Thursday, April 12, 2018

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 April 2018 - 12 April 2018

Kind of a weird weekend for new releases, to be honest: Two counting on questionable name-recognition, two named after fall months despite coming out in April, a couple that opened Wednesday.

  • Then again, you don't really need to remember the 1980s arcade game to be interested in Rampage, which is Dwayne Johnson and some fun character actors running around while Chicago (eventually) gets messed up by giant mutated animals in 3D. That plays the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), the Belmont Studio (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D), the Embassy (2D only), Boston Common (including Imax 2D), Fenway (including RPX), the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax 2D & Dolby), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D), Revere (including MX4D & XPlus), and the SuperLux (2D only). Meanwhile, horror movie Truth or Dare seems to be getting marketed as "Blumhouse's Truth or Dare", and I don't know how many people outside horror nuts really care about Blumhouse, but maybe the Madonna documentary casts a long shadow. Anyway, this one has Lucy Hale as a college kid who plays the wrong game in the wrong room or some such and people start dying when they don't play along. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.

    I am mildly and morbidly curious about Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, an animated movie from "Fun Academy Motion Pictures" about a stray dog adopted by a soldier during World War I who is, apparently, the most decorated dog in U.S. military history. The main filmmakers are guys who make war documentaries and serve as military advisors rather than animators, and the voice cast includes Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter, and Gerard Depardieu. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and Revere. The Icon theater in the Seaport plays Boston for a week around Patriot's Day.

    Some of last week's one-offs continue into this weekend, with Grease playing Fenway Assembly Row on Saturday and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior plays Revere on Sunday. Family movie Phoenix Wilder and the Great Elephant Adventure plays Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Monday; The Dating Project plays those places Tuesday.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and open You Were Never Really Here, with Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatized vet who tracks down missing kids and finds himself on a case that may break him, especially considering this is a Lynn Ramsey movie and she doesn't mess around. The Tuesday show at the Coolidge is an "Off the Couch" screening, and that theater also opens IFFBoston alum The Peacemaker in the Goldscreen, a documentary about Padraig O'Malley.

    This Friday is a 13th, so that means the midnight show that night is a 35mm double feature of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter & Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, skipping the one in between. Saturday, they go with the last Hammer Frankenstein film, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, also on 35mm. Members get free admission to the Strano Film Festival Showcase on Sunday, with special guests related to each short in this Earth Day presentation. Another short film package, the Animation Show of Shows, plays Wednesday morning for all the kids on vacation. They also get a jump on their run of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, with a "Cinema Jukebox" screening on Thursday night.
  • Kendall Square opened Beiruit on Wednesday, as did the Capitol, the Embassy, Boston Common, and Revere; it's the new one from director Brad Anderson, who feels like he should have gotten something big by now, written by Tony Gilroy and starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike in a period thriller. The Kendall also opens Lean on Pete, with Charlie Plummer as a teenager who makes friends with an aging racehorse at his summer job, and a one-week booking of Belle du Jour, which just got a new digital restoration.

    They also host the remaining sessions of The Boston International Film Festival (which is NOT IFFBoston) through Monday, and it might be worth checking the schedule - there are gaps where a bunch of programs aren't listed on the site any more.
  • The Brattle Theatre has a brief weekend between festivals, and plays Hong Sang-soo's latest, Claire's Camera, which has the Korean director (who has a retrospective finishing up at the HFA this weekend) in France with the rare comedic performance by Isabelle Huppert as a schoolteacher on her first visit to Cannes. It runs Friday to Sunday, although the 9:30pm slot those days is the tail end of Awesome, We're F*ckin' Ten: An Oscilloscope Retrospective, which features a 35mm print of Bellflower on Friday, Shut Up and Play the Hits on Saturday, and The Road Movie on Sunday.

    After that, it's Muppet Marathon Madness on Marathon Monday, with a quadruple feature of Labyrinth, Muppet Treasure Island (on 35mm film), a Muppet Movie sing-along, and The Dark Crystal. Then it's back to festival festivities, as they tie into the Cambridge Science Festival with a quick Loving the A.I. series: The Final Cut of Blade Runner on Tuesday, a 35mm print of Her on Wednesday, and Ex Machina on Thursday.
  • In a weird coincidence, Apple Fresh Pond also has something from a director who just had an HFA series, with Submergence the latest from Wim Wenders. It splits time between James More as a man held prisoner by terrorists and Alicia Vikander as a scientist exploring the ocean floor, the two having met the Christmas before. They also have An Ordinary Man, starring Ben Kingsley as a war criminal in hiding.

    One of their Indian movies this week is interesting in that it is apparently dialogue-free (I'll bet it's not actually "silent" as it claims), with Mercury looking like a slasher-type with the youngsters being attacked by a man driven mad by mercury poisoning; the filmmaker seems to have mostly worked in Tamil. They also get subtitled Hindi feature October, with Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu as interns in the same hotel - only two shows a day at Fresh Pond, but a full slate at Fenway. Telugu film Krishnarjuna Yudham continues, and they'll be opening Bharat Ane Nenu in that language on Thursday.

    Chinese animated film Big Fish & Begonia, in which a teenager from the spirit world visits Earth in the form of a dolphin, plays one nightly screening at Boston Common all week after having opened on Wednesday the 11th. It screens in subtitled Mandarin there, and there will also be two nights at Kendall Square, with Wednesday's dubbed in English and Thursday's subtitled. If Spanish-language film is more your speed, Dominican film Veneno opens in Revere, telling the story of the island's most famous wrestler.
  • The Somerville Theatre has the first of their bi-monthly "Slaughterhouse Movie Club" screenings on Friday, with "Crazy for Swayze", which combines a night of Patrick Swayze-inspired burlesque with a 35mm print of Road House. And while it's not until next weekend, tickets are probably going fast for "Aisle of Dogs", where you can watch Isle of Dogs with your pupper on the 21st, although you've got to bring a blanket for the to sit on.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts one-ups October with November, and I highly recommend it - this fantasy from Estonia is bizarre, imaginative, hilarious, and tragic, and has gorgeous black-and-white photography to boot; it may have been my favorite from last year's Fantasia Festival; it plays Friday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Other intermittent runs include Abbas Kiarostami's final film, 24 Frames (Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday), and Cezanne: Portrait of a Life (Thursday)

    They also have their monthly "On the Fringe" screening on Friday, with Daughters of the Dust an essential part of the year-long "Indie FIlm in the 90s" program. There's also the back end of the annual Hollywood Scriptures series with two more"Childhood Stories" - The Florida Project on Saturday and The White Ribbon on Sunday.
  • The Museum of Science opens a condensed, 4-D version of The Martian this weekend, which lops a full two hours off the runtime to get it down to 15 minutes, but with a lot of in-theater effects; it's a $6 add-on to a museum visit. the New England Aquarium, just added Pandas last week and picks up Oceans 3D: Our Blue Planet this weekend
  • The Harvard Film Archive wraps their Hong Sang-soo retrospective with On the Beach at Night Alone (Friday 7pm), Right Now, Wrong Then (Friday 9:30pm), Yourself and Yours (Saturday 7pm), and The Day After (Saturday 9:30pm), with cross-square triple features possible by catching Claire's Camera at the Brattle in the afternoon. After that ends, they show both versions of The Beguiled, with the 1971 version directed by Don Siegel on Sunday night (on 35mm film), followed by Sofia Coppola visiting with her 2017 edition on Monday evening.
  • Emerson's Bright Lights program at Paramount Theater got to the end of its schedule, but they have "Matters of Life and Death: Short Film by Robert Todd" on Tuesday the 17th, with the professor doing a Q&A after his latest 16mm creations; I believe an earlier screening of this was cancelled due to the weather.
  • Belmont World Film continues Monday with Streaker at Studio Cinema; it comes from Switzerland and features a high school teacher taking bets on how long streakers can avoid security to raise money to build a museum
  • CinemaSalem has Furlough, a comedy with Tessa Thompson as a parole officer watching Melissa Leo, in the small room, and Borg vs McEnroe one one of their other screens.


There is some weird stuff this week! I'll try and catch some combo of Claire's Camera, Beiruit, You Were Never Really Here, and Big Fish & Begonia (okay, fine, and Rampage), and I'm weirdly curious about Sgt. Stubby and Mercury.

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