidentifiable tissue.
Based on a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, Color Out of Space is the first fiction feature in more than 20 years for writer-director Richard Stanley, who earned a cult following for such films as the dystopian 1990 thriller Hardware. After being fired from a 1996 production of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Stanley’s career flagged, and he turned to short subjects and documentaries.
Stanley’s latest finds him in familiar territory, but this belated second act isn’t exactly seamless. Cinematographer Steve Annis bathes much of the film in an otherworldly light, but the script, which Stanley co-wrote with Scarlett Amaris, is kind of a mess. Lavinia’s dabbling in the occult is the kind of detail you might find in a ’90s exploitation movie, and it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Yet the cliched subplot does serve a purpose. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stanley explains that Lavinia’s witchcraft is just another element of a family that’s “out of touch with the world, just as so many modern neo-pagans are out of touch with the true rhythms of the land.”
For all the blood and guts, there is a brain behind Color Out of Space. It doesn’t really pay off until a final act that ramps up the biological horror, but, with its subtle cultural critique, this is one B-movie that’s smarter than it seems.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 24, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
CITIZEN K
Orson Welles’ 1942 classic Citizen Kane charted an empire built on American idealism and felled by hubris. Director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) hopes to tap that myth-making pedigree with his latest documentary, Citizen K, a profile of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The Russian businessman built a fortune following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but after benefiting from government corruption, emerged as an outspoken opponent of President Valdimir Putin — who sent him to a Siberian prison for a decade. Does this make Khodorkovsky, once one of his country’s wealthiest men, a national hero? Gibney tries to make that case, but while the film gets off to a moderately entertaining and informative start, the director doesn’t close the deal.
As Gibney explains, free enterprise opened up a Pandora’s box in 1990s Russia, with gangland-style slayings turning Moscow into the Wild West of the East. During this post-Communist period, Khodorkovsky founded the first Russian bank and made millions buying up government assets, including an oil company that, as he puts it, had been highly inefficient before he came along.
For the film’s first hour, Gibney navigates a complicated cast of characters to tell the story of Russian capitalism. Citizen K is heavy on interviews with Khodorkovsky, who’s currently living in London. Unfortunately, Khodorkovsky isn’t particularly charismatic, coming off like a mildly charming Bond villain whose nemeses include the somewhat more colorful journalists who tried to keep the public abreast of his high-level business deals. And while Gibney gets some drama out of K’s rise, his fall is less compelling. When the director shifts gears to Khodorkovsky’s deteriorating relations with Putin, the film loses focus. Gibney’s previous films include scathing exposés of Enron and Scientology, but here the director can neither bring Khodorkovsky to life as a villain nor convince us that he’s a hero.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 24, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
OLD MEN NEVER DIE
The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are taking this week off from their 24th annual Iranian Film Festival; fortunately, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is screening festival highlights you may have missed on the Mall. This 2019 comedy-drama — director Reza Jamali’s feature debut — depicts a remote Iranian village whose elders seem unable to shuffle off this mortal coil. Unfortunately for 100-year-old Aslan (Nader Mahdilou), such longevity is a curse; he’s tired of living and wants the Angel of Death to come visit, but he fears it doesn’t know where to find him. Cheered on by his fellow centenarians, Aslan tries to kill himself, repeatedly, but is foiled at every turn. Before he can drown in a steambath, for example, the soldiers who watch over the village rescue him. Aslan fears that his past as a hangman has come back to haunt him. As he tells the story, he hanged his own father, and Aslan comes to feel that his seeming invincibility is punishment for all the men he killed.
As Jamali explains in a recent interview, he worked as a photographer before turning to short films and traveled frequently in Azerbaijan, where he shot the film. His wide-angle shots of the green landscape evoke the films of Abbas Kiarostami, albeit with a deadpan humor. With their wizened faces perfectly captured by high-resolution digital cameras, Jamali’s elder actors seem to pass on decades of wisdom without even saying anything, and the film is strongest in silent moments that simply present the land and the people. But the pacing is erratic, and Jamali, who expanded the feature concept from a 10-minute short film, sometimes seems like he’s setting a remake of The Sunshine Boys in a Middle Eastern hamlet. Old Men Never Die is too dark to approach the cuteness factor of a late-career George Burns comedy, and the tonal shifts from suicide to slapstick and back again generally come across as heavy-handed and awkward.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, Jan. 28, at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT
“There’s too much fantasy in the movies, too much escapism.” This might sound like something one of director Martin Scorsese’s controversial dismissals of Marvel blockbusters, but actually it’s what director Lino Brocka once said about Filipino cinema. Brocka began making movies in 1970 but took a brief hiatus after President Ferdiand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972; when he returned to the craft, he did so with a more socially conscious aesthetic that culminated in this 1975 masterpiece.
Based on a 1967 novel by Edgardo Reyes, Manila in the Claws of Light tells the story of Julio (Bembol Roco), a fisherman who goes to Manila in search of his girlfriend Ligaya (Hilda Koronel) after she is snatched from their village and sold into prostitution. Coming from a rural area, Julio is an easy target in the bustling metropolis. Because he’s young and strong, it’s easy for him to find work on a construction site, but the foreman pockets a third of his salary. When Julio eventually finds Ligaya, her spirit has been broken by the big city — and by the Chinese businessman who forced her to bear his child.
For Roco, it was only his second screen appearance; he went on to some 200 more credits, including a supporting role in the 1982 Mel Gibson drama The Year of Living Dangerously. In Manila, he maintains a steadfast demeanor throughout all the indignities Julio endures, including his own stint as a prostitute. In an essay for the Criterion Collection, University of Illinois professor José B. Capino writes: “Suspending itself between social exposé and parable, Manila functions both as stylized reportage on the state of the city during the Marcos era and as a universal tale of life and death in a metropolis.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Jan. 26, at 6 p.m. at Suns Cinema. $10.
AFTER HOURS
The Washington Psychotronic Film Society has a reputation for trafficking in bad movies. But from no-budget American exploitations like The Brain From Planet Arous to arthouse extravaganzas like The Holy Mountain, the organizers’ selections favor what might best be described as an alternative cinema that’s not beholden to mainstream tastes. Which makes Martin Scorsese’s 1985 black comedy seem like an anomaly on the group’s schedule. After all, isn’t Scorsese an elder statesman of culturally sanctioned, good-for-you Art? But After Hours captured lower Manhattan at a crossroads of ‘80s conformity and artistic experimentation that’s a startling reminder of the city before it was overrun by cookie-cutter architecture and outlandish housing prices.
Griffin Dunne stars as Paul, who works an unchallenging data-entry job in east Midtown. In the space of a single, frantic night, he makes the acquaintance of vivid characters like the friendly but suspicious Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), her edgy artist roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), ice-cream truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara) and other downtown residents who lead Paul through what seem like several circles of hell. After Hours perfectly evokes a mood of ’80s promise and paranoia, and if watching it in a basement bar may not be the ideal viewing situation, the camaraderie of fellow psychotronic movie fans should provide an appropriately anxious atmosphere.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Jan. 27, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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