Friday, September 22, 2017

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 September 2017 - 28 September 2017

Another week of the big prints at the Somerville,as well as something that is probably getting twice as many screens per capita here than everywhere else.

  • Seven more days of The Somerville Theatre's 70mm & Widescreen Festival, even if it does get interrupted by the comedy festival Saturday night. There's a ton of large-format goodness (and, admittedly, badness) on tap: The Dark Crystal (Friday & Sunday), Howard the Duck (Friday), Lawrence of Arabia (Saturday), Hook (Sunday), The Untouchables (Sunday), Days of Thunder (Monday), Wonder Woman (Tuesday), Top Gun (Wednesday), Blue Thunder (Wednesday), and Cleopatra (Thursday). This, plus the new releases, pushes The Big Sick and Dunkirk to their sister theater The Capitol in Arlington.
  • I've got to admit, when I saw post-Boston Marathon Bombing drama Stronger being listed, I groaned, but it looks like David Gordon Green doing the sort of small, intimate story where he's at his best, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a man who lost his leg in the attack and Tatiana Maslany as the love of his life, and that's a group worth keeping track of. It's at Kendall Square, the Embassy, The Lexington Venue, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  • The release getting the premium screens this week is Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which is hopefully less Mark Millar-ish than the first. If nothing else, it's got a lot of fun-looking additions to the cast and some neat action in the preview. It's at the Somerville, Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's, the Studio Cinema, the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), Assembly Row (including Imax), and Revere (including XPlus).

    For the kids, there's The Lego Ninjago Movie, a 3D spin-off of The Lego Movie focusing on the Ninjago characters, which look fairly neat from the previews; hopefully it's not too much a thing only kids will get. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond (2D only), Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.

    Friend Request, yet another horror movie trying to make social media supernaturally scary, gets a smaller release, playing Apple Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Revere. Fenway, meanwhile, gets The Tiger Hunter, a comedy about an immigrant to Chicago in the 1970s who, despite being half a world away, still feels that he is in the shadow of his famous tiger-hunting father.

    Boston Common gets the next film in Disney's weekly Princess series, with 2pm and 6pm screenings of Mulan. Other animated classics include presentations of Hayao Miyazaki's NausicaƤ of the Valley of the Wind, with dubbed screenings on Sunday/Wednesday and subtitles on Monday at Fenway and Revere as part of GKIDS's Ghibli series. There are also 30th Anniversay Screenings of Wall Street at Assembly Row and Revere on Sunday and Wednesday. Finally, there's a single screening of Jeepers Creepers 3 on Tuesday at Boston Common, Fenway, and Assembly Row.
  • Another thing opening wide-ish is Brad's Status, with Ben Stiller as a guy taking stock of his life while accompanying his teenage son on his college visits. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Somerville, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Revere. The Coolidge also opens Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, a documentary on the seldom-mentioned Native American influences on rock & roll, in the Goldscreen.

    The weekend midnight theme is iconic but nasty revenge movies, with 35mm prints of William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder (Friday) and the original I Spit on Your Grave Saturday (Friday's also got The Room, because they're apparently back to monthly screenings of that thing until The Disaster Artist comes and goes). They celebrate Art House Theater Day on Sunday with a free kids' show of "Revolting Rhymes" in the morning and a special screening of Food Evolution in the afternoon with a post-show discussion on GMO foods. There will also be science and discussion of game theory before Monday's "Science on Screen" presentation of Dr. Strangelove.
  • Apple Fresh Pond keeps subtitled Hindi film Simran and Telugu-language Jai Lava Kusa around this week, with Saturday/Sunday screenings of Magalir Mattum and Thupparivaalan, while Spyder opens on Tuesday in both Tamil and Telugu, both listing English subtitles. They also open the English-language Last Rampage, a prison-break movie starring Robert Patrick, Heather Graham, Molly Quinn, Bruce Davison, and John Heard, which is almost the platonic ideal of a B-movie cast.
  • The West Newton Cinema has a couple of fancy events to go with their openings this week: Year By the Sea will have original novelist Joan Anderson and star Karen Allen on-hand for a red-carpet premiere on Friday, while Saturday's 8pm screening of documentary California Typewriter will feature a live performance by the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.
  • The Brattle Theatre wraps up Tilda Swinton: World's Greatest Actress with a comedy double feature of Hail, Caesar! & Trainwreck on Friday and a "unique directors" pairing of Snowpiercer & Only Lovers Left Alive (the latter on 35mm) on Saturday. Then it's specials the rest of the week: Art House Theater Day on Sunday features a disaster-relief screening of The Tree of Life on 35mm in the afternoon and a new restoration of A Matter of Life and Death in the evening, while Monday's DocYard screening of The Work has director Jairus McLeary on-hand to discuss his film set in a single room in Folsom Prison. The Elements of Cinema screening on Tuesday is Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, while IFFBoston presents a preview of The Florida Project on Wednesday. The week ends on an odd-looking program Thursday, with composer Chris Brokaw live-scoring some short films by Peter Hutton while leaving others silent.
  • The Harvard Film Archive begins their annual McMillan-Stewart Fellowship series, this year focusing Niger's Moustapha Alassane with a program of 16mm shorts on Friday, Toula on Saturday, and "Tall Tales and Short Films" (on 16mm and 35mm) Sunday afternoon. For the first two nights, they'll shift to Chantal Akerman at 9pm, showing All Night Long on 35mm Friday and Golden Eighties on Saturday. The rest of the schedule is Synaesthetic Cinema: Minimalist Music and Film, with a psychedelic program on Sunday evening and a preview screening of "Electro-Pythagorus" followed by a live set from Ernst Karel on Monday.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts still has My Journey through French Cinema (Friday), Letters from Baghdad (Friday with director Zeva Oelbaum in person plus Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday), and After Love (Sunday, and also playing at CinemaSalem this week). "Costa-Gavras: Encounters with History" has a second 35mm screening of Missing on Saturday, and director Annette Lemieux, whose gallery in the museum references To Kill a Mockingbird, among other films, will be on-hand for a special screening of that one Thursday evening.
  • Bright Lights has local video essay "Wander Wonder Wilderness" on Tuesday and documentary Chavela on Thursday, with both free screenings in the Paramount's screening room followed by discussion with the directors. The latter also serves as opening night for The Boston Latino International Film Festival, which also has shows at Harvard's Tsai Auditorium that day.
  • The Regent Theatre has 1 Buck in the "Regent Underground" space on Friday while a live performance goes on upstairs, and has the first of their two presentations of this year's Manhattan Short Film Festival on Thursday..
  • The Boston Film Festival continues through the weekend at AMC Boston Common with Augie (Friday), American Satan (Friday), What Haunts Us (Saturday), Damascus Cover (Saturday), Dabka (Saturday), The Bullish Farmer (Sunday), and Crash Pad (Sunday), as well as three shorts programs and a live presentation.
I'll mostly be living at the Somerville and Fenway Park this week, but I'll probably go for Lego and Stronger as well.

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