Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 May 2014 - 5 July 2014

Looking like a good week to catch up on what you missed, although there is neat stuff to be found too.

• Have all the funny parts of A Million Ways to Die in the West been shown in the previews? One hopes not, since the previews of writer/director/star Seth MacFarlane's movie about a how miserable living in the old West could be - although things seem to be looking up when Charlize Theron comes to town. It's all over the place, at the Somerville, Apple, Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and the SuperLux.
  
  The other opening is Maleficent, with Angeline Jolie as the Sleeping Beauty villain who apparently isn't really a bad person because people just don't appreciate a good villain. It's in 2D and 3D at the Capitol, Apple, Jordan's Furniture, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and the SuperLux. Jordan's, Boston Common, and Assembly Row have it in Imax 3D, although I'm not sure why you'd displace Godzilla for that.
  
  The Sunday/Wednesday classic at Boston Common is Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Wow, they made a second sequel to L'Auberge Espangole. Who knew that was so popular in France? This time, the group including Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cecile De France, and Kelly Reilly are in New York despite the title being Chinese Puzzle, and it's at Kendall Square.
  
  They also have The Dance of Reality, the first new film by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 23 years, an autobiographical piece that he and producer Michel Seydoux cooked up when they were reunited during the filming of Jodorowsky's Dune. Because Jodorowsky is making it, expect trippiness and for certain things not to be taken completely literally. Landmark misses an opportunity to do some clever double-feature material by having the director's cut of Alien as their Friday & Saturday midnight movie during Dance's one-week booking.
• The Coolidge, on the other hand, does not; even if they don't have Dance, they have Jodorowsky's El Topo on their big screen at midnight in 35mm on Friday & Saturday. It's technically a Western but insane in every detail, the film that originally defined the term "midnight movie". They'll have The Holy Mountain next week.
• Somerville Subterranean Cinema & All Things Horror are presenting Desolate in the Somerville's micro-cinema on Friday and Saturday, and it looks interesting; director Rob Grant shot it during free weekends around production of Mon Ami, and it looks to be another post-apocalyptic drama akin to his Yesterday, which I liked a lot. (Oops, that's next week!)
• The Brattle is doing the annual Reunion Weekend program of things that were released multiples of twenty-five years ago for all the alumni descending upon Harvard Square. Friday night is single features of Dr. Strangelove and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (35mm); Saturday starts with a matinee of Babes in Arms (35mm) and has a double feature of Goldfinger and the Tim Burton Batman (35mm) later on. Babes has another matinee Sunday, the the double feature being The Rules of the Game (35mm) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Monday's two-shot is Do the Right Thing and Sex, Lies & Videotape.
  
  It would be clever if Trash Night played into that Tuesday, but they will be mocking Cyber Tracker 2. Wednesday and Thursday, meanwhile, have the two parts of Lars Trier's Nymphomaniac, scheduled so that you can see a double feature either day or Part I at 7pm Wednesday and Part II at 7:30pm Thursday.
• The Harvard Film Archive finishes their Frank Capra retrospective this weekend, with Broadway Bill and Riding High playing on Friday - with the latter a remake of the former and actually using a great deal of the original's footage - and Lost Horizon concluding the series on Monday. More of the Kenji Mizoguchi series plays in between, with The Life of Oharu and Miyamoto Musashi on Saturday and Women of the Night and Straits of Love and Hate on Sunday. All are in 35mm and single admissions.
• The Museum of Fine Arts goes from one extreme to the other this week, with Technicolor Musicals wrapping up over the weekend with The Music Man (Friday), Mary Poppins (Friday), A Star Is Born (Saturday), The Wizard of Oz (Saturday), Singin' in the Rain (Sunday), and An American in Paris (Sunday). Then, a few days later, they start a series on The Limitless Possibilities of Black and White made up of monochromatic films shot after 1966. The first two are Lenny and Raging Bull, each playing single shows on Wednesday and Thursday.
• The play that was at The Regent Theatre for the last few weeks has wrapped its run, leaving them a bit more time for film. On Friday, filmmaker Alice Rothhild will be on hand for a screening of her documentary on Israel & Palestine, Voices Across the Divide, presented by the Arlington International Film Festival; another film with similar subject matter, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, plays Thursday night, presented by Belmont World Film and Friends of the House of Hope Shelter. Between those two, there's a fundraising screening of The Anonymous People and related workshop to benefit the Massachusetts Substance Abuse Helpline on Sunday afternoon.

My plans? Flexible. I'll probably see A Million Ways to Die in the West, because I'm a sucker, along with Desolate and The Dream of Reality. Don't know if that will motivate me to see El Topo or not. I've been enjoying the Mizoguchi series and the Brattle's reunion screenings are a mix of things I haven't seen and things I'd like to see again, but I've actually got discs I really want to get through, so I might actually make use of the living room.