Friday, November 04, 2016

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 November 2016 - 10 November 2016

Kind of crazy - one of the biggest movie weeks since summer, and there are extra things grabbing screens in some spots, and it's harder to find what is playing where because Google has just killed their listings page. There are others, but they are not as compact and readable.

  • Not that you'll need to look far for to find a theater playing Doctor Strange; the latest from Marvel, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Marvel's Master of the Mystic Arts, although he's note quite there yet. Great cast, and supposedly one of the best uses of Imax 3D going. It's at the Somerville (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's (Imax), the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), Revere (including MX4D & XPlus), and the SuperLux. Apparently the XPlus screen in Revere has just been upgraded to laser projection, too.

    Also on the three-dimensional screens is Trolls, the latest DreamWorks animated film, with Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick voicing trolls (like the dolls) trying to rescue the rest of their village from troll-eating monsters. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. Fun fact: DreamWorks has a show coming out on Netflix next month called Trollhunters. Kind of playing both sides there.

    The third big-ish release is Hacksaw Ridge, with Mel Gibson directing Andrew Garfield as an army medic in WWII who refused to carry a weapon. First thing Gibson's directed in ten years because he torched his career but good. It's at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, Revere, and the SuperLux.

    On top of that, Boston Common also will have Mad Max Fury Road: Black & Chrome for a week, showing last year's best action movie in the black-and-white version fans have been looking forward to since director George Miller mentioned the possibility. They also add Someone to Talk To to Mr. Donkey for fans of Chinese films; the new one involves a divorced woman who moves in with her unhappily-married brother. Revere and the SuperLux, meanwhile, will have special twentieth-anniversary screenings of From Dusk Til Dawn on Sunday and Wednesday.
  • The Handmaiden expands a bit this weekend, opening at The Coolidge Corner Theatre and the Embassy. The Coolidge is also one of the theaters opening the really excellent Moonlight, along with the Kendall and Boston Common. It is a pretty terrific three-act picture about the life of a man in a poor neighborhood from youth to adulthood.

    They also kick off a month-long series of 1980s comic-book movies with 35mm shows at midnight, with Swamp Thing playing Friday night and Howard the Duck on Saturday. There's also a Goethe-Institut presentation of German coming-of-age film Young Light on Sunday morning, a Big-Screen Classics presentation of GoodFellas on Monday, and a 35mm "Rewind!" presentation of Kindergarden Cop on Thursday.

    They also serve as one of the venues for the first couple days of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, with AKA Nadia opening it on Wednesday, and a neat-looking program of 35mm Max Fleischer cartoons and The Tenth Man on Thursday. The festival also repeats AKA Nadia in Framingham that night, while the FreshFlix Shorts competition plays at the Somerville.
  • Kendall Square has Moonlight on a lot of screens, but they've also picked up Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch's documentary on Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
  • The Brattle Theatre brings back Kate Plays Chrisine, which played IFFBoston in the spring and features Kate Lyn Sheil as she does research to play a 1970s newscaster who committed suicide on live TV. It runs Friday to Sunday, with Monday being given to the DocYard who present a new restoration of 1984 documentary Los Sures and two shorts from the "Living Los Sures Project", a document of a Brooklyn neighborhood.

    The election dominates the rest of the week, with the place closed on Tuesday because Election Day should be a holiday, and then the debate-inspired "Bad Hombres & Nasty Women" double feature of No Country for Old Men and Multiple Maniacs on Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, WGBH and The Editorial have a post-election panel on
  • The Somerville Theatre hosts the Boston International Kids Film Festival from Friday to Sunday, with bunches of kid-friendly shorts, features, and workshops. Then on Monday, they have a 35mm print of The Little Foxes, a much-awarded Bette Davis picture. To make a little room, they push The Accountant to the The Capitol, which also picks up Denial.
  • The Harvard Film Archive kicks the weekend off with Shoot Shoot Shoot on Friday night, a 50th-anniversary celebration of the London Film-Makers' Co-operative, with Mark Webber, who literally wrote the book on the group, introducing a selection of 16mm shorts. On Saturday, they welcome back 2012 MacMillan-Stewart Fellow Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche to show his latest film, Story of Judas. Sunday is Soviet Film Day, with the Khutsiev series continuing in the afternoon with And Still I Believe, while the Soviet silents series concludes with Zvenigora, accompanied by Bertrand and Susan Laurence, in the evening; both are 35mm. Madeline Anderson visits on Monday for a free program of three 16mm shorts on Monday night as part of their African-American film series, and another visitor, Alfred Guzetti, introduces more 16mm shorts on Thursday, these by Peter Hutton, kicking off a weekend series.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts plays host to the the Boston Turkish Festival's Documentary & Short Film Compeition with Kedi, a documentary on Istanbul's stray cats, on Friday, Up and Down Galata and a set of shorts on Saturday, and two more sets on Wednesday. There's another overnighter from Friday to Saturday, with this month's Philip K. Dick movie a 35mm print of A Scanner Darkly at 1am. Tunisia's As I Open My Eyes plays Sunday, as does a special presentation of local documentary "Dos Idiomas, Una Comunidad", with two musical performances beforehand. Documentary Do Not Resist plays Wednesday and Thursday.
  • ArtsEmerson actually has something of a film program in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room this weekend, more or less: They show Finnish transgender drama Open Up to Me on Friday evening, and then a return of the Danny Boyle Frankensteins over the weekend, with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Frankenstein on Saturday and the roles reversed on Sunday. In the same spot, Bright Lights brings back IFFBoston selection Real Boy on Tuesday, with director Shaleece Haas and subject Bennett Wallace doing Q&A afterward. Thursday is their annual Silversonic Music Video Showcase, a program of shorts made by Emerson students and alumni. As always, Bright Lights shows are free to the public.
  • The Regent Theatre has a few different films this week, starting with the 18th Annual Animation Show of Shows - a family-friendly block of animatied shorts - on Saturday afternoon; the same audience may be interested in free documentary Project Wild Thing on Sunday evening. On Wednesday, director Wendy Schneider will visit with her music-industry documentary, The Smart Studios Story.


Busy times ahead, as I'll head out to the furniture store for Strange, catch Hacksaw Ridge and Fury Road closer to home, try to get to the Coolidge for the Fleischer show, and figure on seeing The Handmaiden and some of the things I've let slide somewhere in there.

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