Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 April - 2 May 2013

I really need to sleep after that massive This Week Month in Tickets, so let's race through this.

• The Tenth Annual Independent Film Festival Boston has begun and it is fantastic. Go to their website, scope out all the great stuff playing, and remember that I recommend Sightseers and The Hunt wholeheartedly, having seen them in the UK last fall. The Festival runs at the Somerville, and the Brattle all weekend, with single shows at the former Stuart Street Playhouse (now the Revere Hotel's "Theatre1") on Monday and the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday.
• That Closing Night presentation at the Coolidge Corner Theatre is In A World..., but they've got other noteworthy stuff as well. Granted, their main opening is Hava Nagila: The Movie in the screening room, a documentary on a song which is a bit of Jewish kitsch. They also pick up The Company You Keep in 35mm, which should look pretty nice.
  
  In terms of specials, one noteworthy one is Sunday morning's Goethe-Institut German Film, Hannah Arendt, with Margarethe von Trotte as the Jewish journalist whose coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial was not what anyone expected. It's a preview, with a regular run scheduled for July. Yet another Jewish-oriented event comes Monday night, with Alicia Svigals performing her new score to silent movie The Yellow Ticket with pianist Marilyn Lerner; there will be other multimedia components and a post-film panel discussion. The weekend's midnights are David Lynch's Lost Highway as part of the "road trips from (to?) hell" series, and Quentin Dupieux's awesomely absurd Wrong, both on Friday and Saturday.
• If you're at the festival or can't stay up late for Wrong, the Brattle will be playing it on Wedesday and Thursday (1 & 2 May) as part of a double feature with Dupieux's equally but differently bizarre Rubber. That's after spending the weekend as one of IFFBoston's venues, and shutting down Monday & Tuesday for a quick between-festival rest.
• If the indie stuff isn't your bag, the multiplexes have some powerfully mainstream openings. Pain & Gain is apparently a "smaller film" for Michael Bay, but it's still crammed with big stars (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Ed Harris) in an over-the-top story about not-so-bright bodybuilders kidnapping a Miami mobster. It plays the Arlington Capitol, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, and Fresh Pond. Presumably The Big Wedding is female-oriented counter-programming, with a decent ensemble (Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfrien, Robin Williams) in a remake of a French farce about a divorced couple who fakes still being together for their son's weding. It plays Boston Common and Fenway.
  
  Interestingly, the multiplexes go different directions to fill some extra screens before Iron Man 3 wipes everything clean with night-before shows on Thursday. Fenway picks up The Company You Keep and is also the only place on the T opening Arthur Newman, with Colin Firth as a man who fakes his death to start a new life, romancing Emily Blunt, who has done something similar. Boston Common, meanwhile, opens Mud, with Matthew McConaughey apparently continuing a string of great parts. He's hiding out on an island in the Mississippi, but looking to reunite with his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Neither, apparently, has room for Tai Chi Hero, to which I say boo! I totally would have caught a Friday midnight around the festival!
• Kendall Square also has Mud opening, along with two movies that seem like a potential double feature: The Angels' Share, a comedy from Ken Loach (really!) about a parolee who gets involved with distilling whiskey and an attempt to steal a rare cask, and My Brother the Devil, where brothers of Arabic descent in London walk the line between crime and a better future. Oddly, Devil is the one marked with the one-week booking while Angels' is supposedly open-ended.
• It's fairly quiet at the MFA's film program. There are three Samurai Cinema screenings Harakiri on Friday night, Kwaidan on Wednesday the 1st, and Ran on Thursday the 2nd. There's also an afternoon screening of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast on Tuesday as part of their "Myths, Folklore, and Fairy Tales from Around the World" course.
• The ICA has the opening night film of The Boston LGBT Film Festival on Thursday night with Bye Bye Blondie, a new film by Virginie Despentes about two middle-aged women trying to rekindle their teenage affair. Supposedly it's lighthearted, despite Despentes's track record. The festival will continue at the ICA for a few more screenings and also settle in at the Brattle and MFA.
• the Harvard Film Archive has two screenings of Paolo & Vittorio Taviani's new film Caesar Must Die on Friday (6pm) and Sunday (5pm). They also continue the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema series, with a pair of features from the 1990s - Compensation at 9pm Friday and Daughters of the Dust at 7pm Saturday - and three different collections of featurettes at 9:15pm Saturday and 7pm Sunday & Monday.
• iMovieCafe goes with Telugu-language Shadow for the most part, although with a couple screenings of Gunde Jaari Gallanthayyinde (also Telugu) mixed in during the weekend.
• While the Somerville Theatre is booked up for IFFBoston, the Arlington Capitol picks up Oz: The Great and Powerful; it will return (along with Evil Dead, Spring Breakers, and Scary Movie 5) when the festival leaves on Tuesday.

My plans? Living at IFFBoston, and then decompressing afterward, although the Wrong/Rubber double feature is tempting.