Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 September 2018 - 27 September 2018

Big film at the Somerville, but beyond that, there's enough unusual stuff opening around town that a new Michael Moore almost seems conventional.

• As mentioned, head projectionist David Kornfeld will be working overtime at the
  The Somerville Theatre, projecting big film for their third annual 70mm and Widescreen Festival: Brainstorm and Lifeforce on Friday, Kong: Skull Island and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines on Saturday, El Cid (on 35mm) and Malcolm X on Sunday, Spartacus on Tuesday, Khartoum (in 70mm Ultra Panavision) on Wednesday, and Starman on Thursday (delayed a week after a reel got held up in customs). All in 70mm except where noted, and it's entirely possible that something fills that Monday hole at the last minute.
  
  The big event pushes Sorry to Bother You to their sister cinema in Arlington; The Capitol is also the only place around town playing Bel Canto, starring Julianne Moore as an opera singer who takes a job performing at the birthday of an industrialist (Ken Watanabe), only to find it become a month-long hostage situation when local guerillas invade.
• Blaze opens at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common, but it's The Coolidge Corner Theatre who gets to welcome director Ethan Hawke for the Friday screenings of his biography of Texas songwriter Blaze Foley, and what started as one Q&A at 7pm which quickly sold out became Q&As at 3pm, 5pm, and 7pm, plus an introduction at 9:55pm. Hopefully he gets a chance to enjoy a couple of Brookline's many fine restaurants in between those shows.
  
  They're also one of the places opening Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore's latest which is apparently less about Trump than the mess made of American democracy that somehow led to his Presidency (Moore was one of the few who thought it could happen back in 2016). That's at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Revenge is the name of the game after midnight, with Mandy continuing both Friday and Saturday while John Wick plays Friday. Magnum Force screens on 35mm Saturday night. There's a 35mm Science On Screen showing of Ace in the Hole on Monday with the MIT Media Lab's Deb Roy talking about the spread of misinformation. Wednesday's "Bergman 100" screening decamps to the Mount Auburn Cemetery as part of a double feature of Wild Strawberries and Stand by Me. Doesn't seem like a natural pairing, but maybe it fits.
• The House With a Clock in Its Walls is an oddity, a family-friendly supernatural thriller starring Jack Black and Cate Blanchett as rival sorcerer neighbors directed by Eli Roth, whose work has been decidedly non-PG in the past, but it's supposedly pretty good! As an added bonus, Imax screenings will have John Landis's video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" attached (supposedly converted to 3D, although the feature isn't screening in 3D anywhere). It's at Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (in Imax), the Embassy, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway (in RPX), the Seaport (including Imax and Dolby matinees), South Bay, Assembly Row (including Imax and Dolby matinees), Revere (including MX4d and XPlus), and the SuperLux.
  
  Life Itself, meanwhile, is getting some of the most venomous reviews of the year as a mashup of various different melodramatic plot threads. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. There are better reviews for two movies about young women killing people: Lizzie retells the tale of Lizzie Borden with Chloe Sevigny in the title role and Kristen Stewart as the maid some speculate was her lover and motive for murdering her parents; that's at the Somerville, Kendall Square, West Newton, Boston Common, and Revere. Assassination Nation is contemporary, with four girls looking out for themselves after a hack reveals a great deal of a town's personal data. That one's at Kendall Square, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, and Revere.
  
  AMC's Disney Princess screenings continue with The Princess and the Frog at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row; the Harry Potter screenings at Boston Common finish with both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Sunday. TCM presents Rebel Without a Cause at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Wednesday. The week's big anime presentation is My Hero Academia: Two Heroes, mostly playing dubbed at Boston Common, Fenway, and Revere from Tuesday to Thursday (Wednesday's shows are subtitled; Kendall Square has a show on Thursday).
• On top of the stuff opening elsewhere, Kendall Square has Love, Gilda, which tells the story of comedienne Gilda Radner mostly through her own words, taken from letter written all the way up to her death.
• Korean war epic The Great Battle opens at Boston Common, starring Jo In-sung as a Korean general who held off and invading force for nearly three months. They also have Chinese movie The Road Not Taken, with Wang Xuebing as a divorced man trying to reconnect with his wife in the Gobi desert, saddled with someone else's kid.
  
  Revere has one from Brazil, although Moses and the Ten Commandments: The Movie is a 2016 film edited down from a 2015 television series, supposedly including new-then scenes and a different ending, which does not seem like something its audience would be too fond of.
  
  Fenway plays Kannada-language film Sarakari Hiriya Prathamika Shale, Kasargud, Koduge Ramanna Rai - about kids in a school threatened with closure - on Friday and Saturday. Apple Fresh Pond has Telugu romantic comedy Nannu Dochukunduvate and Tamil actioner Sammy 2. Malayalam satire Theevandi plays one show on Sunday, and then Tamil drama Chekka Chivantha Vaanam and Hindi thriller Captain Nawab open on Wednesday.
  
  They also have Little Italy, with Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen as kids who fall in love despite their feuding parents who own competing pizza restaurants, which I honestly thought went straight to streaming a couple of months ago from how people were making a lot of noise about it.
• The Brattle Theatre continues their run of Bisbee '17, a documentary of a town preparing to mark the anniversary of a little-known but infamous atrocity. They also keep Madeline's Madeline around for late shows through Monday.
  
  Sunday's Art House Theater Day presentation is a new restoration of John Landis's Schlock. There's also a free Elements of Cinema screening of Edward Scissorhands on Tuesday, and then on Thursday they have the opening night presentation of the new Boston Women's Film Festival with Family
• Bergman 100 continues at The Harvard Film Archive with Persona (Friday 7pm), All These Women (Friday 9pm), Through a Glass Darkly on 35mm (Saturday 9pm), Scenes from a Marriage (Sunday 1pm), and Winter LIght on 35mm (Monday 7pm). On Saturday, they pull a rare Technicolor print of Singin' in the Rain out for a $5 family show at 3pm, and then look back at the Documentary Educational Resource program with Zulay, Facing the 21st Century at 7pm. They also present an Artist Talk from Ali Cherri in the bookstore on Thursday, a day before he presents a program of short films.
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues Ryuchi Sakamoto: Coda with screenings on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday. It shares the screen with Films from Pooh Corner, which includes both Disney features: 1977's The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Thursday) and 2011's Winnie the Pooh (Saturday/Sunday).
• The Boston Film Festival is still a thing - it actually had its opening night on the 20th - but it gets smaller every year, with two of its slots occupied by TV episodes. Most of the screenings are in the Paramount's Bright Screening Room, including Friday's The Etruscan Smile and A Boy Called Sailboat, but Saturday's Turning Point is at the Aquarium (first 100 seats free to those who RSVP) and Sunday's closing night screening of Grace is at the Icon in the Seaport.
• The Regent Theatre has its second screening (of three) of John Lyndon doc The Public Image Is Rotten on Sunday, and then the first of two shows of Joan Jett: Bad Reputation on Wednesday (it also plays the Kendall that night). On Thursday, they have their first screening of the 2018 edition of the Manhattan Short Film Festival.
• This week's Bright Lights screenings upstairs at the Paramount Theater are Lunafest (an all-female traveling film festival) on Tuesday and Estiu 1993 on Thursday, which opens the Boston Latino International Film Festival. The festival has another screening across the river that night, with Nuyorican Basquet playing in Harvard's Tsai Auditorium.
• If you missed it it during BUFF or at the Coolidge last weekCinema Salem has the big, loud, feature-length shootout that is Let the Corpses Tan in their little screening room.

I shall be living in the front row of the Somerville much of this week, only skipping Saturday afternoon for The Great Battle & The Road Not Taken. Maybe catch The House with a Clock in Its Walls on Monday, depending how/if the Somerville fills that space.