Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 June 2011 -16 June 2011

Thursday was weird, hot enough to set your clothes on fire and rainy enough to put them out. It looks like this weekend will mostly be going with the rain, but both of those are valid reasons to spend the afternoon in climate-controlled theaters. It does sort of effect what movies to see and where, though - is it worth making the hike to Reading if it means standing in the rain to catch a bus?

• I may wind up doing that, weather permitting; it's been a while since I've hit a movie up on the genuine IMAX screen at the furniture store, and there's something delightfully perverse about seeing a movie by the name of Super 8 blown up to gigantic size. I'm down for it anyway - even if his main talent is surrounding himself with good people, J.J. Abrams has earned a lot of goodwill with Mission: Impossible 3, Star Trek, Alias, and Fringe, and the idea of him doing an Spielberg-style boys' adventure with the man himself looking over his shoulder is an appealing one.
  
  The other thing opening on a bunch of screens is Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer. It's based on a series of kids' chapter books, and beyond that and Heather Graham being in it, I know about zero, but that's okay, because it's not really for me, is it? Still, considering it opens against Super 8, there's something telling about that - although Super 8 and the movies that inspired it are about kids and mainly targeted toward young boys, they're for everybody, whereas this seems very targeted.



• Those are the big openings; the big expansion is Tree Of Life, which picks up a couple screens at Boston Common and one at the Coolidge after being exclusively at Kendall Square for a week. Also playing the Coolidge on Friday and Saturday are midnight showings of Wet Hot American Summer, which will be preceded by roasted marshmallows in the parking lot and an on-stage talent show. The other special events this week aren't movies: Sunday morning (12 June) features a "Europe's Grand Operas" presentation of The Magic Flute, and Cuban folk musician Carlos Varela will be doing a show on Thursday (16 June)



• Kendall Square continues to open things on multiple screens, this week giving two to Beginners, a decent-looking movie with Ewan McGregor as a man shocked when his elderly father (played by Christopher Plummer) comes out to him. Plummer looks like he's going to be fantastic in this role. Another unconventional parent is the subject of the one-week booking, The First Beautiful Thing, in which a middle-aged teacher returns home to deal with his dying, eccentric mother.



• ArtsEmerson is not doing movies every weekend during the summer break, but they've got an excellent Noir Nights program going on this weekend with a half-dozen classic crime films not available on DVD. Friday night's program is a Ray Milland double feature with Victorian "gaslight" noir So Evil My Love at 7pm and Faust story Alias Nick Beal at 9pm; Saturday night is a "Hand of Justice" double feature that features Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, and Brian Keith in Phil Karlson's Tight Spot at 7pm and Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt at 9pm; Reasonable Doubt repeats Sunday at 5:30pm with Olivia de Haviland (x2!) in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror at 7:15pm. I missed Dark Mirror on Thursday, but did see Cry of the City, and if it's a fair representation, the prints are gorgeous.



• The Brattle is kind of like a regular theater this week, with an all-week booking of Nostalgia for the Light, in which Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán looks at two quests for knowledge in the Atacama desert: Astronomers who use the spectacularly clear skies to study the stars, and widows searching for "disappeared" political prisoners whose remains may be mummified at the base of the mountains.
  
  For something a little more fantastical, there are "Hooked on Who" screenings of Doctor Who episodes at 9:30pm all weekend - Tom Baker in "Terror of the Zygons" on Friday, David Tennant in "The Hand of Fear" and "School Reunion" on Saturday, and Matt Smith in "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Doctor's Wife" on Sunday.



• Harvard Film Archive continues their The Radical Visions of Jerzy Skolimowski program this weekend with five more films from the Polish New Wave director, although his visit to Cambridge has apparently been cancelled. With Q&A time no longer necessary, the HFA has added two free screenings: Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water runs Saturday at 9pm, and (presumably) Skolimowski's version of Torrents of Spring runs Sunday at 9pm.



• Art on Film continues to continue at the MFA this week, with more screenings of Art Safari, The Woodmans, and First Face: The Buck Starts Here scattered through the weekend and Wednesday (the 15th). New movies enter the rotation then - Women Art Revolution on Wednesday and the amazing-looking hand-painting-animated Mia and the Migoo on Thursday.



• The second-run shuffle this week basically involves two movies - Jane Eyre and Win Win moving from the Somerville Theatre to the Arlington Capitol. Which I guess makes them third-run.



• Warning for Bollywood fans: Ready will be hanging around for a couple shows daily at Fresh Pond during the weekend, but will only be playing 4:30pm matinees Monday-Thursday as Telegu-language film Bhadrinath takes many prime showtimes.

My plans: Well, I've already bought a bunch of tickets for the noir shows at Emerson, so that's what I'll be doing for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Already being downtown, that will give me good reason to hit up Yellowbrickroad Friday at midnight and some IMAX stuff at the Aquarium and Science Museum at other points. As mentioned before, Super 8 gets fit in somewhere, the only question being where and when. And then... catch-up and maybe a preview at some point.