Saturday: Transformer’s Heartbreakers Ball at the Line Hotel

Transformer’s 7th Annual Heartbreakers Ball returns this year at D.C.’s Line Hotel in Adams Morgan. Since its 2017 launch, the event has worked to spotlight emerging artists in the District. The Heartbreakers Ball largely centers around debuting new works from Transformer’s FlatFile Program, a growing collection of small works from D.C. artists, each one in 2D format, sized 16-by-20 inches or smaller, and priced at $500 and below. Attendees will be able to shop the collection in person. The ball has changed venue and format every year, but it is always held close to Valentine’s Day so as to “warm hearts and encourage connection with emerging visual art and artists.” As one of Transformer’s major fundraising events, the ball helps to sustain the local gallery’s self-proclaimed mission to “connect, elevate, and serve a diversity of emerging artists and arts leaders.” Love Bazaar, this year’s event, is free to the public and will feature a LOVE photo booth from artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer. Thalhammer painted her original “LOVE” mural in Blagden Alley, kickstarting her mission to use the rainbow message to communicate a community-wide sense of love, hope, and strength. SUNSOAKED Tarot card readings will be offered by local creative Briget Heidmous for a sliding-scale price, and DJ Kerim plays. Love Bazaar runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Feb. 11 at the Line DC, 2468 Champlain St. NW. transformerdc.org. Free with RSVP. —Camila Bailey 

Sunday, Monday, Wednesday: RRR at the AFI Silver Theatre

You may well be skeptical about spending Super Bowl afternoon with a three-hour historical epic about India’s fight for independence from British rule—I mean, how much fun can that be? But chances are, it’ll be more exciting than the big game. After all, director S. S. Rajamouli’s achievements also include a wild musical fantasy about a thwarted lover who’s killed and gets reincarnated as a fly (2012’s Eega). Sure, you can watch this Oscar-nominated three-hour epic on Netflix—even on your phone, if you so desire. But this is a movie that needs to be seen on the biggest possible screen, and we can thank AFI Silver for bringing this rip-roaring spectacle to their largest auditorium. The surprise Tollywood (Telugu-language) sensation of 2022 is loosely based on a pair of real revolutionaries in the battle of India’s independence from British rule. But who needs facts when you’ve got diametrically opposed buddies N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan Teja fighting with CGI animals—and by fighting with them, we mean herding all the animals of the forest and then letting them loose on agents of the British Raj, killing hundreds. It’s as if a drug-fueled David Lean directed a feature-length Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon that’s viciously anti-British—and happens to be a big-budget musical production that will catch you humming nationalistic propaganda in a language you don’t understand. Cinema, at its peak, communicates something to audiences, and Rajamouli is a shameless master at getting you to care about these people and cheer them on as they destroy the mustachioed British devils. At the end of RRR, when you finally catch your breath, you’ll probably want to get right back in line to take that roller-coaster ride one more time. You have three chances next week. RRR screens at 3 p.m. on Feb. 12, 3:15 p.m on Feb. 13., and 3:15 p.m on Feb. 15. at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. silver.afi.com. $11–$13.—Pat Padua

Tuesday: Sabrina at E Street Cinema

Many of Audrey Hepburn’s breezy romantic comedies—Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Funny Face, Roman Holiday, Charade, Paris When It Sizzles—are delightful Valentine’s confections: rich, sweet, and there’s always room for one more. This includes Billy Wilder’s 1954 classic Sabrina, a witty and bewildering love-triangle starring Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, with Hepburn as the shared love interest between brothers with less in common than Cain and Abel. Bogart, playing against type as a romantic lead, stars as the elder workaholic brother of the incredibly wealthy Larabee family, while Holden is the golden-haired playboy younger brother. While Holden as David is a love-’em-and-leave-’em heartbreaker, Bogie’s serious Linus is too busy running the family business. But they both fall for Hepburn’s Sabrina Fairchild. The daughter of the family’s chauffeur, Sabrina was a tomboy that both brothers completely ignored. But now, recently returned from finishing school in Paris, the ugly duckling has transformed into a swan with a chic new haircut, tony accent, sophisticated tastes, and divine dresses designed by Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy. Sure, Bogie’s 30-year age gap with Hepburn is a bit icky and behind the scenes, there was a ton of drama and somehow both not much and too much love. (Hepburn and Holden had a brief but passionate affair; Holden’s alcoholism was hindering his performance and showing up on set; and Bogart was reportedly feeling both miscast and resentful that his own beloved Lauren Bacall wasn’t starring in the title role.) None of that hinders the movie, which has Wilder’s trademark wit, charm, and pizzazz. Still relatively new to Hollywood (her debut in Roman Holiday was the previous year), Hepburn earned both an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA (British Academy Film Awards) for her star-making turn as the Long Island Cinderella, firmly establishing her career as the go-to romantic leading lady. Sabrina plays at 7 p.m. on Feb. 14 at Landmark’s E Street Cinema, 555 11th St. NW. landmarktheatres.com. $7. —Colleen Kennedy

Ongoing: Jenny Wu’s Ai Yo! at Morton Fine Art Gallery

Is it architecture? Or painting? Perhaps some tapestry of the two? And does genre even matter? What is this instinct to sort, to categorize? Is it intrinsically human, or an invented construction? These are some of the many questions prompted by Jenny Wu’s colorful and layered pieces, on view this month at Morton Fine Art. Wu’s collection, titled Ai Yo!, is both a celebration of multiplicities and a reflection of liminality. Like many artists, Wu begins with a wood panel canvas and paint. But she immediately diverges. Like a pastry chef or chocolatier, Wu pours liquid latex paint into silicone molds repeatedly over extended periods of time until she’s built her own new kinds of ‘paint chips.’ She splices them together with her precise, yet whimsical hand, to reveal brilliantly colored miniature confections, each barring their own signature markings. She then assembles these to create her cheekily titled works (yet another invitation for complexity), such as “Hello to That One Person Who Nods Along Encouragingly During Presentations” or “Spent $50.4 Million on TV Ads to Brag About Giving Local Businesses A Total of $100,000.” In one piece, titled “Too Heavy to Carry to the British Museum,” hot pink and tangerine strips (think sour rainbow candies) stacked like books leave enough negative space for the glossy yellow underlayer to shine through. And in another joyful, defiant, complicated piece, lavender, turquoise, and bubblegum paint layers fit snugly next to each other, like sugar-high kids on a Friday night sleepover. When you step back, the interplaying modules evoke a well-loved floor rug, or a cross section of some distant technicolor planet’s malted core. Another title Wu selected reads: “It’s Not Finished But I Am.” The exhibit is on view through March 8 at Morton Fine Art Gallery, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. Free, by appointment. —Emma Francois

Ongoing: Two exhibits at at National Academy of Sciences

It’s not widely known, but for the past 60 years, the federal government has been sponsoring artists to document and provide perspective on the NASA space program. The artists who have taken Uncle Sam up on the offer have included some top-tier names, such as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, William Wegman, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kehinde Wiley; their works, as well as an assortment of pieces by lesser-known artists, are on display in the exhibit Launching the Future: Looking Back to Look Forward at the National Academy of Sciences. Some of the works are old-school: Paul Calle’s graphite sketch of two Gemini astronauts; Henry Casselli’s contemplative portrait of John Glenn; Wilson Hurley’s painting of the Viking spacecraft approaching Mars; and a pair of paintings of experimental aircraft by Stan Stokes. Of the more famous artists, the standouts include Warhol, who transformed a famous image of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon into one of his trademark pink-and-yellow-hued pop-art diptychs; Wegman’s signature Weimaraner pups posing as astronauts; and a trophy for a video awards show designed by Wiley that features (deep breath) a silver cartoon astronaut ringed by vines and plopping an MTV flag into the ground. Separately, and in a cooler vein, the NAS is exhibiting Altar, a tall, gold-hued sculpture by Indian American artist Smriti Keshari that plays with themes of artificial intelligence by memorializing a matrix of Python coding that helped call into question human intellectual superiority over machines. Launching the Future runs through March 1 and Altar is on display through Sept. 15 at the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave. NW. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. cpnas.org. Free. —Louis Jacobson