Thursday, April 09, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 April 2015 - 16 April 2015

A week later, nobody wants to mess with Furious 7 but some good stuff at the less-mainstream places - except, perhaps, the most obvious counter-programming possible.

  • That, of course, would be The Longest Ride, the latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel about star-crossed lovers - in this case, a bull-rider and a student looking to work in high art - which ties in with another story that spans decades. You will find that at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  • The next-largest "opening" is probably the expansion of Woman in Gold. Already at the Kendall, Boston Common, Revere, and the SuperLux, it adds the Coolidge, the Lexington Venue, Fenway, and Assembly Row.

    The Coolidge will also kick off an April "Southern Phantoms" midnight series spotlighting the films of Charles B. Pierce. This week's Friday & Saturday night shows are his 1976 grindhouse true-crime flick, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, which they will be showing from a 16mm print. If you prefer early to late, Sunday offers two options - the delightfully absurd The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is the Talk Cinema offering at 10am, while the Goethe-Institut persents Dietrich Brüggemann's formally-rigorous but intriguing Stations of the Cross, about a very religious woman trying to balance her fundamentalist Catholicism with a need to interface with the modern world. There is also a 35mm "Science on Screen" presentation of Tim Burton's Big Fish on Monday, Open Screen on Tuesday, and an NT Live presentaiton of Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem on Thursday.
  • Kendall Square probably has the best slate this week, if also the more unusual. Take White God, whose trailer starts out looking like a simiple movie about a girl and her dog needing to be reunited but soon suggests a full-on animal revolt. It looks like brilliant madness. The one-week booking of Kill Me Three Times looks to be a different sort of strange, with Simon Pegg as an assassin who finds that a relatively simiple job has him dealing with other competing to take out his target.
  • There's also The Salt of the Earth, which opens at both the Kendall and the West Newton Cinema. It's a documentary on Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, co-directed by Wim Wenders, a long-time admirer, and Salgado's sun Juliano Ribeiro, trying to learn more about a parent who was often away from home.

    West Newton will also be playing Northern Borders, director Jay Craven's most recent film about the "Northeast Kingdom" area at the border of Vermont and Quebec, this one focusing on a child sent to live with his disagreeable grandparents. If it sounds familiar, it played the Brattle about a year ago, but Craven is still getting it seen, and will be on-hand for the 6pm show on Friday. The Belmont World Film series moves back to Sunday this week with A Few Cubic Meters of Love, an Afghani film about a secret romance at a factoy illegally hiring Afghan immigrants near Tehran.
  • The Brattle, meanwhile, opens Ned Rifle, the latest film in the series Hal Hartley started eighteen years ago with Henry Fool (which also plays Friday & Saturday) and continued in 2006 with Fay Grim (screenings Saturday & Sunday). The bulk of the cast returns, although Liam Aiken has shifted to the fore as per the title, with Aubrey Plaza joining as the grown Ned's love interest. Oddly, Saturday is not set up so that the trilogy can be watched all the way through in one sitting; also, while the new film is a DCP, the two earlier ones are 35mm.
  • The Somerville Theatre has booked the new restoration of Powell & Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffman, an anthology of operatic stories that has influenced filmmakers as diverse as Martin Scorcese and George Romero. For more opera, they kick the week off with a 35mm print of Amadeus on Friday night, preceeded by a live performance from Don Giovanni.
  • Both Fenway & Boston Common are continuing to show Let's Get Married, while Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe keeps Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! around for another week, and I recommend it even for those who might not usually be into the Bollywood. They also open Dharam Sankat Mein in Hindi with English subtitles; it's a comedy about a man who was raised Hindu but learns (at the age of 55) that he was born to Muslim parents. On the other hand, you'll need to know Telugu to get much out of Son of Sathyamoorthy.
  • Two new programs start at the Harvard Film Archive; the first being The Waking Dreams of Wojciech Jerzy Has, with Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf introducing The Hourglass Sanatorium on Friday and The Noose in 35mm on Saturday, while the Czech director's How to Be Loved plays without introduction on Monday. Friday and Saturday also see the start of Ben Rivers' Midnite Movies, with 10pm 35mm screenings of Messiah of Evil and Mad Max 2. Continuing series include Lav Diaz's From What Is Before on Sunday afternoon(set aside five and a half hours), and a 35mm print of John Carpenter's Dark Star as part of "Furious Cinema" on Wednesday.
  • The Boston LGBT Film Festival will finish up over the weekend with screenings at The Museum of Fine Arts and ArtsEmerson's Bright room at the Paramount.

    After that, the MFA starts this year's "Hollywood Scriptures" series on Wednesday, with Ilan Duran Cohen's The Jewish Cardinal, a story of a Catholic priest who retained his cultural identity of a Jew even as he rose through the ranks of the church.
  • Bright Lights at the Paramount has three shows this week. Frank - with Michael Fassbender as a musician who wears a giant papier-maiche head - plays on Tuesday, Kirby Dick's documentary The Hunting Ground on Wednesday with a group of Emerson College's staff members relevant to the subject matter of on-campus sexual assault on hand for panel afterward, while Edward Snowden doc Citizenfour plays Thursday.
  • The Boston International Film Festival has reconfigured itself this year, with only the Thursday opening night show at AMC Boston Common this year and the rest of the festival compressed on two smaller screens. That opening night looks kind of fun, actually, with Friends and Romans featuring a bunch of character actors playing a bunch of mob-movie extras putting on Julius Caesar, only to have an actual mobster and an FBI agent infiltrate the group. If follows "Lines", a short by Amy Jo Johnson in which she co-stars with her Flashpoint co-star Enrico Colantoni.

My plans involve baseball on TV and at Fenway, so it's kind of nice that the release schedule is so light. I'll still be checking out some subset of White God, Kill Me Three Times, The Tales of Hoffman, Woman in Gold, While We're Young, Dark Star, and Friends and Romans. I'm tempted to get up early Sunday for The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, because it is hugely entertaining.

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