Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 April 2017 - 4 May 2017

Man, the major studios just don’t want to compete with IFFBoston at all, leaving foreign imports and smaller distributors to pick up the slack. Or, perhaps, nobody wants to be caught between The Fate of the Furious and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. One or the other.

• Still, if you’re in Boston, Independent Film Festival Boston 15 is the big event, playing on all five screens atThe Somerville Theatre as well as the Brattle through Monday, and then moving over to the Coolidge for the Tuesday and Wednesday. Big attractions include Sam Elliott in The Hero, Joe Berlinger’s Intent to Destroy, Errol Morris’s The B-Side, nifty casts in Lemon, Lost in Paris, and Little Hours, plus the new Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon Trip to Spain, among others.
  
  It looks like the Somerville takes a breather afterward, before re-opening next Friday, although The Brattle Theatre has a couple of special shows after the festival. On Tuesday, they play Michael Mann’s Heat at 8:30pm, and have a special skype call with Mann afterward. Then, on Thursday May the 4th (“...be with you”), they begin a new tradition of trolling Star Wars fans annually, this year with a double feature of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on 35mm and Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs. The former also functions as a sneak preview of the series of companion films they’ll be playing with Harold & Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story next week.
• The only bummer about this is that it’s going to make it hard for me to get to a nice slate of Asian movies this week. My most anticipated is Love Off the Cuff, Pang Ho-cheung’s third film pairing Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue as an unlikely set of lovers, this time feeling a seven year itch. That’s from Hong Kong, while Battle of Memories comes from mainland China and features Huang Bo and Xu Jinglei in a sci-fi story about an author invading the memories of a serial killer. South Korea, meanwhile, offers up The Mayor, starring Choi Min-sik as a two-term mayor of Seoul trying for an unprecedented third term that could set him up as the front-runner in the next Presidential election. All three are playing at Boston Common.
  
  Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond, meanwhile, has BaahuBali 2, a gigantic fantasy sequel on four screens: Two in Telugu, one in Tamil, and one in Hindi, with the latter marked as having English subtitles. It’s also playing at Showcase Cinemas Revere in subtitled Telugu. Apple also has Voice of the Stone on half a screen, that one being a supernatural thriller featuring Emilia Clarke as the new nurse in a haunted castle.
• It’s actually not completely dead at the multiplexes, with The Circle starring Tom Hanks as the head of a tech company invading all the privacy, with Emma Watson and John Boyega as the young employees who suspect something is up. Heck of a cast below the line, with Karen Gillan, Bill Paxton, and more. It’s at Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, Revere, and the SuperLux. How to Be a Latin Lover also features a star-studded cast, with Eugenio Derbez as an aging lothario who moves in with his sister (Salma Hayek). Also features Kristen Bell, Raquel Welch, Rob Lowe, and anyone else director Ken Marino could rope in. It’s at Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.
  
  There’s also a smaller opening for Sleight, with a street magician trying to outsmart the gangsters who kidnapped his little sister. It’s at Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere. Fenway seems to be the only place showing Grey Lady, a locally-shot thriller with Eric Dane as a Boston cop investigating the murder of his partner on Nantucket. There’s also a one-night-only show for I Am Heath Ledger, a documentary on the late actor, at Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, West Newton, and Boston Common pick up Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, which stars Richard Gere as a man in finance who manages to get the ear of the new Israeli Prime Minister. With Kendall Square still undergoing renovations, it’s actually got the same screen count as the Coolidge right now.
  
  This weekend’s Coolidge midnights pay tribute to Kathryn Bigelow, with Near Dark playing Friday and Point Break on Saturday, both on 35mm. There’s a Talk Cinema screening of Moscow Never Sleeps Sunday morning, and a Sound-of-Silents screening of The Freshman on Monday
• The Harvard Film Archive is only programming two days this week, with nothing open to the public on Friday and Saturday. Istrument by Jem Cohen and “post-hardcore” band Fugazi plays Sunday afternoon, while the “Želimir Žilnik and the Black Wave” series starts that evening with Žilnik’s Brooklyn - Gusinje. Monday brings a visit from John Gianvito, who will present his documentary Profit motive and the whispering wind.
• Just one Frederick Wiseman film at The Museum of Fine Arts this week, but it’s one of his big ones, with Belfast, Maine running upwards of four hours on Friday. Their only other film program this week is the first night of Jewishfilm 20 on Thursday, with Ben-Gurion, Epilogue playing with post-film Q&A with director Yariv Mozer.
• Belmont World Film visits Iran this Monday without leavig the the Studio Cinema with Daughter, Reza Mirkarimi’s film about a girl who sneaks out to attend a party in Tehran, but has her father come looking when she’s not back the next day.

I’ll be living at IFFBoston for most of the week, with tentative plans of Whose Streets? and Tormenting the Hen on Friday; Edgar Allen Poe, City of Ghosts, Dealt, and Lemon on Saturday; Street Fighting Men, Abacus, Shorts H, and either Dean or The Little Hours on Sunday; Menashe and The Force on Monday; Trip to Spain and Landline on Tuesday; and Band Aid on Wednesday. It may just be possible to also fit the Chinese and Korean movies in if I don’t care too much about sleep and if the Thursday shows aren’t bumped for Guardians, but I wouldn’t exactly count on that.