Thursday, June 22, 2017

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 23 June 2017 - 29 June 2017

On the one hand, it kind of sucks that the only major new release this weekend is the fifth part of an awful series that everyone seems sick of. On the other, I've got baseball tickets and nieces celebrating a birthday and there's an awesome series at the Brattle, so, fine, I accept your staying out of my way, Hollywood.

  • The terrible-looking big 3D thing is Transformers: The Last Knight, and while I used to get upset about something I really enjoyed as a kid being turned into awful Michael Bay movies, I now accept that this keeps him sequestered and not making something else terrible. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), Assembly Row (including Imax), Revere (including MX4D and XPlus), and the SuperLux.

    But, it gets better; Edgar Wright's Baby Driver opens on Wednesday (or Tuesday night), and it's a great-looking action movie, with Ansel Egort as a getaway driver who constantly listens to music to drown out his tinnitus, with Wright synchronizing the action to the playlist. It opens at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Revere; maybe other places, too.

    If you've got kids - or just love great movies - GKids and Fathom Events are doing a monthly series of Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki movies, starting with My Neighbor Totoro. It's playing at Fenway and Revere, dubbed on Sunday afternoon and subtitled on Monday afternoon; there's a series pass available
  • Over at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, The Journey , a piece set mostly (entirely?) inside a car as two people on opposite sides of the Irish conflict are detoured on the way to a peace negotiation. They're played by Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney, two folks who don't get great roles nearly often enough. It also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common.

    The Coolidge also gets The Bad Batch, Ana Lily Amirpour's follow-up to A Girl Walks Home at Night, this one taking place in a post-apocalyptic world with Suki Waterhouse as a young woman falling in with a group of cannibals including Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, and Jim Carrey, though it only plays the 9/10pm shows throughout the week and midnight on Friday and Saturday. The regular midnights are 35mm prints from 1987, with Lethal Weapon on Friday and Full Metal Jacket on Saturday. They also break out the film projectors for Big Screen Classic Rebel without a Cause on Monday, and (I believe) take one on the road to the Greenway in Boston for Twister on Tuesday. It's Open Screen on Wednesday, and then there's a 35mm Cinema Jukebox show of Cabaret on Thursday.
  • The Brattle Theatre has A Fistful of Spaghetti Westerns this week, with both the big ones and some less well-known. They kick it off with The Man with No Name, showing a double feature of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More on 35mm, expanding it to a triple feature with a DCP of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on Saturday. Sunday's double feature is Once Upon a Time in the West and A Fistful of Dynamite (35mm), with Tuesday offering rarities in The Big Gundown and Death Rides a Horse (35mm). Wednesday starts with an Elements of Cinema Screening of Face to Face on 35mm, though instead of the usual post-film discussion they'll be running a big trailer reel at the start, and finishes with a 35mm print of Don't Turn the Other Cheek. It wraps up on Thursday with rarities Day of Anger and Cemetery Without Crosses.

    There was a little rearrangement in there so that IFFBoston could get a special preview screening of Okja, the new film by Bong Joon-ho, which once again straddles Korea and America, ith An Seo-hyun as a girl looking after a strange woodland creature and Tilda Swinton as the American CEO looking to exploit the beast. It's free but first-come-first-serve, and likely the only time that the film will play Boston theatrically, what with it being available on Netflix two days later.
  • The big Bollywood opening this week is Tubelight, big enough to open at both Apple Fresh Pond and Fenway. It stars Salman Khan and Sohail Khan as brothers, one of whom is drafted leaving the other to try and intervene as the war gets more serious. Apple also gets Telugu action-comedy Duvvada Jagannadham, and limited screenings of Anbanavan Asaradhava (Saturday/Sunday morning).
    They also have one screenings of The Last Face, Sean Penn's film featuring Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, and Jean Reno as relief workers in Africa at 11am on Friday.
  • The West Newton Cinema is where you've got to go to see The Exception, a WWII spy with Jai Courtney as a German spy sent to embed himself into the home of exiled Kaiser Wilhelm (Christopher Plummer) to see if he has ties to the Dutch resistance. They also have a special preview of Boston Jewish Film Festival selection The Women's Balcony on Thursday.
  • The Harvard Film Archive continues their two summer retrospectives. This week's entries in The Complete Jean Renoir are La Chienne (Friday 7pm), Madame Bovary (Saturday 9:30pm), and The Land is Mine (Sunday 4:30pm). That Certain Feeling… The Touch of Ernst Lubitsch, meanwhile, offers up That Uncertain Feeling (Friday 9pm), The Love Parade (Saturday 7pm), a silent double feature of "The Doll" and "I Don't Want to Be a Man" with music by Martin Marks at 7pm Sunday, and short silent feature Kohlhiesel's Daughters with music by Jeff Rapsis on Monday. All are 35mm
  • The Museum of Fine Arts is primary home to the Roxbury International Film Festival, focused on film by and about people of color. The MFA doesn't show films seven days a week, so the festival actually heads back to Roxbury for "Dinner & a Movie" at the Haley House Bakery/CafĂ© on Monday and I Know a Man… Ashley Bryan at Hibernian Hall on Tuesday.
  • The Somerville Theatre picks up Beatriz at Dinner, and if you go down into the Micro, they're playing BearCity 3, the third in a series of romantic comedies starring Gerald McCullouch and Joe Conti, from Friday to Sunday. There's a GlobeDocs screening of IFFBoston selection City of Ghosts on Monday, and then the theater winds up wrapping their "Summer of Love" series with a double feature on Wednesday: Godard's Weekend at 7:30pm and a rescheduled Riot on Sunset Strip at 9:25, since the print didn't arrive on time last week.
  • CinemaSalem has two boutique films this week, with Moka from France in the 18-seater and I, Daniel Blake on one of the larger screens.
  • The stage production at The Regent Theatre is reaching its end on Sunday, so later in the week they have a couple of film presentations - a free screening of Being Mortal sponsored by the Arlington Council on Aging on Wednesday and Volume 4 of The International Ocean Film Tour, a water-focused collection of short films, on Wednesday.
  • The outdoor screenings on the Joe's Free Films calendar are mostly concentrated on Friday night, when you can see Moonstruck, All the President's Men, or The Secret Life of Pets depending where you find yourself.

I'm kind of booked, with baseball to see on Friday and Thursday and presents to exchange for cake with my nieces on Saturday. In between, a lot of spaghetti westerns at the Brattle and maybe Baby Driver, Beatriz, or The Journey in between. I've already got tickets to see Okja in New York, so I'll let someone else have that seat at the Brattle.

No comments: