Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 November - 18 November

New Danny Boyle this weekend! Regal opens their response to AMC Boston Common's IMAX-branded screen at Fenway! Tons of documentaries at Kendall Square! The Brattle and Coolidge splitting a small audience!

• As I mentioned about a month ago, Regal Fenway 13 has actually been a 12-plex for the past few weeks as Regal upgrades one of their two larger screens to something they're calling "Regal Premium Experience", or RPX. It looks like it's meant to be something roughly equivalent to the digital IMAX ("Liemax") screen at Boston Common, with digital projection and 3-D on a screen much larger and closer to the audience than is typical. Of course, there's a price difference - $15.00 as opposed to the usual $11.50 in the evening, and apparently the same price during the day (when the price is usually $9.00). No word yet on whether there will be additional surcharges for 3-D. Interestingly, Regal has been pushing the sound quality in the theater harder that the picture quality, though I guess that's not surprising - it was already a good-sized screen, so it's hard to see how going digital rather than 35mm will be an improvement.
  
  The movie they're opening with is Unstoppable, Tony Scott's new runaway train film with Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, and Rosario Dawson. It looks like it could be fun, although I'm curious to see how they make an entire movie out of it. The other mainstream openings are Skyline, the second nifty-looking alien invasion movie done on a budget by guys best known for their special effects work in as many weeks, and Morning Glory, which looks cute, although I never thought I'd see Harrison Ford as a supporting actor in a Rachel McAdams comedy.



• Strangely, the multiplexes aren't opening 127 Hours wide this week, although it looks pretty good - Danny Boyle directing James Franco in a very cool looking movie that has a nifty trailer and is reportedly intense enough that people are reported to have passed out while watching it at festivals. It's only opening at the Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner theaters, although it will probably expand in a couple weeks.
  
  Kendall Square also opens four other movies, including three documentaries - Cool It, about alternative methods for dealing with global warming; Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which appears to depict both his attempts to handle the financial crisis and the scandal that took him down; and Tibet in Song, whose title is fairly self-explanatory. That's the one with the one-week-warning, and director Ngawang Choephel will be present for the 7:10pm show on Friday. The one-week warning likely also applies to Enter the Void, the latest from Gaspar Noe. He directed Irreversible, and his new film looks to be every bit the punishing mindbender as his previous work. Landmark is apparently serious about only adults getting in; not only are they treating it as an NC-17 film, but it's splitting a screen with Tibet in Song.



• The other film opening at the Coolidge is Boxing Gym, which will be opening in one of the video rooms. It is, as the title implies, a look at the regulars at Austin's Lord's Gym, and it's directed by Frederick Wiseman, who has made a great may documentaries in his day and is still cranking them out at the age of eighty. The movie also opens at the Brattle theater, and this afternoon and evening (Friday 12 November 2010), Wiseman will prove he's not slowing down by doing introductions at both locations - 7pm at the Brattle, and 4:40 and 9:20 at the Coolidge. I'm not sure how much Q&A there will be - even with the theaters just a couple miles apart, going back and forth will likely be tight. It's kind of surprising both are opening the film; hopefully they don't split a niche audience too badly.
  
  The Coolidge offers some special features - "Spike & Mike's Twisted Festival of Animation" returns for a second weekend of midnights, and The Room joins it on Saturday. Sunday Morning, they have a pair of screenings - a program of kids' shorts at 10:30, and German film Gravity at 11:00am. Monday night they have a live show, the "One-Man Star Wars Trilogy".
  
  The Brattle has a couple of documentary specials of their own: Enemies of the People, the much-awarded documentary about the Cambodian Killing Fields, will have single matinees Friday (4:30pm) and Saturday (1:00pm), with the director present on Friday. Sunday at 3pm, there is a screening of The Things We Carry, presented by the Boston Asian American Film Festival.



• If you missed Four Lions at the Kendall, it moves over the Somerville Theatre this weekend, where it will share a screen with Hereafter. It will probably only last one more week, but that's still seven more days to see a very funny movie. Also opening at Somerville - albeit in the video screening room next to the Museum of Bad Art - is BearCity. Apparently, this is a Sex and the City-inspired romantic comedy taking place in New York's "bear" scene. If you know what that is, you probably also know whether this sounds like a good idea to you or not.



• The Harvard Film Archive has guests again this weekend, but at least one is an order of magnitude less obscure than usual. Elaine May will be on-hand Friday and Saturday night, presenting Mikey and Nicky on Friday and Ishtar on Saturday. Yes, that's right, you can see Ishtar and demand explanations! She's not listed as hanging around for Sunday, but the Archive has two more of her films on tap that evening, A New Leaf and the original The Heartbreak Kid.
  
  On Monday, Harun Farocki returns with a pair of films, the short "I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts" and the featurette Images of the World and the Inscription of War, his best-known work according the the HFA website. The Archive also hosts a pair of free VES screenings, Spirit of the Beehive on Tuesday and Black Girl on Wednesday.



• For the next couple of weeks, Emerson's main stage features what looks like an amazing bit of puppet theater, "Petrushka", set to music by Igor Stravinsky, and thier film programming this weekend ties in. Saturday afternoon, there is Animation Brigade: Puppet Animation Shorts Program, an hour of family-friiendly films from Latvia. Saturday evening features a pair of Stravinsky documentaries from the mind-1960s: Stravinsky and A Stravinsky Portrait. Also playing Saturday evening (as well as Sunday evening) is Ken Russell's Stravinsky biopic, The Music Lovers, which I gather is not quite so exaggerated as Lisztomania!.
  
  Like the Brattle, Emerson is also presenting a couple films with the Boston Asian American Film Festival this weekend: Aoki, a documentary of Japanese-American Richard Aoki, who was one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party, runs Friday night. After that, they will be running "Got Shorts?", a group of seven films that runs a total of about 90 minutes.



• And, finally, the MFA wraps up its Boston Jewish Film Festival screenings on Sunday with Just Like Home and My Peristroika.