Friday, May 23, 2014

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 23 May 2014 - 29 May 2014

I could be watching movies over the long weekend, but I'll probably be going a hundred miles out of my way to help my brother move because it's the only chance I'll have to see another brother for months. (Shakes fist at sky)

  • So, I probably won't see X-Men: Days of Future Past until early next week. That's okay; it should play a while, and the ambition is impressive, merging the casts of both the first three X-movies and the pretty darn good First Class to adapt a time travel story that is one of the most popular from the seminal Chris Claremont & John Byrne run. It's playing in both 2D & 3D, and I seem to recall that director Bryan Singer used the third dimension pretty well in Jack the Giant Slayer. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, and Assembly Square.

    The other big opening is Blended, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore once again paired in a romantic comedy that, well, looks less awful than the words "Adam Sandler" might indicate. It's at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Square, and the SuperLux.

    In better news, Chef is expanding this weekend, adding the Somerville Theatre, West Newton Cinema, and Fenway to its bookings at Boston Common and Kendall Square. It's great and you should see it.
  • Surprisingly, the week's big Indian release is not playing at Apple, but at Fenway: Kochadaiiyaan, a 3D motion-capture film featuring southern India's biggest star, Rajinikanth, in a historical epic that also features Deepika Padukone. I won't lie to you: A digitally animated Tamil historical action/adventure musical is a thing that sounds crazy enough that I will go see it even if it lacks English subtitles. Apple Cinemas & iMovieCafe will instead be opening up Telugu-language comedy Manam, which I believe also lacks subs.
  • The Coolidge (along with Kendall Square and West Newton) opens The Immigrant on its main screen, a pretty well-made movie starring Marion Cotillard as a Polish immigrant to the US in 1921 who encounters an intense Joaquin Phoenix and a charming Jeremy Renner.

    Also on the main screen: Friday/Saturday midnight showings of Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu the Vampyre, which is as nuts as you'd expect a Herzog vampire movie with Klaus Kinski in the title role to be. There's also a "Cinema Jukebox" screening of Dirty Dancing on Monday night
  • In addition to The Immigrant, Kendall Square opens Cold In July, the latest movie from director Jim Mickle and co-writer Nick Damici, who haven't made a bad movie yet. Heck, I'm not sure they've made oen that's less than great, and folks do love this adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's crime novel with Michael C. Hall, sam Shepard, and Don Johnson.

    The one-week booking is documentary Teenage, in which director Matt Wolf examines how the idea of the teenager really created itself during the twentieth century. Kendall also picks up God's Pocket for two shows a day (it basically moves over from the Embassy), and has Friday & Saturday midnight showings of Back to the Future (and I don't want to complain too much that their midnights are the same ones everyone books, but it's also playing at Boston Common on Wednesday afternoon/evening).
  • The Brattle celebrates 100 years of The Little Tramp with a week of Charlie Chaplin silents, including new restorations of the short films he made at Keysstone (Friday & Saturday) and Mutual (Saturday & Monday). Those are digital, but the features - The Kid (Friday), City Lights (Sunday), The Circus (Sunday), Modern Times (Monday & Tuesday), and The Gold Rush (Tuesday) - are all 35mm. The whole series is double features, although the place is closed on Wednesday & Thursday.
  • The Harvard Film Archive has more Kenji Mizoguchi, including Sansho the Bailiff (Friday & Sunday), likely his most famous film; Hometown (Friday), his first sound picture; The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Sunday); and White Threads of the Waterfall, a silent that will play with a benshi soundtrack. There will be a quick break from Mizoguchi on Saturday for two by Frank Capra - silent The Matinee Idol at 7pm and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town at 9pm. All are in 35mm except White Threads, which is 16mm
  • The Museum of Fine Arts wraps up The Boston International Children's Film Festival with Patema Inverted from Friday to Sunday, which looks like an anime version of Upside Down, "Shorts for Tots" on Saturday, Miniscule: Valley of the Lost Ants on Saturday & Sunday, and one last screening of Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart on Sunday. The Technicolor Musicals program also continues with A Star Is Born (Friday), West Side Story (Wednesday), and An American in Paris (Thursday).
  • The ICA screens Jellyfish Eyes and The New England Animation Film Festival program once each on Sunday and Monday; the former is included with museum admission
  • The Regent Theatre has two film events this week: The 5h Annual Ciclismo Classico Bike Travel Film Fest plays Wednesday, with tickets to this collection of short films about bicycle-based tourism entered in a draw for a trip to Italy. Next Goal Wins, a fun documentary about the hapless American Samoa national soccer team trying to gain respectability, plays Thursday.
  • That's a Gathr screening, and it's worth noting that they do have a few upcoming bookings around the area, including Kids for Cash at Fenway on Thursday. The other theatrical-on-demand service, Tugg, actually seems to have sold a screening of some Ghost in the Shell episodes out while I wasn't looking, with the next event, 3D Imax dance concert movie Under the Electric Sky, scheduled for 5 June at Boston Common if 32 more people reserve tickets in the next week.
  • It's also about time to start paying attention to free outdoor screenings (check Joe's Calendar), as Beetlejuice will be showing outside Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville on Monday.


My plans? It's just not going to be possible to fit Sansho the Bailiff, Kochadaiiyaan, and Cold in July in before heading north, is it? Well, I'm looking at those three and X-Men, maybe some Mizoguchi & Chaplin, and I still haven't seen Neighbors yet.

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