Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 19 October 2018 - 25 October 2018

I'd scratch my head at how many screens the weekend's big release is on, but opening night of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is the craziest show I can remember from when I worked at a theater. Folks apparently like that series but it's been weirdly mismanaged (although that may have kept it from burning out).

• But first, head over to the The Brattle Theatre for the Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, their annual event midway between the last festival and the next one to catch up on some of what's coming out in the next few months. It's compacted to fit in between other things there, cramming ten movies into three days: Wildlife and Border on Friday evening; Cold War, Rafiki, Shoplifters, and Vox Lux on Saturday; and Roma (maybe your only chance to see it theatrically), Non-Fiction, Burning, and The Favourite on Sunday.
  
  After that finishes, the DocYard welcomes directors Michael Palmieri & Donal Mosher for The Gospel of Eureka, a documentary about gospel drag shows, which apparently is a thing. After that comes the first half of Strange Frequencies, their Halloween series, this year featuring Prince of Darkness & [REC] on Tuesday, a 35mm double feature of Poltergeist & The Innkeepers on Wednesday, and a single print of Kairo (Pulse) on Thursday.
• Elsewhere, you can see Halloween (2018), which is really straining the screwy naming conventions of series that come back after a while - it's a sequel to John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher which ditches all of the continuity (or lack thereof) that came between, so this fork of the franchise has two parts, both named "Halloween", which isn't confusing at all. Anyway, David Gordon Green's sequel is all over the place, at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby CInema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux. If (like me) you've somehow never seen the original, Apple Fresh Pond is screening it late afternoon all week.
  
  Much smaller release for The Oath, a timely-sounding comedy hypothesizing a required loyalty oath to the president, due at Thanksgiving, and the havoc it plays at a divided family's holiday dinner - that's just playing Boston Common and the Embassy. The relatively small release slate also has three films expanding to more theaters: The Hate U Give is now at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere; The Sisters Brothers at the Somerville and Kendall Square; with The Old Man and the Gun at the Coolidge, the Capitol, West Newton, The Lexington Venue and Kendall Square.
  
  In one-offs, Twilight gets 10th anniversary screenings at Boston Common, Fenway, and Revere on Sunday and Tuesday; BeetleJuice one at Revere for its 30th (and The Conjuring one on Thursday for its fifth; and last but not least, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead celebrates its fiftieth at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Wednesday and Thursday. And while I generally don't list the live theater broadcasts here, an exception is made for the Danny Boyle/Benedict Cumberbatch/Jonny Lee Miller Frankenstein, playing Monday at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere with Cumberbatch as the creature and Miller as the monster (and the roles reversed on the 29th).
• Beautiful Boy opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, as well as Kendall Square and Boston Common. It features Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet as a father and his son who is battling addiction, taken from both of their memoirs.
  
  The Coolidge also opens Black '47, although it only gets two midnight shows (Friday and Saturday); it stars James Frecheville as a nineteenth-century soldier seeking revenge upon all those he blames for a disastrous famine and British crackdown, while Hugo Weaving is the soldier assigned to stop him. They also continue their "Jamie Lee Curtis: Queen of Halloween" series with a 35mm print of Prom Night at midnight on Friday, and wrap their run of midnight screenings of The Exorcist with a show on Saturday. Creepiness continues on Monday with a 35mm Big Screen Classics show of The Silence of the Lambs, with an optional before/after-show seminar. They also bring out a 35mm print of Hocus Pocus for Rewind! screenings on Thursday.
• Kendall Square is at least the first place to get The Happy Prince, which Rupert Everett writes, directs, and stars in, playing Oscar Wilde in his later years, brought low by his imprisonment and still drawn to Alfred Bosie Douglas (Colin Morgan); Colin Firth, Emily Watson, and Tom Wilkinson also star. They also open Denmark's Oscar submission, The Guilty, a one-man-show for Jakob Cedergren, who plays a cop on desk duty responding to a call for help.
• Aravindha Sametha Veera Raghava and Vada Chennai continue Apple Fresh Pond continues , 96, also opening Tamil serial-killer thriller Raatchasan. They also open Namaste England, a Hindi-language romantic comedy with Parineeti Chopra and Arjun Kapoor that apparently opens things up a little from Namaste London. There's also Badhaai Ho, also in Hindi, featuring Ayushmann Khurrana as a grown man who finds it more than a bit embarrassing that his mother is pregnant. There's also Tamil action sequel Sandakozhi 2, a Saturday afternoon screening of Marathi film Shubh Lagna Savdhan, and Malayalam adventure Kayamkulam Kochunni on Sunday.
  
  Project Gutenberg continues at Boston Common, which is a pretty nice run!
• The Harvard Film Archive is one of the local venues collaborating on a Tony Conrad retrospective and exhibit (along with the Carpenter Center and the MIT List Center), showing a selection of his 16mm films at 7pm on Friday and following it up with Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, Tyler Hubby's 2016 profile. They also welcome Albertina Carri for The Blonds (Saturday 7pm), I Won't Go Back Home (Sunday 4:30pm), and Cuatreros (Sunday 7pm); she is scheduled to be at the first and last, while the first two are in 35mm. Monday kicks off their 200th-Anniversary-of-Frankenstein series with a 35mm print The Spirit of the Beehive, where the monster is more an idea than a presence.
• The Museum of Fine Arts opens their Boston Palestine Film Festival with The Reports on Sarah and Saleem on Friday, which includes discussion with director Muayad Alayan and writer Rami Alayan, with the former also scheduled for Saturday's encore. The festival also includes two short packages on Sunday, with one repeating on Thursday along with Soufra. Aside from that, they screen I Am Not a Witch on Saturday afternoon and two more in the Let the Devil In: 50 Years of British Horror series on Wednesday: The Innocents and The Wicker Man.
• Boston Asian-American Film Festival has super-sized itself this year, running a full 11 days, mostly in the Bright Screening Room at the Paramount Theater, including Bitter Melon on Saturday, Centerpiece screening "Deported" on Sunday, and plenty of shorts packages; one of which is Thursday's Bright Lights presentation. They detour to the Pao Arts Center for two "Chinatown Presents" shows on Monday and Tuesday, and have a free screening of Finding Samuel Lowe, including an author talk at the Boston Public Library on Wednesday.
  
  Bright Lights also participates in the Palestine Film Festival, presenting The Judge.on Tuesday, with director Erika Cohn discussing her film about the first woman to be appointed as a judge in a Shari'a court.
• The Regent Theatre plays Reach, in which a suicidal teenager makes an unexpected new friend who finds new ways to pull him out of funks and help him strengthen other relationships. Note that it plays once a day through Thursday and bounces between the main theater and the "Underground" space. One of the things it moves downstairs to make room for is Chet's Last Call, a documentary on the 1980s Boston punk venue, built around two 2016 tribute concerts, with several of the bands involved scheduled to play after the film. They'll also have their own "Frankenfest" on Wednesday, with the Edison "Frankenstein", Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Frankenstein Created Woman.
• The ICA screens Where the Pavement Ends, a documentary about the history of Ferguson, Missouri, intertwined with that of Kinloch, the now mostly-abandoned town whose population was mostly black compared to the all-white in Ferguson during the days of segregation. Filmmakers Jane Gillooly, Khary Saeed Jones, and Aparna Agrawal will be present for the single show Sunday afternoon.
• Silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis makes one of his regular visits to the Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville on Sunday for a live soundtrack of the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera.
• Throwback Thursday at The Capitol is not a Frankenstein film - they're celebrating Halloween with a screening of Carrie.
• Cinema Salem mixes some 2D shows of "The History of Halloween" in with the 3D ones, and also has the Teseracte Players in for The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday, both at 8pm and midnight. Full Body Cast is (I believe) still doing that every Saturday at Boston Common.

I'll probably be living at the Brattle for the Fall Focus this weekend, although I don't want to jinx the Red Sox and say what nights I'll be watching baseball instead of movies this week.