Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 May 2015 - 21 May 2015

Two big sequels this week, one thirty years coming, and apparently well worth the wait.

• That would be Mad Max: Fury Road, with George Miller back making crazy post-apocalyptic action after a couple decades of making movies about pigs and penguins. It's a shame Mel Gibson isn't back, but Tom Hardy's pretty great and supposedly Charlize Theron is even better. Plus, insane vehicular mayhem. It's playing in 2D and 3D at The Somerville Theatre, Embassy, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Those theaters also open Pitch Perfect 2, which follows the college a cappella group from the first during their senior year after a scandal resets things back to zero.
• Fairly quiet weekend at Kendall Square, which opens IFFBoston selection Iris, the final film legendary documentarian Albert Maysles made on his own. It's a profile of Iris Apfel, a 93-year-old fixture on the Manhattan fashion scene. They also bring back New Zealand zombie comedy What We Do in Shadows.
• The Brattle Theatre has two premieres this weekend. First up is I Am Big Bird, a documentary following 81-year-old Caroll Spinney, who has performed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch for Sesame Street's entire 45-year run. He'll be there in person on Friday night, although the 7:30pm show has sold out. That also includes a starring role in Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, which plays at 11:30am on Saturday and Sunday. It runs through Monday.
  
  Not much call for that during the later hours, so they'll be playing Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, Lost River, in which a small family finds strange mysteries in an all-but-abandoned city. Nice cast, including Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Ben Mendelsohn, and Eva Mendes. There's also a Trash Night presentation on Tuesday (Shredder Orpheus), and a special preview of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (which was pretty good when it closed IFFBoston) on Wednesday, and there's a bunch of guests - director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, writer Jesse Andres, and from the cast, Olivia Cooke, Thoms Mann, and R.J. Cyler.
• Once again, The Coolidge Corner Theatre has their only new opening in the GoldScreen, although One Cut, One Life will move into larger screens for the three shows where this collaboration between subject Pincus and co-director Lucia Small will play host to filmmaker Q&As and panels with guests.
  
  Speaking of guests, this month's screening of The Room at 11:45pm on Friday will feature cast member Greg Sestero, promoting his upcoming book on the film, The Disaster Artist. That's in 35mm, as is the other midnight screening on Friday & Saturday, Death Wish 3. You never hear about Death Wish 2, do you? On Sunday morning, the Geothe-Institut presents To Life!, an odd-couple film about a man with a secret and a Jewish cabaret singer in 1960s Berlin. There's also a Cinema Jukebox screening of Amadeus on 35mm Monday evening, as well as the start of a month-long "Wine & Film" series on Thursday, where Somm, a documentary on the test to become a Master Sommelier, will be paired with a tasting.
• Piku continues with full shows at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe, so it must be doing pretty well. They also open unsubtitled Tamil-language films 36 Vayadhinile & Purampokku Engira Podhuvudamai, but the larger opening is Bombay Velvet, which takes place in the Golden Age of Bollywood and also opens at Fenway.
  
  Fenway also opened Mandarin-language drama The Left Ear last week, sneaking it onto the schedule at the last minute with no fanfare. It's a love quadrangle of sorts, starting out when its protagonists are about 17.
• The Harvard Film Archive has been showing astonishingly long films by Filipino director Lav Diaz for the past month or two, but when the guy arrives in person, what do they have? His latest film, Storm Children, Book One plays Friday night; this documentary about the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda, and runs a mere 143 minutes. Saturday's film, "Butterflies Have No Memories", is just under an hour (it's paired with 31 minute short "Prologue to the Great Desaparecido", although that sort of serves as a trailer for him. C'mon, let him talk about one of the beasts!
  
  Sunday has a free screening of Breaking Away as part of Bay State Bike Week, and then the HFA picks the Wojciech Jerzy Has series back up: Gold Dreams on Sunday evening and An Uneventful Story on Monday. Wednesday has another free screening at 3pm, Robert Flaherty's "A Night of Storytelling".
• Jewishfilm.2015 concludes at The Museum of Fine Arts on Friday with The Kindergarten Teacher, in which the title character becomes fascinated with one of her students, who composes poetry far beyond the typical capabilities of a five-year-old. Kids are the focus of the rest of the weekend there, where The Boston International Children's Film Festival presents two features on Saturday (Moomins on the Riviera and Mune) and two blocks of short films on Sunday.
  
  There's also a special presentation of Angkor's Children on Saturday afternoon, with director Lauren Shaw and Arn Chorn Pond (a former refugee whose foundation is part of this film about young people reclaiming the arts in Cambodia) on hand for Q&A. I saw it at IFFBoston and it's pretty neat.
• The Belmont World Film Series officially ended last week, but it has a special presentation on Monday at The West Newton Cinema - Os Gatos Nao Tem Vertigens, presented as part of the Boston Portuguese Festival and showing a small-time crook in Lisbon get taken in by a lonely widow.
• The Capitol brings While We're Young over from Somerville, and continues "Mel Brooks in May" with Young Frankenstein at 11pm on Friday & Saturday.

My plans include Max Max: Fury Road, Piku, The Left Ear, and probably more, although I really should be packing up to move.