Friday, February 06, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 February 2015 - 12 February 2015

Hey, it's my most ambivalent moviegoing week of the year - the one I want to be the best, which seldom lives up to it. But I'm still optimistic!

  • That's because it's the week of The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which will be taking up residence at the Somerville Theatre starting on Friday. Noteworthy presentations include Robot Overlords from the director of Grabbers on Friday, Boy 7 from the Netherlands on Monday, a double feature of Dr. Who and the Daleks & Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. on Wednesday, and a rare screening of the only 35mm print left of The Noah with director Daniel Bourla on-hand on Thursday.

    In the main room, the theater will be re-starting their monthly "Silents, Please!" series of 35mm prints of silent films shown with Jeff Rapsis at the organ at 2pm on Sunday. Once again, they'll be going for deep cuts, with February's selection being a double feature of two Rin Tin Tin features, Clash of the Wolves & The Night Cry.
  • In a weird convergence, all three movies being released in the multiplexes are in 3D, which doesn't strike me as the best way to go about it, but go figure. The most intriguing looks to be Jupiter Ascending, a space opera from the Wachowskis featuring Mila Kunis as Jupiter Jones, a Chicago girl who happens to have the same DNA as a long-dead empress of a galactic empire, with Channing Tatum as the soldier with dog genes sent to protect her. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (3D Imax only), the Embassy, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax 3D), and Revere.

    Weirdly, Seventh Son is also getting an Imax release this week, and I almost wonder if Legendary is looking to spite Warner Brothers for sitting on it for a couple of years until they got a new deal with Universal. It's playing the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (3D Imax only), Fenway, Boston Common (including 3D Imax), Assembly Row (including 3D Imax), and Revere. Since those two are sharing screens, check showtimes if the big screen is a priority for you.

    Finally, there's The Spongebob Squarepants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, with the residents of Bikini Bottom traveling in digitally-rendered form to the live-action surface world to retrieve their crab-cake recipe that has been stolen by a pirate played by Antonio Banderas. I love funny Antonio Banderas, so this might be worth checking out. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Fenway, Boson Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  • Only one new movie opening in Kendall Square this week, but it's one that a lot of folks I know have been looking forward to, with Mommy being the latest from Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan; it stars Anne Dorval as an immature single mother who is probably not doing the greatest job raising her ADHD teenager, and is probably only hanging around for a week.
  • The Brattle has another week of one movie taking up most screening times in store, with this week's selection being Actress, a documentary by Robert Greene that follows Brandy Burre, who left the screen to start a family and whose attempts to return to the profession throw her home life into upheaval and reveal how difficult it can be for women over thirty. Greene will be on-hand Friday night, and will be joined by Burre for a spectal 7pm DocYard Screening on Monday, with screenings continuing through Wednesday.

    There is some repatory fun going on as well, with "Recent Graves screenings at 9:30pm over the weekends: ABCs of Death 2 on Friday, V/H/S: Viral on Saturday, and Housebound on Sunday. See Housebound, folks; it's great. On Saturday night, the 11:30pm "Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Romance" screening is Perdita Durango, in Alex de la Iglesia's director's cut no less. Then on Thursday night, there's a special premiere screening of David Cross's directorial debut Hits.
  • It's a pretty big weekend for Indian film at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe, with three playing at various times. The big one appears to be Shamitabh, a portmanteau of the names of stars Danush & Amitabh Bachchan, and the trailer I saw indicated it was some sort of weird, meta-fictional thing. It's in Hindi with English subtitles, and also plays at Fenway.

    They will also be playing Yennai Arindhaal, a crime & revenge thriller starring Ajith Kumar, Anushka Shetty, and Arun Vijay. That one's in Tamil with English subtitles. It looks like you'll need to speak Telugu to catch what's going on in Malli Malli Idi Rani Roju, a romance of some sort.
  • The Coolidge mostly keeps the same line-up as last week, swapping the Oscar-Nominated Live Action & Animated Shorts in for the departing Sundance shorts, running them alongside the two programs of Documentary shorts.

    The special events are an interesting group. The Cronenberg Mad Science series of weekend midnights continues on Friday & Saturday with a 35mm print of Rabid, while Monday's "Science on Screen" presentation is Evil Dead II (also 35mm), with Dr. Steven Schlozman talking about how neurobiology makes us wired to enjoy horror movies beforehand. In between, the Sunday morning Talk Cinema presentation is Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, a courtroom drama about a woman attempting to obtain a divorce is Israel, where the husband must consent. There's also Open Screen on Tuesday and Mortified's annual "Doomed Valentine's Day" show on Thursday, with people sharing their teen love poetry on stage.
  • Mati Diop is the Geneviève McMillan - Reba Stewart Fellow at Harvard this year, so Harvard Film Archive will welcome and pay tribute to her this weekend, with the Senegalese filmaker on-hand for three programs - recent featurette "A Thousand Suns" on Friday, a short program including "Atlantiques", "Big in Vietnam", and "Snow Canon" on Saturday, and her debut film Touki Bouki on Monday. "Snow Canon" and Touki Bouki are 35mm; the others are DCP.

    Entries from two ongoing retrospectives fill the gap on Sunday, with Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story in the afternoon and Orson Welles's F for Fake in the evening, both on 35mm. Wednesday's "Furious Cinema" screening is Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small, which appears to be odd even for him - an all-little-person cast in a movie about revolution on an island where everything is built for big people.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts is all The Films of Stanley Kubrick, all the time in February. This week's selections are The Killing (Friday & Sunday), Paths of Glory (Friday), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Saturday & Thursday), Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Sunday), Spartacus (Wednesday), Fear and Desire (Wednesday), and Lolita (Thursday).
  • The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room also has Stanley Kubrick on the brain; they'll be screening Room 237, a film about those who hold bizarre theories about Kubrick's The Shining, on Tuesday night. On Thursday, they will screen five 16mm films by Emerson professor Robert Todd. The irregular ArtsEmerson film program will be using the room for a screening of Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, with Drs. Smba Gadjigo & Claire Andrade-Watkins introducing that first film made by a director from Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The Regent Theatre
  • will celebrate Black History month on Tuesday with a special screening of King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis, an Oscar-nominated documentary on Martin Luther King originally produced in 1970 which has recently been restored.



I will basically be living in the Somerville Theatre this week, although I hope to use some empty slots to catch Jupiter Ascending and maybe Housebound.

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