Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 July - 5 August

Back from Montreal, and though I am kind of movied out, just sitting at home, watching baseball, and catching up on my Fantasia reviews isn't going to be an option: It seems like I have to see Inception in order to understand half my Twitter feed, the Brattle's got a number of things that won't be hanging around, and so on.

• The Brattle opens Valhalla Rising for four days (although it only plays 10pm on Monday, because of DocYard and noir screenings). It's part of a weird cluster of Middle Ages-set movies coming out now, arriving at about the same time as Neil Marshall's Centurion (which I missed at Fantasia) and Christopher Smith's Black Death (which is pretty darn good). This one is directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and features a mute, one-eyed Viking confronting the spread of Christianity.
  
  The rest of the Brattle's programming is old-school vertical-calendar style: The DocYard presents Speaking in Tongues, a documentary on bilingual education on Monday evening. Tuesday is noir-day, with Born to Kill (also playing a Monday matinee) and the not-on-video Johnny Angel. Thursday is Best of the Aughts, featuring Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood for Love and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Note that the double feature of George Washington and Wendy and Lucy seems to be off on Wednesday, replaced by a "TBA". A preview of some sort?



• The one-week warning at Kendall Square is for Great Directors, a documentary about, well, pretty darn good filmmakers. Also opening is another documentary, Countdown to Zero



• The Coolidge is all hold-overs this week, but it's a pretty strong group: The Kids Are All Right and The Girl Who Played with Fire on film; Winter's Bone, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and Phyllis and Harold on video.
  
  The specials are midnight screenings of 28 Days Later on Friday and Saturday to close out their "The End Is [Pretty F---ing] Nigh" series and Psycho on the big screen Monday for the 50th anniversary.



• The Harvard Film Archive has five films by Nicholas Ray as part of a series from Friday - Monday; in continues next weekend. The Museum of Fine Arts has a mix of films, including screenings for The Roxbury Film Festival, which also has screenings of other films by and about people of color around town.



• Mainstream openings are Dinner for Schmucks, Charlie St. Cloud, and Cats & Dogs 2. All look OK, none of them will make me particularly sad if I miss them because they come and go as quick as Predators did (seriously, I was only gone three weeks!).
  
  This week's completely random opening at a mainstream theater is something called 71: Into the Fire or Pohwasogeuro at AMC Boston Common. It looks like a South Korean war film that only opened in its native land a month and a half ago, and is apparently not part of CJ Entertainment's plans to conquer the world. It's got low rankings on IMDB and I've never heard anything about in on Twitch or Subway Cinema. As a result, I'm curious.