Friday, November 09, 2018

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 November 2018 - 15 November 2018

Yes, I just bought tickets to something before posting it to make sure whoever reads this doesn't sell it out before I could. You can probably guess which one.

  • It's not Overlord, which I caught Thursday night and rather liked - it's pretty basic WWII pulp horror, but fun, and at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax 2D and Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax), and Revere. The week's other big thriller is The Girl in the Spider's Web, which has Claire Foy taking on the role of Lisbeth Salander as Sony (and director Fede Alvarez) jump past the original trilogy for one of the books written by someone else to continue the series. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.

    Also being adapted - The Grinch, this time in 3D-animated feature form, with Benedict Cumberbatch voicing the title character who sounds a little more sympathetic in the previews than normal. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), West Newton (2D only), Boston Common, Fenway (including 2D RPX), the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax 2D and Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D and Dolby Cinema), Revere (including MX4D), and the SuperLux (2D only).

    There's more Christmas cheer on hand with 30th Anniversary (really?) screenings of Die Hard at Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Wednesday. It's 25 years for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, which plays those places on Monday, and no particular milestone for Slap Shot at Revere on Thursday. Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, Assembly Row, and Revere also go early with a special "Fandom Event" premiere of Fantastic Beasts 2 on Tuesday.
  • Boy Erased plays at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and Boston Common, offering up Lucas Hedges as a gay teenager sent to "conversion therapy", with Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman playing his parents. Joel Edgerton directs and appears, and that's a lot of Australians making this movie set in America.

    The Coolidge's Midnight Meltdown continues with 35mm prints of two masters showing a movie can be both smart and gory (and remakes at that): David Cronenberg's The Fly on Friday night and John Carpenter's The Thing on Saturday. They also break out film for The Royal Tenenbaums, a Thursday "Rewind" show.
  • Kendall Square and Boston Common are the first to get A Private War, featuring Rosamund Pike as war correspondent Marie Colvin. They also have biography in documentary form with Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco.

    Over in Waltham, their sister cinema in Embassy Square continues to help Netflix technically release their films in major markets by playing Outlaw King, featuring Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce reuniting him with his Hell and High Water director, David Mackenzie.
  • The big Diwali movie this year looks to be Thugs of Hindostan, playing both Apple Fresh Pond and Fenway, which has the director of Dhoom 3 reuniting with some of that movie's cast for a big high-seas adventure that, so far as I know, it's more about pays than the mostly-fictional Thugee cult. Fresh Pond also holds over Tamil drama Sarkar and screens Marathi film Ani… Dr. Kashinath Ghanekar, about a dentist who became a popular stage actor, on Saturday and Sunday mornings and Monday evening. They also have American documentary Surviving Home, about four generations of Veterans who had trouble re-assimilating to civilian life.

    The new film from Japanese director Shunji Iwai, Last Letter, is set in Shanghai and features a woman attending a high school reunion in place of her late older sister and meeting the man she had a crush on as a kid. Intriguingly, Iwai is already shooting a Japanese version, both inverting and accelerating the usual foreign remake cycle in a way that makes me wonder if this isn't some other sort of experiment. The Chinese version plays Boston Common this week, and if be surprised if the other makes it over here. Boston Common also opens Korean comedy Intimate Strangers, on which two couples who haven't seen each other in some time exchange cell phones and have secrets revealed as party of a game.
  • The Brattle Theatre and the Goethe-Institut finish their "And the Winners Are…" series on Friday with In The Aisles (director Thomas Stuber in person) and Manifesto. They follow that up with the start of the latest "Recent Raves" series, including Science Fair (Sunday), Sorry to Bother You (Tuesday) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Wednesday). There's also a DocYard screening of Blowin' Up with director Stephanie Wang-Breal discussing her film about how prostitution cases are handled by the law, and a special screening of short film "Jahar" with filmmakers present; it dramatizes the reactions of the Cambridge teenagers who knew the 2013 Marathon bomber.
  • Saturday and Thursday at the Brattle are taken by the Boston Jewish Film's Annual Festival, which continues all week, spread out over the metro Boston area. Films also screen at the Coolidge (Friday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday), the JAC Riemer-Goldstein Theater (Saturday/Sunday), MFA (Saturday/Wednesday), ICA (Sunday), Newbridge on the Charles (Sunday), West Newton (Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday), Patriot Place (Monday), the Center for the Arts in Natick (Monday), the Capitol (Monday/Thursday), Maynard Fine Arts (Tuesday), the Somerville (Tuesday)
  • The Harvard Film Archive receives a visit from Chinese documentarian Wang Bing to present two of his most recent works at drastically different scales - Mrs. Fang, on Friday, is an 86-minute look at the family of a woman in an open-eyed coma; Saturday's Dead Souls is an eight-hour compilation of the stories of those sent to a state re-education camp.

    The focus then shifts to Germany, with a special family screening of Mountain Miracle - An Unexpected Friendship on Sunday afternoon, and then continuing their Early West German Film program with Avant-garde shorts (Sunday 5pm on 16mm/35mm), The Eighth Day of the Week (Sunday 7pm), and Redhead (Monday 7pm on 35mm).
  • In addition to their Jewish Film Festival programming, The Museum of Fine Arts continues The Boston Turkish Festival's Documentary & Short FIlm Competition with programming on Friday and Saturday. Friday is also the first night for Milford Graves Full Mantis, a documentary about a percussionist who, in addition to being at the top of that field, had a martial-arts dojo in his backyard and a lab in his basement. A different matter of hours field is profiled in John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, which screens as a "Jump Cut" preview on Sunday. The new Frederick Wiseman documentary Monrovia, Indiana, continues with screenings Sunday and Wednesday.
  • Emerson's Bright Lights program has director Amy Adrion in on Tuesday for her documentary Half the Picture, which focuses on how under-represented women are as directors in the movie industry. Thursday's presentation is A Fantastic Woman, with faculty discussion. As always, free and open to the public in the Bright Screening Room.
  • The Somerville Theatre had to cut its "Silents, Please" series short for renovations this year, and though those are not yet done, they've still got room to show The Big Parade, with Jeff Rapsis providing the score for the 35mm Armistice Day presentation. There's a "Reel Rock" group of short films on Wednesday, which includes the guy from Free Solo as well as other climbers. And on Thursday, they team with IMAGINE for a special premiere of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, which was shot in Massachusetts and is a ton of fun. The $75 VIP tickets get you in a 6:30pm reception, but the guests (writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski, FX guys Doublas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich, and composer Joe Kraemer) will be there for a Q&A after the 8pm screening which only runs $15.
  • The Regent Theatre has documentary Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story on Thursday evening, and I don't know if these really count as movies, but one of those "Deconstructing the Beatles" things (this one for The White Album) on Wednesday..


I am down for Last Letter, Thugs of Hindostan, Outlaw King, and A Private War, and will probably try to fit some catch-up in there too, although some of that is hard to schedule around given length and location on some of 'em. Oh, and I absolutely look forward to catching The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot again from someplace that is not the absolute last seat in the house.

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