Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 August 2018 - 30 August 2018

Just two weekends left in summer vacation, so no point in releasing anything with the chance of really having legs, I guess. So, might as well catch up with other stuff, right?

• It seems like The Henson Company has been trying to make The Happyland Murders - a crude-as-heck puppet movie about serial killers taking out the cast of a thinly-veiled Sesame Street clone - for a long time, but it's finally coming out now, and you can't help but notice that Melissa McCarthy is not going around being interviewed to promote it, which is usually not a great sign. See if it's as much a mess as that indicates at the Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  Actually kid-friendly (or at least, that's the idea) is A.X.L., which has a couple of teens discover a big ol' robot dog, with the military group that developed it wanting it back and probably don't want it bonding with someone who will use it for things other than war. It is at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  This is about when Imax screens need a bit of filler, so if you didn't see 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm earlier this summer (and can't wait until the Somerville brings their print out for their annual festival), you can catch it at Boston Common or Jordan's Furniture. Revere opens refugee drama Beautifully Broken, and there's also a Wednesday opening for Operation Finale, with Oscar Isaac as the Nazi hunter who tracked down Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley), at Boston Common, the Seaport, and Assembly Row
  
  This week's TCM classic is South Pacific, playing Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Monday; those same places also have a 25th Anniversary screening of Rudy. Fenway and Revere have Robert Townsend's documentary about Making "The Five Heartbeats"
• Kendall Square gets two IFFBoston alumni this weekend: Support the Girls is the latest from Andrew Bujalski, featuring Regina Hall as the manager of a sports bar best known for the scantily-clad waitresses than its food and drink; We the Animals follows a disintegrating Puerto Rican family in upstate New York whose youngest son is starting to notice his brothers taking on some of their father's worst characteristics. There's also a one-night presentation of This Is Congo on Wednesday, with Jeanne Kasongo L. Ngondo of the Shalupe Foundation there to discuss it afterward.
  
  There's also Papillon, which apparently credits both the original book and 1973 film as source material, this time with Charlie Hunnam in the title role and Rami Malek as the counterfeiter with whom he plans to escape In addition to the Kendall, it plays the Embassy, Boston Common, and the Seaport.
• The Island hangs around for a third week at Boston Common. They also get Oolong Courtyard about a month or so after it was originally expected to open; I've read that this slapstick comedy about two small-time crooks who enter a secluded martial-arts school in the hopes of finding something hidden there is connected to another movie, but I can't find where. They also get Go, Brother!, a teen comedy about a girl who wishes her annoying brother as gone, only to find things different when that wish finds him suddenly part of another family.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond and Fenway continue matinees of Gold, with Fresh Pond also holding Geetha Govindam and Kolamavu Kokila over. Tamil dance film Lakshmi and Telugu romance Neevevaro each get one show a day.
• The Brattle Theatre wraps up their summer vertical calendar, starting with a weekend double feature of Blade Runner (the "Final Cut") and Blade Runner 2049. The Rita Hayworth series ends with three single features: Separate Tables (35mm) and The Money Trap (16mm) on Monday and The Lady from Shanghai on Tuesday (replacing the canceled Road to Salina). Tuesday also has a free Elements of Cinema screening of The Player, and then they wrap up their part of "Heroic!: Women Who Inspire" with a double feature of Persepolis (35mm) & A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night on Wednesday and one of Arrival & Alien on Thursday.
• "Heroic!" also continues at The Museum of Fine Arts with Strange Days (35mm Friday), Mad Max: Fury Road (Friday/Saturday), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Saturday/Sunday), Princess Mononoke (subtitled on Sunday), as well as Ava (Thursday). They also screen a ballet adaptation of Casanova on Saturday and Thursday as part of their "Casanova's Europe" program.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre picks up fashion doc McQueen to mostly play the Goldscreen, and then start to wind their summer programming up. Pumpkinhead (Friday) and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Saturday), both in 35mm, wrap up the "Organic Panic" midnights, with Friday also including a screening of The Room with a live shadowcast. There's also a 35mm Big Screen Classics presentation of The Godfather: Part II on Monday, and a special screening of Palestinian film Wajib on Tuesday.
• The Somerville Theatre holds Summer of '84 over for a third week of midnights (it also plays Cinema Salem at 9:30pm those days), also offering up late-night 35mm prints of Showgirls (Friday) and Purple Rain (Saturday) to finish the series, the latter featuring giveaways from High Energy Vintage. Their sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, has a Throwback Thursday screening of Breakfast at Tiffany's on the 30th.
• The Regent Theatre hosts the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday, with eight blocks of of films (some including a feature, some not).
• The Museum of Science's "Summer Thursdays" series had movies on the fourth week of each month, and for the fifth they go for a double feature, with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: First Contact. Mildly surprised they didn't do all three second Star Trek movies and include Into Darkness, but that one's the weak link of the trio.
• Because I let my membership lapse a few years back, I don't know what's playing for Members' Weekend at the The Harvard Film Archive, but if you're a member, you've probably already received an email about what rare 35mm prints they're pulling out to screen!
• It's Films at the Gate weekend, with free outdoor movies on the Rose Kennedy Greenway at 8pm all weekend, preceded by martial-arts demonstrations and WGBH Stories from the Stage entries. Friday has a couple other GBH presentations, "Forever, Chinatown" & "Random Acts of Legacy"; Saturday features Chasing the Dragon with an introduction from Klyster Yen, father of star Donnie Yen (and probably a demonstration from his mom's martial arts school); and things wrap up on Sunday with Xu Haofeng's The Final Master.
  
  Joe's Free Films has a list of other free movies, with Thor: Ragnarok getting a couple of outdoor screenings.

I honestly don't know what I'll be seeing this weekend - probably Support the Girls, but nothing else is looking like a must-see. I'm honestly just kind of glad I won't see a trailer for Oolong Courtyard again. I guess it'd be a shame to skip Films at the Gate, if only to hear from Donnie's dad.