Thursday, September 24, 2015

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 25 September 2015 - 1 October 2015

The Toronto International Film Festival has finished, which means awards season has unofficially begun, and the line between multiplexes and boutique houses starts to blur for a while.

  • Two of these semi-wide openings will be The Coolidge Corner Theatre. Likely the more anticipated is Pawn Sacrifice, which stars Tobey Maguire as American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, thrust into the spotlight as yet another means of fighting the Cold War, as the Soviet Union dominated the game for much of the twentieth century. It's also at the Kendall, West Newton, and Boston Common. Those same theaters also open one of the more peculiar stabs for dramatic recognition - Roland Emmerich (best known for effect-driven movies of dubious quality) directing Stonewall, which purports recreate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but in doing so appears to file many rough edges off the people he portrays.

    The midnights at the Coolidge are busy this weekend, with Arnold Schwarzeneggar in Commando and new indie horror Hellions both nights and the annual Serenity fundraiser/food drive on Saturday. Sunday morning has the first "Talk Cinema" screening of the new season, though the film has not yet been announced. Crumb is the 35mm "Big Screen Classic" on Monday, with art by local comic artists on display in the lobby.
  • At the multiplexes, Everest expands from its initial giant-screen opening to "regular" 2D/3D screens, meaning you can see it at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy (2D only), Jordan's (Imax), Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Revere, and the SuperLux. Note that several of the large screens that got the early release last week will be moving it to smaller houses on Wednesday to make room for an early release of Robert Zemeckis's The Walk.

    Also playing 2D & 3D: Hotel Transylvania 2. Three years ago, Genndy Tartakovsky being a talented director of animation made up for the fact that this is an Adam Sandler comedy in disguise; will that happen again? It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere (including screenings in the "MX4D Motion EFX Theatres"). If you want your horror with more teeth, Eli Roth's The Green Inferno finally reaches theaters after two years at festivals, on shelves, and being bounced between distributors. That's at Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    I've seen folks recoiling from the trailer to The Intern like it was looking horrify, but it looks like a pleasant-enough comedy featuring Robert De Niro as a retiree who takes on an internship to fill his time and Anne Hathaway as his somewhat inexperienced boss. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  • Kendall Square, in addition to the larger openings, also picks up a number of movies that played local festivals earlier this year. Goodnight Mommy played BUFF way back in March, and it's good enough that this creepy thriller which gets downright nasty toward the end is Austria's unconventional submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. There's also two from IFFBoston - Finders Keepers, the bizarre saga of a man who found a severed leg in the grill he bought second-hand and the man who wants it back, and A Brilliant Young Mind (aka "X+Y"), a nice enough story about a mathematically gifted autistic boy with a nice performance by Sally Hawkins as his mother; that one is marked down as scheduled for a week.

    They've got another one-night show, too, Attack on Titan Part I, which I liked at Fantasia and hopefully should please fans of the manga; it will also play midnights at the Coolidge next weekend with Part II showing up later in October.
  • Boston Common holds both Office and Veteran over for fans of Asian films, and also pick Lost in Hong Kong up day-and-date with China. It's Zheng Xu's follow up to the hit Lost in Thailand, although apparently more in terms of having a similar theme and title and Xu back as director and star, this time as a former artist hoping to hook up with a former lover on vacation, but since it's Hong Kong, there's a crazy kung fu murder mystery.

    For fans of Indian cinema, Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond has Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon in subtitled Hindi, with Kapil Sharma as a man juggling three wives who is falling in love again. There's also Subramanyam for Sale for those who speak Telugu.
  • The Brattle Theatre has something nifty-looking in "The Quay Brothers in 35mm", featuring three short films by the surrealist masters of stop-motion animation along with a short documentary on their work directed by none other than Christopher Nolan. On Saturday night, their "Reel Weird Brattle: Animated Weirdness" series has a feature by someone similar, Jan Svankmajer, screening Alice on 16mm film.

    There are 6pm Harvard Book Store readings Monday to Thursday, bumping the film a little later, although there are no Quay screenings on Monday, with the monthly Elements of Cinema screening that night, so you can come see An American Werewolf in London on 35mm for free, with an introduction and discussion by programmer Mark Anastasio.
  • With Quay and Svankmajer at the Brattle, so it's only natural that The Harvard Film Archive starts a series about Guy Maddin, who will visit later on. It kicks off with The Saddest Music in the World (Friday 7pm with short "Send me to the 'Lectric Chair"), followed by Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Friday 9pm with short "The Heart of the World"), and Brand Upon the Brain! (Saturday 7pm). Sunday's "Five O'Clock Shadow" noir is When Strangers Marry, a William Castle-directed thriller. It's on 16mm, as is the group of experimental short fims by Paul Sharits at 7pm. Then on Monday, "Furious and Furiouser" continues with Larisa Shepitko's 1977 Soviet war movie The Ascent.
  • The Somerville Theatre kicks off the weekend with the 5Point Film Festival, a traveling selection of adventure films, at 7pm Friday night. After that, they break out the 70mm projector for afternoon and evening screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don't know if it's the same print they had as part of the sci-fi marathon, but it should look pretty terrific.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts continues to show last week's premieres: documentary Paul Taylor: Creative Domain (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday) and New French Cinema selection Fidelio, Alice's Odyssey (the same days). On Sunday, they also have this year's edition of the Manhattan Short Film Festival, which plays across the country and lets audiences vote for the award-winners (it also plays at The Regent Theatre on Thursday). The MFA's next "New French Cinema" presentation, Mélanie Laurent's Breathe, start its run on Thursday.
  • Two free Bright Lights screenings upstairs at the Paramount this week: A preview of I Am Michael co-presented by the Boston LGBT Film Festival on Tuesday with director Justin Kelly in attendance, and documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck on Thursday, with two Emerson professors on Thursday.


Did the preview of The Intern tonight, so I'm looking at Lost In Hong Kong, Everest at the furniture store, 2001, 35mm Quay Brothers shorts, Hotel Transylvania 2, Pawn Sacrifice, and one last Red Sox home game. Maybe catch up on Black Mass and Grandman.

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