Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw
Directed by Rick Goldsmith

“There are days I wake up and I can’t move” is not something you expect to hear from the “female Michael Jordan”—she’s not talking about being physically injured or going overboard with the exercise. In Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw, the titular player and erstwhile Washington Mystic is talking about clinical depression. But back when she first became a pro, no one knew what Holdsclaw was going through, perhaps not even herself: As she says, the mentally ill need to be vulnerable and ask for help, the opposite of how athletes are trained to act. Mind/Game is full of moments that will be familiar to depressives (“How can you be sad?”); missteps include its narration turning into a weird, medical 411 toward the end as well as the script’s coyness about Holdsclaw being an openly gay woman. Her story, however, of becoming a spokeswoman for mental illness and a school trainer (‘ball, plus a kick of psychology) is heartening. And though there is nothing funny about Holdsclaw’s situation, D.C. fans will have to laugh when her agent describes her first season with the Mystics: “She experienced losing at a level she had never experienced before.” 

Screens Thursday, March 10 at 6:15 p.m. at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Internet Junkie
Directed by Alexander Katzowicz

Internet Junkie is a wannabe message movie full of pedants, dipshits, and assholes who are—wait for it—glued to their screens. Allegedly, that is. The film’s world is so utterly commonplace that you imagine it must take its premise and speculate on its consequences (as if we weren’t already witnessing them) or project a future in which humans are even more digitally dependent and therefore more isolated, a la Her. Instead, it just throws a bunch of barely identified characters on the screen, gives them storylines that aren’t always dependent on computers, and confuses you for 92 minutes. Deadpool-like, there’s the dude who’s cheating on his girlfriends. The kid who locks himself in his room typing with one hand. The mom who ignores him. The PYT who walks around town and throws herself at men, with zero technology involved. Who are these people? The subplots might as well be discrete shorts, minus their purported link and subsequent viewer irritation.

Screens Friday, March 11 at 9:15 p.m. at the Navy Memorial Presidents Room.