Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 December 2011 - 8 December 2011

There is so close to nothing coming out this week that we might as well just link back to last week's. But, there's screenings at rep theaters and a few new releases, so let's see what's showing up before just looking at catching up.

• Some of the "new releases" are more along the lines of "very short runs", comprising just Friday and Saturday. The Brattle, for instance, will feature Tales from the Golden Age at 4pm and 7pm and Burke and Hare at 10pm and midnight. The former is an anthology film led by director Cristian Mungiu; like his 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, it focuses on life in Romania during the latter years of the Ceausescu regime with a darkly comic look at the everyday insanity of living in a dictatorship. The latter comes from John Landis; it's a frequently funny look at the infamous pair of Edinburgh "resurrection men", as played by Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis.
  
  Across the river, ArtsEmerson has the Boston release of The Color Wheel, in which director Alex Ross Perry and Carlen Altman star as a pair of bickering siblings who have a hopefully funny back-and-forth as the brother helps his sister move. It plays at 6:30pm on Friday and 8:45pm on Friday and Saturday, with Perry on hand for the Friday night shows.



• ArtsEmerson also starts their third leg of their Katharine Hepburn series (which could be subtitled "the spinster years") with a newly restored 35mm print of The African Queen on Saturday at 6:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. If you haven't seen this, you really should - it's Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart on the title boat in East Africa during World War II, a great adventure with great performances.
  
  Among other continuing programs, the Harvard Film Archive wraps up its tribute to one director and continues another. Friday and Saturday are the finales for Frederick Wiseman, Institution USA, featuring two very different films - on Friday night, Wiseman appears in person to present The Last Letter, a rare non-documentary (though the black-and-white, Expressionistic monologue of a woman describing the Nazis taking her village is hardly conventional), while Saturday features State Legislature, a three-and-a-half hour documentary on Idaho lawmakers and their staff at work.
  
  The other series is The Complete Henri-Georges Clouzot, and also includes a documentary and a narrative. The documentary is Sunday's The Mystery of Picasso, in which Clouzot shows the artist at work in 1956 (it will repeat next week). The narrative film on Monday is one Clouzot wrote but did not direct, Strangers in the House, which adapts a George Simenon novel about a corpse found in a small-town lawyer's attic. It plays with "Jean's Return", a short film that originally appeared as part of a 1949 anthology.
  
  With a new month, the MFA starts a new calendar, including The Boston Turkish Film Festival's Documentary & Short Film Competition and The Festival of Films from Greece. The former wraps up on Sunday, while the latter continues for a week after that; both include some acclaimed films. On Wednesday the 7th, they start a program of Architecture & Design on Film which will run for most of the month, starting with Eames: The Architect and Painter
  
  The Brattle will also have the latest installment in their CineCaché series on Monday the 5th, although as of this writing, the film has not yet been announced.



• The rest of the Brattle's schedule is some potentially fun special events: A live presentation of the Baltimore Annex Theater's production Threepenny Opera plays on Sunday at 8pm, and there are Harvard Book Store presentations on Monday (Mindy Kaling, sold out) and Wednesday (American's Test Kitchen) at 6pm. There's a new ski movie on Tuesday, with "Solitaire" offering a rare look at winter sports in South America's mountains. And on Wednesday and Thursday evening, a new Muppet movie in theaters is as good an excuse as any to show the original classic The Muppet Movie, with the added kick that the 8:30pm show on Wednesday and the 7pm show on Thursday are sing-alongs!
  
  If you'd like to see E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial on the big screen, you've got options: ArtsEmerson will be running it in the Paramount's Bright Screening Room on Saturday at 2pm, while the Coolidge has it playing midnights on Friday and Saturday as well as at 10am on Saturday morning. Note that ArtsEmerson is advertising the 2002 re-issue edition (notorious for some well-intentioned but unnecessary changes) while the Coolidge has the original 1982 cut... So, aside from a potentially more convenient time, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't see it at the Coolidge.
  
  The Coolidge also has a couple of other enjoyable presentations this weekend: The other midnight movie on Friday and Saturday is The Creature from the Black Lagoon in anaglyph 3D - red and blue glasses will be provided! People say those look silly, but honestly - an audience filled with people wearing those looks like it's about to have fun, compared to the serious room full of Matrix characters of today. Sunday morning's Talk Cinema screening is Michel Haznavicius's thoroughly wonderful The Artist, with conversation afterward.
  
  AMC Boston Common and Showcase Cinemas Revere will also be having weekend matinees of Pokemon the Movie: White - Victini and Zekrom on Saturday and Sunday. I'm guessing it's dubbed.



• Also worth noting at Boston Common and Revere, the showtimes for Moneyball and The Ides of March are set up for viewing as a double feature. Revere is selling single-admission tickets for the pair, but I don't know about Boston Common, but it's worth asking at the box office.
  
  Other than that, the multiplexes basically stay as-is this weekend, with just two screens turning over: Kendall Square picks up Tomboy for a one-week booking; it's about a ten-year old girl who, when her family moves to a new neighborhood outside Paris, is mistaken for a boy and opts to run with it, even though she's quite feminine at home. Boston Common's booking of Answers to Nothing is technically open-ended but since this mystery/ensemble drama is getting terrible reviews and also available on demand, it likely won't last long despite a cast of Dane Cook, Julie Benz, Erik Palladino, and Elizabeth Mitchell. (Okay, it probably doesn't deserve that sarcasm)

My plans - yikes - probably mainly involve double-dipping: Another go at The Artist and Hugo, especially while the latter is playing on the RPX screen at Fenway (it was gorgeous last weekend). Catch-up with My Week with Marilyn and maybe J. Edgar. See what CineCaché is. That sort of thing.

(There will be non-preview posts coming soon, honest!)