DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Christmas Holiday

The AFI is in the midst of their annual collection of holiday films, which includes the usual suspects like Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Jim Henson's Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. (For those of you who can't get enough of Muppet-ized Christmas stories, the Smithsonian's Discovery Theater is screening A Muppet Family Christmas this weekend.) They have, however, snuck one oddball title into the mix, a rarely seen Robert Siodmak film noir from 1944, Christmas Holiday.

The generic title does no favors for this film, which takes place around Christmas and features one long scene in a midnight mass, but otherwise has little to do with the holiday. Siodmak directs a script by Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, with many of the narrative complexities and flashbacks that typified his work on Welles' film. The story, based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel follows an unlucky-in-love soldier who meets up with a prostitute for an evening of churchgoing and late-night walks, during which she relates to him the story of her ne'er-do-well jailbird husband. The film is remarkable for casting two well known song-and-dancers, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, as the prostitute and the husband. The former just gets a couple of songs in the cathouse, while the latter sings not a note, and dances not a step. Both actors show darker sides they rarely, if ever, showed in the rest of their careers. Merry Christmas!

There's a trailer in this clip, but you'll want to skip ahead to the 3:07 mark to avoid spoilers. For some reason, whoever posted the clip included final three minutes of the movie ahead of the trailer.

Christmas Holiday screens Saturday-Monday at the AFI while the rest of their holiday programming continues through Christmas Eve.

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Recovered Treasure: UCLA's Festival of Preservation

For fifteen years, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has been dedicated to preserving the moving image, taking often deteriorating original materials from both rare and well known works and transferring them to more stable media. Ever since they started preservation activities in 1995, they also presented film festivals featuring works from their archives. This year, for the first time, they're taking that show on the road, and the National Gallery is currently hosting a number of screenings associated with the festival. Those screenings continue through the end of the month, and this weekend there are four films. Saturday there's a double feature of Frank Borzage directed films from the early 30s, and on Sunday there's a film noir double shot with dark tales from noir masters Edward G. Ulmer and Fritz Lang.

The Festival has three programs this weekend at the National Gallery, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Free.

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The Little Match Girl

Just in case you didn't get enough of the darker side of the holiday with the AFI's offering at the start of today's column, the National Gallery is screening this early Renoir silent, based on the classic Hans Christian Andersen story. In it, a young girl sells matches on the street during the holiday season to help support her family, and would rather freeze to death than face her father's wrath if she comes home without any money. As she passes out from the cold, she enters into a dream that allows Renoir to display his remarkable skill, even at this early stage in his career, at creating a magical fantasy world.

Saturday at 1 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.

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Broken Embraces

Pedro Almodóvar's latest is a love letter to the movies, and to the entire process of creation, told via an often tension-filled thriller. The more mysterious aspects of the script take a while to unfold, just as it takes some time for the director's muse Penélope Cruz to establish herself as the film's lead character. The story, told mostly in flashback, is of an aspiring actress (Cruz) who gets her first film role thanks to the power of her rich older husband. In the present, the storyteller is her director, a blind man who is now only a screenwriter due to the loss of his vision. The circumstances under which he lost his sight, how his life intertwines with that of the wealthy financier, and the mysterious appearance of that man's son in the director's life after many years are all part of an engaging puzzle that Almodóvar assembles slowly, and with his usual elegance. Some of the twists feel a little forced, and the end feels a little empty, falling short of the payoff the slow build seemed to promise. Still, that certain magic that happens any time Almodóvar points his camera at Penelope Cruz is as evident as ever here, as is the director's deceptively casual mastery of drawing the viewer into his unique stories.

View the trailer.

Opens tomorrow at E Street.

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Avatar

I was a skeptic. There was over a decade's worth of lingering bad taste in my mouth from my dislike of Titanic. There are the trailers and commercials that just look silly and visually flat. Blue-skinned aliens that were drawing comparisons to unholy unions of Jar Jar Binks and the smurfs. Heady proclamations from director James Cameron that he was going to change the face of movies. It all left me sitting in my seat prior to seeing Avatar expecting a big failure with an even bigger price tag. That's a lot of pessimism to overcome, but the fact is that Avatar really is a game changer. No, it's not perfect. Far from it. It's overlong, the script is hopelessly clunky, the characters aren't nearly as vivid as those in the director's strongest work in Aliens and the first two Terminators. But it delivers what, for many years, Cameron did better than nearly anyone else: thrilling sci-fi action with eye-popping, extraordinary visuals. Forget what the trailers look like — this isn't a movie where 3D is an enhancement to the moviegoing experience. It's as essential to the film as technicolor was to The Wizard of Oz. Dismissing this movie based on a 2D trailer is like writing off The Lord of the Rings based on a two minute clip viewed on an old, static-plagued 13-inch TV with broken vertical hold. The difference really is that great. Sitting in a theater with those glasses on, you'll see a movie like nothing else you've ever experienced.

Don't bother viewing the trailer. See it in a theater.

Opens tomorrow (or, tonight at midnight) at most area theaters. For those of you wanting to see it in IMAX, the Smithsonian hasn't announced if or when they'll be screening it either in town or out in Chantilly. Which only leaves the fake IMAX screen in Alexandria, which will be showing it.

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