Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 October 2012 - 18 October 2012

Another weekend packed full of releases, some of which are coming with impressive festival/pre-release buzz.

• Take Argo, for instance, the new one from director and star Ben Affleck, in which he plays a CIA agent charged with helping US Embassy staff excape Iran after the infamous 1979 attack. The plan? Enter posing as a film crew looking to shoot a science fiction film there and exit with the hidden diplomats in tow. Great premise with an all-star cast, and Affleck has built a solid reputation on Gone Baby Gone and The Town. It plays the Coolidge, the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common. The Tuesday evening show at the Coolidge is an "Off the Couch" screening with an introduction and post-film discussion courtesy of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society.
  
  That's on the film screens at the Coolidge (as is The Master, which should still look nice as it plays in 35mm as opposed to 70); they also open Girl Model on (mostly) the tiny GoldScreen. It's an impressive documentary by David Redmon & Ashley Sabin in which they follow both a sweet young girl from Siberia and an American talent scout who recruits her as a model for Japan. Give it a look; I saw it at IFFBoston and wanted a shower afterward in the best way. It's especially astonishing when you consider that the scout is the one who came to the filmmakers. The movie will also screen as part of the UMass Boston Film Series, with the filmmakers on-hand for Q&A, on Tuesday the 16th at 7pm
  
  There are two midnight movies playing Friday and Saturday; the "Fresh Blood" selection is V/H/S, a very uneven anthology of found-footage horror (I liked about two of six), while the "Oc-Tobe-r" selection is Lifeforce, in which a mission to Halley's Comet returns with a beautiful woman who is actually a space vampire. Notable for Mathilda May being naked a lot.
• Also getting some very good buzz is Seven Psychopaths, which reunites Collin Farrell with In Bruges director Martin McDonagh (haven't seen In Bruges? Do so; it's good!). He plays a screenwriter who gets pulled into chaos when his grifter friends kidnap a mobsters yappy dog. It plays Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond. Then there's Sinister, the new horror movie by the writer/director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. In this one, Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime writer who moves his family into the house where the latest murders he's researching took place, only to stumble upon something paranormal. The folks I know who saw it at at FantasticFest loved it; it plays the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Less with the good advance buzz? Here Comes the Boom, which features Kevin James as a high school teacher who moonlights as a mixed martial arts fighter to raise money for extracurricular activities (this is funny, you see, because Kevin James is not in great shape). It plays the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway. The latter two also pick up Atlas Shrugged Part II: Either-Or, which is just weird - the first lost money and was panned, so doing a second seems to be against its very principles. The second part of the trilogy also has a new director and an almost completely new cast (to be fair, the first was produced on a deadline to avoid losing rights, and most of the new cast looks like an upgrade; still, gonna be weird when watching the whole trilogy if it gets finished).
• The Paperboy opens at Kendall Square; it features Matthew McConnaughey as a reporter returning home to investigate a possible miscarriage of justice, at the behest of the accused's lover (Nicole Kidman). It's from the director of Precious and the cast also includes Zac Efron, John Cuzack, David Oyelowo and Scott Glenn, and, yes, it's that movie with Kidman and Efron. You don't know what that means? Good; I wouldn't want to ruin it for you.
  
  The scheduled one-week run is Keep the Lights On, an adequate chronicle of a ten-year-long troubled romance buffeted by immaturity and addiction. Also likely to only last one week is The Other Dream Team, a documentary on the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, who aside from helping forge a post-Communist identity for the nation also found themselves tight with the Grateful Dead.
  
  Make sure you check the times at Kendall from Monday to Thursday; they will apparently be downgrading to digital projection during those days, and not all screens will be functioning on all days.
• Special treat at the Brattle this week: A new 35mm print of Wake in Fright (aka Outback), a harrowing film from 1971 about a teacher stranded in a small outback town who quickly spirals into a haze of alcohol, madness, and violence. Nearly lost, it's been recovered and restored; I saw it at Fantasia a year ago and it's great stuff. The Brattle's programmers have also put together an Outback Gothic Sidebar of movies to play along side it: Double features of Mad Max & The Road Warrior on Saturday and Walkabout & Picnic at Hanging Rock on Sunday. Walkabout also plays Tuesday, and Peter Weir's The Last Wave plays Wednesday.
  
  No movies on Thursday; that's a Union Square Round Table live event. Monday night offers the latest CineCaché screening, Headshot, a crime movie by Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang about an ex-cop-turned-assassin whose world is literally turned upside down by a bullet to the head.
• No particular theme at ArtsEmerson this weekend beyond being adaptations of books: Friday Night Lights and Mystic River on Friday, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Saturday afternoon, with House of Sand and Fog and Gone Baby Gone playing that evening, and Election Sunday afternoon. All play off DVD.
• The Harvard Film Archive continues The Mysteries of Michelangelo Antonioni: The Girlfriends and The Lady Without Camelias on Friday, The Cry and Red Desert on Saturday, a second screening of La Notte Sunday afternoon, and The Vanquished on Monday. Sunday evening they pay tribute to a different filmmaker, Jordan Belson with a program of 16mm short films made between 1952 and 2011 presented by Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music.
• The MFA has the tail end of the The 6th Annual Boston Palestine Film Festival on Friday and Saturday, with four new pictures between those days. Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps plays Friday and Sunday and will pop up again next Friday as well. There's a screening of the 2008 Brideshead Revisited on Saturday afternoon to tie into the "Cheers! Celebrate Enchanted England" program inspired by the England-centric exhibits running there. Sunday the 14th is the last screening of Downeast (have a Redmon & Sabin documentary double feature by heading to the Coolidge afterward!). Wednesday the 16th has a "Jazz on Film" entry, 'Round Midnight.
• The Indian films screen at Fresh Pond is mostly Brothers in Tamil and Telegu this week, although there is one Hindi film with English subtitles playing scattered showtimes this week: Aiyyaa, starring Rani Mukerji as a woman who sees her life as a movie looking for love
• The Regent Theatre in Arlington actually has a fairly busy week. Friday night is the latest installment of The Boston Bike Film Festival, a full evening of music and bicycle-related short films. Tuesday the 16th is a screening of Music from the Big House, in which blues singer Rita Chiarelli travels to Louisianna's Angola Prison to play for (and with) inmates serving life sentences. And on Wednesday, they begin the 2nd Annual Arlington International Film Festival begins, running until Sunday the 21st and featuring films highlighting international art and culture.

... Wait, Atlas Shrugged 2 gets two screens on the same subway line but we're not getting The Thieves at all? That is some bull--

Anyway, my plans involve Argo, Sinister, Lifeforce, Seven Psychopaths, Headshot, The Paperboy, and the Mad Max double feature. My plans are probably more ambitious than is reasonable.