Fritz Karl and Clare-Hope Ashitey star in Black Brown White. Photograph courtesy of Allegro Film.

Tuesday, January 24

FILM: The 20th annual Film Neu festival, a showcase of German, Swiss, and Austrian films, returns to E Street Cinema. In today’s screening of Black Brown White, a truck driver aids a young Nigerian woman on the run. Complimentary Austrian treats will be served between screenings. With English subtitles. Tickets ($11) can be purchased at the box office. 7 and 9:15 PM.

Gina Carano in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, opening tomorrow. Photograph courtesy of Relativity Media.

Haywire

Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest—one of the dizzying flurry of films he’s making as he barrels headlong toward his self-imposed retirement in 2013—is part quiet black-ops spy thriller and part ’80s-style action showcase. Fans of The Limey’s contemplative revenge story will find plenty to like here, as will those who enjoy crowd-pleasing, Ocean’s 11–mode Soderbergh, though anyone angling for just one or the other may be a little disappointed. Like any good ’80s franchise, this film is centered on a formidably talented physical presence—in this case, former Muay Thai and mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano. Carano isn’t trained as an actor, and doesn’t really need to be; Soderbergh only needs her to be tough and to be able to beat up a lot of people in a plot that disguises itself as a complex CIA-mercenary double-cross piece before simplifying things into a more singularly focused attack-and-retaliation vengeance study. The awkward hoops in place to keep the story on the rails are easily forgiven thanks to Soderbergh’s fantastic visual style and the eye-popping fight choreography he fills those frames with.

View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at a number of area theaters.

Corman’s World, about producer Roger Corman, opens tomorrow at West End Cinema. Photograph courtesy of Anchor Bay Films.

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, plus three Corman classics

Roger Corman, hyperprolific producer of exactly the kind of low-budget, low-concept, high-fun trash that the Motion Picture Academy turns up its nose at during Oscar season, received an Academy Award in 2010. You may not remember it, as he didn’t get up onstage to swelling music during a broadcast that went out to hundreds of millions, but rather received an honorary Oscar in the Academy’s separate Board of Governors ceremony. It seems appropriate that Hollywood should honor him away from the spotlight. Corman produced and/or directed nearly 400 films in his career, and has had an unquantifiably massive impact on the film industry—this is, after all, the man who gave first big breaks to the likes of Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jonathan Demme, to name just a few. Yet he could probably walk down the street in any city in America without a second glance from all but the most ardent film nerd. Alex Stapleton’s documentary gathers many of those folks to talk about Corman’s legacy, and what makes him such a unique and underappreciated figure in cinema.

The film opens at West End Cinema this weekend, and the venue is also using the opportunity to screen a few of Corman’s classics as late-night fare Friday through Sunday. That starts tomorrow night with one of the number of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations he made with Vincent Price, Fall of the House of Usher. Saturday it’s Little Shop of Horrors, the original film that inspired the musical that inspired the musical film, both of which are, like many of the things Corman is responsible for, much more well known than their inspiration. It’s also a prime example of Corman’s legendary thrift: Little Shop was shot in just two days, on film sets left over from another production, for $30,000. Finally, Sunday night West End will have The Terror, a fun bit of low-budget gothic horror from 1963 that’s perhaps most notable for its incredible collection of talent: The film starsBoris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson, and Corman handed over directorial reins for sections of the film to Nicholson, Coppola, Jack Hill, and Monte Hellman, surely the most impressive roster of uncredited directors in the history of cinema.

View the trailer for Corman’s World. Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood opens tomorrow at West End Cinema. Photograph courtesy of Soda Pictures.

Norwegian Wood

The work of popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami has only been adapted to film on a few occasions, and none of those adaptations have achieved significant international success. Perhaps it’s the surreal qualities that make them resistant to easy adaptation, or the fact that so much in Murakami’s stories rests between the lines: Simple translations of the plot elements can’t necessarily capture the tone of his work. French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung has taken on one of Murakami’s most accessible works in Norwegian Wood, likely the highest-profile of those adaptations to date. That accessibility might make it a more likely candidate for adaptation, but given the popularity of the book, which skyrocketed the author to fame, it also probably subjects it to greater scrutiny from fans.

The plot centers on a Tokyo college student in the 1960s who’s dealing with the recent suicide of a friend, as he falls in love with two young women who are entirely different in personality, and who represent a choice he has to make between the grief of his past and the potential hope of the future. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who also wrote the fantastic music for There Will Be Blood, provides the score.

View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

Josette Day and Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast. Photograph courtesy of Criterion.

War Horse

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, adapted from a hit play that was adapted from a children’s book, is essentially a World War I spin on Black Beauty: Our protagonist is the horse, who gets passed from owner to owner, accumulating different stories and experiences wherever he ends up. In this case, brown stallion Joey makes his way from the picturesque hills and farms of southwest England to the French countryside as a cavalry horse to a quiet fruit farm, and then back into the fray as an expendable work horse towing heavy artillery for the Kaiser’s army. The film has many things to recommend it, including some of the most stunning battlefield scenes from Spielberg since Saving Private Ryan. But it’s also a tonal mess, moving from borderline silly childish comedy in its opening scenes—which recall the saccharine artificiality of ’50s and ’60s live-action Disney features—to some truly harrowing war sequences. The first half hour seems like a movie for kids, but some young ones are going to find the things that happen to Joey in the latter half to be too intense, particularly since Spielberg doesn’t really pull punches when in wartime mode. This is a film being tossed around as a big Oscar contender, and it effectively fits plenty of Oscar formulas, with sweeping melodrama and plenty of heartstring tugging. It’s an interesting film to watch if only to see Spielberg try—and ultimately fail—to make these different moods work together.

View the trailer. Opens Sunday at many area theaters.

Rooney Mara stars in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Daniel Craig (not pictured). Photograph by Baldur Bragason courtesy Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
One of the most anticipated releases of the holiday season is out this Tuesday, and if you need a break from happy holiday music at the mall and cozy heart-warming Yuletide commercials on television, David Fincher has (as it was billed in the bracing first trailer released over the summer) the “feel-bad movie of Christmas” you’ve been looking for. The story follows the paths of a magazine publisher (Daniel Craig) investigating dark events in the past of an elderly billionaire (Christopher Plummer); and a computer hacker (Rooney Mara) with a shadowy past of her own, who carries out her own investigation of Craig’s character before eventually joining forces with him to uncover a decades-old crime.

Normally, a US remake of a foreign film that was released only a couple of years ago, and that was well liked by fans of the hugely popular series of books, would be cause for a fair amount of cashing-in skepticism. After all, when the Swedish version was released in 2009, Noomi Rapace became an international star on the strength of her glowering, tough-as-nails performance. Why would anyone want to try to supplant that portrayal? But Fincher, a modern master of the moody, twisting thriller (he even managed to make a flick about Facebook into a dark tale of betrayal) seems like the perfect choice to put his stamp on this material. The brief clips in that trailer, accompanied by Trent Reznor’s music, give hope that this is one remake that could be just as good as or better than the previous version.

View the trailer. Opens Tuesday at theaters across the area.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
This is the second adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 novel about frequent le Carré protagonist George Smiley, a British intelligence agent trying to locate a mole within his agency after being forced into early retirement. The previous iteration was a 1979 BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness in the Smiley role, and watching Tomas Alfredson’s new version, it’s easy to see why the BBC version ran nearly six hours: There’s a lot of story here. Alfredson’s overstuffed film teeters right on the edge of too much information, as a large cast of characters come in and out of Smiley’s investigation (the lead role here taken by a fantastic Gary Oldman), and the timeline hops around between the present and various flashbacks to different points in the past. There are so many places where it would be easy for a director to lose control of this material, or allow it to become confusing or unwieldy. Alfredson keeps laserlike focus throughout, creating a grim vision of Cold War–era Europe so vivid that one can almost smell the stale cigarette smoke wafting off the upholstery. There’s zero pandering or simplification here; Alfredson and the film’s writers don’t allow for the viewer’s attention straying for even a moment. Luckily, the movie they’ve created is too engrossing to look away from.

View the trailer. Opens Friday at Bethesda Row.