Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 25 May 2012 - 31 May 2012

Long weekend coming up, and it looks like it's not going to rain! Which is good, because I've got baseball I want to see and heavy rain stinks for pedestrians trying to get to movies.

• Main opening this week: Men In Black 3, ten years after the not-really-good MIB 2, and... man, have both Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith been keeping a low profile lately. Maybe that's why this seems to be sneaking into theaters, despite opening for a holiday weekend in 3D (postconverted). Or maybe The Avengers has just been a juggernaut blocking out all slightly-less-huge movies (fun fact - Men In Black 3 is technically also a Marvel movie, as they purchased publisher Malibu back in the 1990s, but I don't think they've done anything with the property in fifteen years). Opens at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common in both 3D and 2D. It gets the Imax-branded screen at Harvard Square, but the furniture stores give it a pass.
  
  Also opening at the multiplexes: Chernobyl Diaries, a horror movie set in the area around the Soviet nuclear reactor whose meltdown left miles of uninhabitable land on all sides. Expect mutants! Plays the Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway.



• A couple of movies that played IFFBoston take up residence at the Kendall Square Cinema. I can heartily recommend the one-week booking, I Wish, the new film from Hirokazu Kore-eda; it follows a pair of young brothers whose parents divorce has left them living at cities on the opposite end of Japan's southern island, on a quest to make a wish at the point where the bullet trains pass each other. The also pick up Polisse (which I missed because Brian told me this booking would happen, a French drama about a reporter observing the Child Protective Unit within the Paris police. Also in French is Where Do We Go Now?, a comedy about a group of Lebanese women trying to build bridges in their village.
  
  They're also starting to run The Room at 10pm on the last Saturday of every month, but, c'mon, that is the Coolidge's thing (or was, since it's not on their schedule), and you'd think that a theater with the same ownership as Magnet Films could dig out their own wacky cult movies.



• The Coolidge's own late-night show this weekend is Wayne's World, one of the relatively few movies based on a Saturday Night Live sketch that turned out to be a critical and popular success. It's in the big theater at 11:59 on both Friday and Saturday. And that, believe it or not, seems to be the entirety of their special events this week, with the program apparently staying pretty much the same until it turns over next Friday.



• The Brattle continues their Reunion Weekend through Monday to coincide with Harvard's reunion/homecoming. That means double features and late shows of movies celebrating their 25th (Spaceballs & The Princess Bride on Friday, Hellraiser Saturday, Predator Sunday), 50th (Vivre Sa Vie & Jules and Jim on Saturday and The Trial & Lolita on Monday), and 75th (A Day at the Races & Easy Living on Sunday) Anniversaries. Predator is listed as digital, with the rest on 35mm.
  
  During the week, they have a quick group of movies by Wes Anderson: Fantastic Mr. Fox (digital) & The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou play Tuesday, Bottle Rocket plays late Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, and a special preview of his new one, Moonrise Kingdom, co-presented by IFFBoston on Thursday evening. The Wednesday-evening hole in the schedule is filled by the local premiere of For the Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Revival, a documentary on the popular and influential 1960s Cambridge venue.



• With the academic year coming to a close, Emerson's ArtsEmerson film programming winds up for a while. The "Festival Focus" selection is Nana, a French film about a four-year-old girl mostly left to fend for herself in a rural area; it won awards at Istanbul and Locarno. It runs Friday and Saturday as does Elena and Her Men, which wraps up "Renoir in Technicolor". It features Ingrid Bergman as a countess torn between Jean Marais and Mel Ferrer.



• The Harvard Film Archive doesn't shut down for the summer, though they are also finishing up a couple of programs. The School of Reis: The Films and Legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro concludes Friday (This Side of Resurrection & Blood) and Saturday (Glória & A Girl in Summer), all created by Portuguese filmmakers who learned from Reis & Cordeiro. The rest of the weekend is the Sergei Eisenstein program - a ddouble feature of Ivan the Terrible parts one and two on Sunday evening, and Alexander Nevsky on Monday.



• The MFA is also wrapping up series at the end of the month, with The Story of Film's various chapters playing out from Friday to Sunday, and two other "Exclusive Screenings " later in the week: Wednesday's Louise Wimmer is a sneak preview of a movie from July's French Film Festival starring Corinne Masiero as a hotel maid; Thursday's Walking in the City is a free selection of short films that tie in with a Wendy Jacob photo exhibit.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has one film program, an evening of animated shorts by Karen Aqua, a local animator who died of ovarian cancer one year ago; proceeds will go to the Ovarian Cancer Fun at Dana-Farber.

Huh, we don't get the animated Disney film from India? Kind of disappointing. Anyway, my plans like include Men in Black 3, Polisse, and Moonrise Kingdom.