Thursday, September 01, 2016

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 September 2016 - 8 September 2016

I've been refreshing various sites all week thinking that Skiptrace would eventually show up, but no dice. Weird, since I've seen a bunch of trailers for it, not even necessarily at Chinese movies. Maybe next week, but with the whole bunch of nothing coming out, you'd think there'd be an audience.

  • I mean, I've got hopes for Morgan, it's a sci-fi thriller filled with good actors (Kate Mara,Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti) including Anya Taylor-Joy of The Witch in the title role as a genetically engineered "next step in evolution" who obviously is not completely docile. That's at Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.

    The Somerville Theatre also opens Summer of 8, a coming-of-age film with eight teens enjoying the last trip to the beach before leaving for college, albeit in the Micro-Cinema. They also pick up IFFBoston selections Don't Think Twice and Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Their sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, gets 2D matinees of Kubo and the Two Strings, and also gets Equity and Café Society.

    Labor Day weekend also tends to bring a Mexican film, so No Manches Frida pops up in Revere, featuring Omar Chaparro as a recently paroled thief who finds that the place where he hid the money has become a school, so it's time to pretend to be a substitute and fall for a dedicated and pretty teacher (Martha Higareda). They also have Sunday and Wednesday screenings of The Never-Ending Story, as does Boston Common

    Aside from that, a fair amount comes back for a few extra shows to try and push films over certain box office thresholds, most notably Star Trek Beyond in Imax 3D at Boston Common, while several places bring back Ghostbusters and The Secret Lives of Pets. And, because Warner Brothers has gotten frighteningly good at exploiting recently-passed actors, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory plays Boston Common and Fenway over the weekend, with Boston Common also having Blazing Saddles. Many of these second-run and tribute shows will be at reduced prices, too.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre is one of a number of places opening The Light Between Oceans, featuring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a pair of lighthouse-keepers who raise a foundling child as their own. It's also at the Kendall, The West Newton Cinema, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the Superlux.

    They also get I Am Not a Serial Killer, a pretty nifty young-adult horror-thriller that includes a great Christopher Lloyd performance, at midnight on Friday and Saturday. That's upstaris; downstairs they kick off a series of classic midnight movies with Pink Flamingos on 35mm Friday night and Freaks on 35mm Saturday. Also on 35mm is Monday night's Big Screen Classics screening of Jaws, which I think is becoming a Coolidge Labor Day tradition. There's also a special Tuesday Balagan screening of films from Cologne with several of the German filmmakers in attendance. Thursday night, they and the Kendall will both be showing Nick Cave's One More Time with Feeling, which is a chance to hear his new album before its release the next day. I seem to recall some signage about 3D at the Kendall, but I'm not seeing any of that now.
  • Kendall Square also picks up two selections from IFFBoston. The Hollars was the opening night presentation and a pretty entertaining comedy from director and star John Krasinski, playing a writer traveling home when his mother falls ill. Great cast, including Richard Jenkins, Margo Martindale, Sharlto Copley, Anna Kendrick, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Krasinski will be appearing at the Friday & Sunday 7pm shows, but those are sold out. It's also at the Embassy and Boston Common.

    The other is Little Men, which nearly everybody else liked a whole lot more than me; it's from Ira Sachs and has a couple of kids becoming close friends when one's father inherits the building where the other's mother has a shop, a situation that causes trouble later on. Then there's Complete Unknown, the one-week booking which has Michael Shannon as a man who sees an old friend (Rachel Weisz) who it turns out reinvents herself every few years. Joshua Martson of Maria Full of Grace directs.
  • The Brattle Theatre will be undergoing renovations from Tuesday to Thursday, but until then, they've got a couple notable double features. Evenings from Friday to Monday pair Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused & Everybody Wants Some!!, while Saturday to Monday repeat last week's GKids retrospective finale, a double feature of My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service at noon.
  • Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond continues Janatha Garage, the Telegu action movie, and also picks up Akira, which is not the anime sci-fi classic, but a Bollywood thriller starring Sonakshi Sinha as a college student who gets entangled in a crime ring involving a bunch of corrupt cops.
  • With the season changing, The Harvard Film Archive wraps up the summer calendar on Friday with the last two films of the Rouben Mamoulian retrospective with Blood and Sand and Song of Songs, the latter in 35mm, while Monday kicks off an Oliver Stone series with Born on the Fourth of July.

    In between, they have their annual overnight marathon, with Night Train offering over ten hours of 35mm rail-based classics starting at 7pm on Saturday: Twentieth Century, Night Train to Munich, The Narrow Margin (1952), Nayak, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and Snowpiercer. That is a bunch of concentrated great movie.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts wraps their runs of Kamikaze '89 (Friday/Saturday) and The Other Side (Friday/Saturday/Sunday) over the holida weekends, while continuing Eva Hesse (Friday/Saturday/Wednesday/Thursday), with Thursday's show welcoming director Marcie Begleiter for a post-screening Q&A. Thursday the 8th is also the start of their "Reagan In Hollywood: The Origins of a Conservative Icon" series with a double feature of two short (~1 hour) B-movies, Secret Service of the Air and Code of the Secret Service, and who knew he had a franchise of his own back in the day, playing Secret Service Lt. Brass Bancroft?
  • Labor Day weekend marks the end of most of the outdoor movie series, although Joe's Boston Free Films has the Harbor Hotel showing the 2009 Star Trek Friday night and Cinema Somerville keeping things unpredictable with the 1952 Jack and the Beanstalk on Thursday.


I'm probably going to be good and limit myself to Morgan and the Night Train series this week, seeing as I'm moving next Friday and there's a lot to pack.

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