Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 May 2015 - 28 May 2015

Heading out of town in two different directions, so what's the point of potentially getting upset about a booking that would otherwise tick me off?

• I mean, seriously, Good Kill, the new film by Andrew Niccol starring Ethan Hawke, is only playing two shows a day at The West Newton Cinema, with the only other vaguely local option Salem? That's disappointing, since the last time Niccol did this sort of contemporary thing we got the pretty good Lord of War, and having Hawke as an Air Force pilot now operating drones from Nevada is at least interesting material. They will also be opening Saint Laurent (see below) and Girlhood, which played the Brattle for a weekend a few weeks ago and is pretty great.
  
  And speaking of bringing things back, listings and an active website have popped back up for their sister cinema, the Belmont Studio, which has been closed since January for various code violations and was written off as dead by a number of places. They'll be running Age of Adaline this week.
• It's another two-movie week at the multiplexes. The big name is Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, starring Britt Robertson as a girl who finds a secret (but lost) place where geniuses have tried to engineer a better world. George Clooney's in it too. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (in Imax), the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Square (including Imax), Revere, and the Superlux.
  
  There's also a remake of Poltergeist, with Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt as the parents and a completely different type of psychic (to be fair, there are some actresses that just aren't easily replaced). Sam Raimi produces, but likely wasn't nearly as involved as Steven Spielberg was with the original. 2D-only at the Somerville, 2D and 3D at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
• It's a fashion-forward week at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, which opens opulent biopic Saint Laurent, which follows Yves Saint Laurent's life from 1967 to 1975 (and shouldn't be confused with the other YSL movie which came out last year). It also plays at the Kendall and West Newton. The Coolidge and West Newton also pick up Iris, Albert Maysles's biography of New York fashion icon Iris Apfel, which opened at the Kendall last week.
  
  There's one other new release getting midnight screenings, the nifty haunted-house thriller We Are Still Here, probably my favorite thing from this year's Boston Underground Film Festival. Don't miss it. Joining it for Friday/Saturday late shows is a 35mm print of Harold and Maude. For a holiday weekend, there are surprisingly no other specials aside from Thursday's "Wine & Film" presentation, the obvious but still entertaining choice of Sideways.
• In addition to Saint Laurent, Kendall Square has IFFBoston selection I'll See You in My Dreams, a nice enough film starring Blythe Danner as a still-vital widow in her sixties who attracts the attention of men her own age (Sam Elliott) and younger (Martin Starr). There's also a one-week booking of Italian fact-based Mafia story Black Souls.
• It's Reunion Weekend in Harvard Square, so The Brattle Theatre is breaking out the multiples of twenty-five for anniversary screenings: Single features of The Great Dictator (75th) and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (50th) on Friday, a 50th-anniversary double feature of The Knack...And How to Get It! & What's New Pussycat? on Saturday, a thriller two-shot of Rebecca (75th) and Repulsion (50th) on Monday, and single programs of My Little Chickadee (75th) and Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (25th) on Monday. They also kick off the next weekly "Reel Weird Brattle" series ("25 Years Weird") at 11:30pm Saturday night with Troll 2. Almost all of these movies are on 35mm, with Troll 2 and maybe Rebecca as the exceptions.
  
  On Tuesday, they have the monthly "Elements of Cinema" screening with Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep at 6pm, followed by a discussion with Boston University's Aaron Garrett. Later that evening (and through Wednesday and Thursday), they have Roar, a rediscovered oddity set on an African wildlife preserve shot with untrained lions.
• Piku and Bombay Velvet continue to chug along for Bollywood fans, and both Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe and Fenway pick up Tanu Weds Manu Returns, which reteams Kangana Ranautand R. Madhavan, and if the trailer I saw the other night is correct, they've broken up/divorced and now Manu is falling for a girl who is a dead ringer for Tanu while she is reconnecting with an old boyfriend. If you speak Telugu, Apple also has Mosagallaku Mosagadu, an action-adventure flick ofsome sort.
• The Harvard Film Archive presents a pair of linked documentaries on Friday and Saturday: 1975's Torre Bela by Thomas Harlan, which presents a battle between aristocracy and commoners in Portugal from inside, and José Filipe Costa's Red Line, which followed the film and situation up in 2012.
  
  Later those nights, Ben Rivers' Midnite Movies return with The Visitor, which is ten minutes of weird surrounding an hour and a half of boring, and Re-Animator (on 35mm), Stuart Gordon's bizarre Lovecraft tale. Then, on Sunday, it's another Lav Diaz marathon, with the seven-and-a-half-hour Melancholia starting at 2pm.
• The Museum of Fine Arts starts a sporadic run of Winter Sleep on Friday, Wednesday, and Thursday (continuing through 3 June); it's the latest from Turkish filmmaker NuriBilge Ceylan. In it, a former actor who now runs a hotel with his wife gets snowed in with his sister. They also have a second weekend of The Boston International Children's Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday, with more screenings of Moomins on the Riviera, Mune, and two short blocks, as as well as and English-dubbed version of French/Belgian animated film Wolfy, The Incredible Secret.
• The Capitol continues "Mel Brooks in May" with Blazing Saddles at 11pm on Friday & Saturday.
• The Regent Theatre has had the stage booked for the past month, but they return to showing film Tuesday the 26th with "Alive Mind" screening Seeds of Time, chronicling Cary Fowler's race to preserve the seeds of vanishing plant species. Enid Hart Bosberg, recently retired from a local seed library, will give a coinciding talk. They also have the 6th Annual Ciclismo Classico Bike Travel Film Festival on Wednesday, featuring a curated block of short films focused on travel by bicycle

I'll be heading north for a family thing on Saturday, at the ballpark Sunday, and flying west for vacation (which includes the San Francisco Silent Film Festival) on Monday, so it likely won't be a big movie weekend. Probably Tomorrowland, maybe Faster Pussycat, and then see if Good Kill is playing in SF before the festival.