Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 January 2014 - 9 January 2014

First weekend of the year is the deadest weekend of the year. Of course, it's also generally one where there's the most to catch up with. This year some places are opening up late on Friday because of a snowstorm and may be running with light schedules otherwise, even though it turned out relatively light.

• Let's start things off with a new series for the new year: The Somerville Theatre and Chris Hallock (who programmed last summer's Cinema Slumber Party) are going to be running a series of nice movies in the screening room on the occasional Friday and Saturday (right now, it looks like roughly every three weeks). This weekend, the series kicks off with GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Just like it sounds, it's a documentary on one of the more unusual wrestling promotions of the 1980s.
• Two stops down the Red Line, The Brattle Theatre will be presenting A Touch of Sin, the new film by Jia Zhangke, one of the most noteworthy directors working in mainland China today. The film follows four people touched by violence in contemporary China, which sounds much meatier than the period pieces or romantic comedies touting the land's prosperity that usually come out of the People's Republic. It runs from Friday to Monday.
  
  On Tuesday through Thursday, the Brattle presents the non-Lawrence part of their tribute to Peter O'Toole with four 35mm prints: A double feature of My Favorite Year & The Stunt Man on Tuesday, What's New Pussycat? on Wednesday, and Venus, which netted him his last Oscar nomination, on Thursday. It's a short series, although Lawrence of Arabia will play again on Wednesday the 15th.
• Only one movie opens in the mainstream 'plexes this weekend, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a Latino-oriented spin-off of the found-footage series that, shockingly, did not have an entry this past Halloween. Supposedly, it's not Paranormal Activity 5 (or 6, considering there's a Japanese spin-off in there too), in part because the previews show it as less pinned down to one location. It's at Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, and Apple.
  
  Boston Common also has a series of what TNT used to call the "new classics" starting up on Sunday the 5th, when Big plays at 2pm, with 2pm and 7pm screenings on Wednesday.
• The Coolidge doesn't open any new movies, but they do start some of the special presentation series up again. Aliens, for instance plays the Friday & Saturday midnight shows in 35mm. Pretty good, even if it does go too far in giving the aliens a familiar life cycle in my opinion. On Monday, there's a "Stage & Screen" show of Secretary, as the director and cast of The Huntington Theatre Company's production of Venus in Fur discuss Steven Shainberg's similarly-kinky movie (which screens in 35mm) afterward.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues its series of four films by Alexandr Sokurov, including Taurus (Friday & Sunday), Moloch (Saturday), and Faust (Wednesday & Thursday). There are also more screenings of Camille Claudel 1915 on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday (with one last show next Friday, the 10th).
• The ICA will has one last screening of "The British Arrows" on Saturday, and then you'll have to find a way to watching British TV if you want to see prize-winning UK advertising. On Thursday (the 9th), they have another collection of award winning shorts, this one the Best of the Ottawa International Animation Film Festival 2013. It's one of the biggest animation festivals in the world, so that should be some good stuff.
• On Satruday, The Regent Theatre hosts the Boston Premiere Event for Milwood, a locally -produced thriller about a boy who finds strange things afoot after being placed in a state facility after (I presume) his parents are killed or imprisoned and finds strange and nasty things afoot. On Tuesday, the Gathr Preview Series presents Summer in February, a romantic drama set in a Cornwall artist colony in the early twentieth century; Dominic Cooper, Emily Browning, and Dan Stevens star.

My plans? A Touch of Sin, Summer in February, The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle, and... what else? Oh, Her, though I may wait for that to play the Coolidge starting the 10th. If it snows some more, maybe make a dent in the pile of Blu-rays. I should separate out the ones for movies that came out this year and might be worth a look for award-voting purposes, anyway.