Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 November 2012 - 20 November 2012

Short week, what with Thanksgiving next week and a fair number of Wednesday openings. Short list of movies coming out and playing theaters, too.

• Kendall Square has the most, actually. The main opening is Anna Karenina, a new adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel which has a nice cast - Keira Knightley in the title role, plus Jude Law, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfadyen, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson - a script by Tom Stopard, and Joe Wright directing. He's had a pretty nice string from Pride & Prejudice to Hanna. It plays two screens there; it also plays single screens at Coolidge Corner and Boston Common.
  
  Kendall Square also opens two documentaries, and has guests coming in for each of them: Brooklyn Castle follows a chess team at a very poor junior high school who nonetheless excel, and yet still face the elimination of their extracurricular activities. On Friday at 7:05pm, Grandmaster Sam Shankland will introduce and presumably talk chess afterward. Chasing Ice, meanwhile, follows James Balog on the Extreme Ice Survey, tracking how glaciers are retreating. It's got a one-week booking scheduled, and for the first two nights (Friday & Saturday), EIS Field Co-ordinator Adam LeWinter will be at the 7pm and 9pm shows.
• In addition to Anna Karenina on the main screen, The Coolidge also opens IFFBoston selection Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, a documentary about a photographer in Western Massachusetts who spends weeks setting up single complex images.
  
  The midnight show this weekend is Robocop, a pretty darn excellent Paul Verhoven flick playing in 35mm on both Friday and Saturday night. Sunday morning, they've got a Talk Cinema preview of Silver Linings Playbook, which opens wide on Wednesday but also plays Boston Common as part of its limited run starting on Friday. On Monday, there's a "Sounds of Silents" screening of the 1924 version of Peter Pan; it's a nice version of the story, and for this show, Leslie McMichael will be accompanying it on the harp.
• The Brattle has a sort-of-new-release, as Miami Connection makes its way to Boston after stops at various film festivals and a thorough push from the Drafthouse hype machine; hopefully this rediscovered 1987 action flick written and directed by star and 9th degree black belt Grandmaster Y.K. Kim is just as insane as it's cracked up to be. It plays midnight on Friday and Saturday nights and 9:30pm on Sunday. They're also offering a free preview screening of Hitchcock on Tuesday, with folks who come to the afternoon screening of Psycho getting first dibs on a seat for the Anthony Hopkins-starring biography.
  
  Neither of those are technically part of Universal Pictures: Celebrating 100 Years, although Hitchcock is naturally a major part of Universal's history. Two of his movies play as part of double features this week, and they're both great combos: The Birds and Steven Spielberg's Jaws play Friday and Saturday (both spiffy new prints), while Hitchcock's Saboteur doubles up with Stanley Donen's Charade on Monday (a delight which features Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Walter Matthau). In between, Sunday features a double bill of great crime movies: Burt Lancaster & Ava Gardner in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, and the reconstructed version of Orson Wells's Touch of Evil (a surprisingly vicous film for 1958).
• The Boston Jewish Film Festival bounces between six different venues in three days from Saturday to Monday: Two shows at "Theatre 1" (formerly the Stuart Street Playhouse) on Saturday the 17th (the rush-line-only Koch and We Are Not Alone); three at the MFA (Let's Dance, Hitler's Children, and Hava Nagila (The Moive)) and two at West Newton (All In and Room 514 on Sunday the 18th; and one each at AMC Framingham (Life In Stills), the Arlington Capitol (Hava Nagila), and Hollywood Hits Danvers (Dorfman).
• Aside from their BJFF screenings, the MFA continues Tales of the Night on Friday and Saturday. There's also more Flowers of the Steppe: A Festival of Kazakh Cinema, with guests present for Friday's Kelin and Saturday's Letters to an Angel, while that day's The Dash and Sunday's Seker will have to stand on their own
• Belmont World Film's Family Film Festival actually plays the Belmont Studio this weekend after being at the MFA last week; it offers live magic shows with Friday night's documentaries and plenty of family-friendly local/US/world premieres Saturday and Sunday afternoons. They've got Looper scheduled for the rest of the week.
• ArtsEmerson offers a weekend of Artists on Film: A Walk in to Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory on Friday and Saturday evenings, Walk the Line Friday night and Sunday afternoon, Together Saturday afternoon, and Before Night Falls Saturday evening. Walk the Line is 35mm; everything else is being shown from DVD.
• Hey, cool - I was tempted by the retrospective screening of Possession at Fantasia this summer, only to see it only playing in French. The Harvard Film Archive has decided to have a little mini-run of the bloody cult classic with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, though, playing it twice on Saturday the 18th and planning to have it back Thanksgiving weekend. They've got special guests on either side Ross McElwee and his son Adrian introduce the father's latest self-documentary Photographic Memory on Friday night, and Ichiro Kataoka will perform live interpretations of silent films on Sunday and Monday before taking part in a Q&A afterward. This sort of narration, or "benshi", was apparently a large part of how silent films were experienced in Japan. Sunday afternoon also features a screening in their Antonioni retrospective, Zabriskie Point.
• You know it's Diwali when there are two screens given over to Indian films at Fresh Pond. Jab Tak Hai Jaan continues through Thanksgiving, but it's joined by Thuppakki. That one's a Tamil-language (but English-subtitled) action movie starring Vijay (I am informed that family names are uncommon in that part of India) as an army intelligence officer who infiltrates terror cells in Mumbai while his family attempts to arrange a marriage for him. There are, of course, also songs.
• The Somerville Theatre is still down to four screens, it seems; one of them is being used to open A Late Quartet upon its exit from Kendall Square. Be quick in catching it; the site doesn't have it playing beyond Tuesday.
• Okay, fine, I'll mention that The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 opens on a metric buttload of screens at the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Fenway (including the RPX screen). By now, you know if you're seeing this final movie about vampires, werewolves, and their intense attraction to newborn babies or not. More importantly, Boston Common and Fenway both pick up Lincoln

Me? Not. I'll be catching Universal stuff, Miami Connection, Possession, maybe some benshi, and at least the docs and Kendall Square. Haven't seen Lincoln yet, either.