Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 27 September - 3 October 2013

New movies coming out, and among other things, we get a Chinese movie opening day-and-date in the United States for the second week in a row! It's like the world knows it's my birthday next week.

• That would be Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, a prequel to Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. This one brings back Tsui Hark as director and Carina Lau as the Empress as Dee Renjie arrives in the capital and is promptly put to work on a case that appears to involve lizard-man assassins. In related news, Tsui Hark is nuts, and I must admit to sadness that we apparently aren't getting this thing in 3D. It's at Boston Common.
  
  One thing that is playing in 3D is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, a sequel to what I'm told is a genuinely fun and funny kids' movie. This one certainly looks extraordinarily pretty and offbeat. It's at the Capitol, Apple (2D only), Boston Common, and Fenway (including RPX matinees).
  
  Also opening is Rush, Ron Howard's long-awaited return to fast-car movies, though this story of rival Formula One racers is sure to be much glossier and more respectable than his old Roger Corman stuff. It's at Somerville, Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, and the SuperLux. There's also Baggage Claim, in which a stewardess played by Paula Patton crisscrosses the country looking reconnect with one of her ex-boyfriends (including Djimon Hounsou, taye Diggs, Derek Luke, and Boris Kodjoe). It's at Fenway and Apple.
  
  The Imax screens at Boston Common and Jordan's Furniture are also picking up Metallica: Through The Never a week early; it's apparently half concert, half surreal adventure, and while the first doesn't interest me much, that Nimrod Antal directs has me curious about the rest. You can double up on hard-rock-docs with the Def Leppard Viva Hysteria concert on Wednesday at Fenway.
• Another mainstream, Don Jon, movie is opening wide enough to play the Coolidge as well as Somerville, Apple, Fenway, Boston Common, and the SuperLux; it features Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also writes and directs, as a New Jersey player who may have found true love with Scarlett Johansson but doesn't know what to do with it. They're also getting Enough Said, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini (in his final role, dammit) as a pair of divorcees falling in love. Kendall Square's got it too.
  
  They've also got a screening or two each day of this year's Manhattan Short Film Festival, which groups ten shorts and allows the public to vote on which they like best. There's also midnights of Troll 2 on 35mm Friday & Saturday, a fitting as heck way to end a "so bad it's...something" shows. They also bring in a 35mm print of David Lynch's Eraserhead as the Big Screen Classic on Monday.
• Kendall Square picks up another two movies in addition to those opening in Brookline. Inequality for All features Robert Reich discussing how the growing gap between the super-rich and everyone else is hurting everyone. The one-week booking is Haute Cuisine, features Catherine Frot as a talented chef plucked out of obscurity to be the pesonal cook for France's President.
• The Somerville Theatre has The Muslims Are Coming! booked for a week; it's a documentary about a group of Muslim comedians who tour America to try and present themselves as not scary but funny, just like everyone else.. Directors Negin Farsad & Dean Obeidallah will be on hand for post-film Q&As on Friday.
• The Regent Theatre also has a couple screenings of the Manhattan Short Film Festival coming up at 7pm on both Sunday and Thursday. Midway between, Tuesday's entry in the Gathr Preview Series is one I'm pretty excited about; everyone who saw The Broken Circle Breakdown at Fantasia told me it was extraordinary, although crushing. It has also just been selected as Belgium's submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.
• The Brattle Theatre welcomes back IFFBoston selection Good Ol' Freda, a documentary on the indispensable first president of the Beatles' fan club. It plays daily, although the 9:15pm show is Blue Caprice, a much-lauded portait of the Beltway sniper attacks - told, unusually, from the vantage point of the shooters. The exception is Tuesday, when Freda only plays at 3pm and Balagan presentsLa Cicatrice Interieure (The Inner Scar), a 35mm print of an eye-catching underground film whose soundtrack would later be released as an album by Nico.
• With the end of the month comes the end of the current the Harvard Film Archive calendar. Nuvove Visioni: Italian Cinema Now wraps up with The Double Hour (Friday 7pm), Il Divo (Saturday & Monday 7pm), and I Am Love (Sunday 4pm). It's also the end for Complete Alfred Hitchcock, which finishes with Suspicion (Friday 9:30pm) and Shadow of a Doubt (9:30pm Saturday). The other slot in the weekend has Portugese artist Salomé Lamas present to introduce her new film No Man's Land at 7pm on Sunday. There are also VES screenings of The Man with a Movie Camera on Tuesday and Wednesday, with Tuesday's preceded by the new short "Time Exposure".
• The MFA holds The Wall, The Legend of Cool "Disco" Dan, and Far From Vietnam over for the weekend, with Disco and Vietnam also continuing into October. Wednesday 2 October also sees Herb & Dorothy 50x50 join the rotation, and I'm guessing that all of us who saw Herb & Dorothy will want to revisit these everyman art collectors as they donate a large chunk of their massive collection to museums in every state. Thursday the 3rd is the start of The National Center for Jewish Film Mini-Festival, kicking off with Czech noir In the Shadow.
• ArtsEmerson features two documentaries this week, with Gideon's Army telling the stories of a group of Southern public defenders Friday evening, while Big Words runs Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and reunites three former members of a hip-hop group that never made it big on the eve of the 2008 election. The Bright Lights programs include Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr Movie on Tuesday the 1st and YERT: Your Environmental Road Trip (with director Ben Evans there for Q&A after) on Thursday the 3rd.
• The ICA has a couple different films this weekend: Unbound, Scenes from the Life of Mary Shelley, imagines the Frankenstein author's life as a series of home movies, and plays Friday evening. Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, on the other hand, feature what looks to be the first in a monthly "Art Over Politics: The Persistence of Dreams" series, with Salma a biography of a Muslim Tamil poet who was literally locked away from the world during her adolescence.
• The Capitol wraps their September Tarantino series up with Inglorious Basterds, Friday and Saturday at 10:30pm.

My plans? Finish the Hitchcock series with Suspicion, catch Young Detective Dee, Rush, and maybe Don Jon. Probably try and watch my copy of Cloudy #1 before tackling the sequel. And probably a lot more.