Friday, February 22, 2019

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 February 2019 - 28 February 2019

It's Oscar weekend, so theaters are prepared for a lot of weekend cramming and maybe hoping for people coming in to catch the winners during the week, making me wonder how much flexibility they've built into their schedules for Monday through Thursday. But there's new stuff too.

  • How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World may not get all the biggest 3D screens - Alita still has many claimed - but will get a fair amount as the finale to what is arguably DreamWorks Animation's best series deserves. By now, the kids from the first one are grown up, but word of their dragons has started to spread, with hunters coming calling. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Boston Common, Fenway (including RPX), the Seaport (2D only), South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux (2D only).

    There's also Fighting with My Family, which stars Florence Pugh as a young British wrestling fan who dreams of joining WWE with her brother - with it awkward when she is the only one signed. Aside from the always-kind-of-great Pugh, the cast includes Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, and Dwayne Johnson, with Stephen Merchant directing. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, the Embassy, and Revere.

    The Oscars pre-empt the "one-off" shows at the multiplexes this weekend, with Fenway continuing to show the best picture nominees (other than Roma) in rotation and Boston Common having the second half of their Best Picture Showcase with an all day marathon of Vice, Black Panther, A Star Is Born, and Green Book on Saturday. Things start up again afterward, with Fenway, South Bay, and Revere playing Gone with the Wind on Thursday.
  • Kendall Square certainly isn't mixing things up much before the awards, although they do open The Invisibles. That one is a story of four Jewish twenty-somethings in 1943 Berlin, hiding in plain sight, sometimes using their very visibility as a disguise itself.
  • The Wandering Earth keeps playing a bunch of showtimes at Boston Common and Fenway (with Pegasus still getting some play at Boston Common), and now both places are opening the biggest Korean hit of the winter, with Extreme Job, a comedy about a group of undercover cops who set up shop in a run-down restaurant, only to make it a success because their fried chicken recipe is so good. I don't know if it's a remake of last year's Chinese comedy Lobster Cop or not, but it sure sounds awful close. Boston Common also picks up Alone/Together, an opposites-attract romantic comedy from the Philippines.

    Fenway and Apple Fresh Pond both continue Gully Boy, with Apple also keeping Uri: The Surgical Strike, with the big Bollywood opening being Total Dhamaal, the third movie in a series about con-artist slackers getting in ove their heads; it features Ajay Devgn, Anil Kapoor, and Madhuri Dixit. They also open Malayalam comedy Kumbalangi Nights, and NTR: Mahanayakudu, the second half of a two-part biography of Nandamuri Taraka Ramarao.
  • The Brattle Theatre sort of cobbles its schedule together this week, starting with how Friday and Saturday feature a 35mm Looney Tunes Revue for matinees, a new restoration of The Bostonians at 4:30pm and 7pm, and then the last couple late shows of Lords of Chaos at 9:30pm (the latter also plays The Somerville Theatre and Cinema Salem for a week starting Friday).

    After that, it's special events - the Oscar Party on Sunday, special DocYard presentation The Competition - with director Claire Simon in person and in conversation with Ross McElwee - on Monday evening, a free "Elements of Cinema" presentation of Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker on Tuesday, and Wings of Desire in tribute to the late Bruno Ganz on Thursday. They're closed to the public on Wednesday.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre shuffles things a bit but mostly keeps the same lineup. They bring out the big guns for Women in Horror this weekend, with Aliens on 35mm at 11:30pm Friday night and Annihilation at midnight on Saturday. There's a GlobeDocs screening of Life Without Basketball on Tuesday, with filmmakers Tim O'Donnell and Jon Mercer on-hand. Another doc plays Thursday night, when they host a special screening of Soul Witness, with the filmmaker present. It has screened as a work-in-progress several times, but this is it in its final, official form.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts finishes their February calendar much as it started, with more of the Boston Festival of Films from Japan including Tremble All You Want (Friday); Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (Friday); We Make Antiques! (Saturday); Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki (Saturday/Thursday); Kusama: Infinity (Sunday); The Third Murder (Sunday); and Hanagatami (Thursday). There are also final screenings of Young Picasso (Sunday/Wednesday), and one last Poverty Row preservation from UCLA, with False Faces playing Wednesday with a 1932 newsreel and Dave Fleischer's "Snow White".
  • Dominga Sotomayor will visit The Harvard Film Archive this weekend - not early enough to introduce "Mar" & "Los Barcos" on Friday, but in person for Thursday Till Sunday on Sunday (playing on 16mm film) and Too Late to Die Young on Monday. In between, they finish up the Mariano LlinĂ¡s retrospective with an encore of Balnearios at 9pm Friday, a special matinee of acclaimed 1969 children's TV-movie J.T. on Saturday afternoon, and a 35mm presentation of Tous let Matins du Monde that evening (in conjunction with a Sunday concert by its musicians).
  • ArtsEmerson doesn't use the Bright Screening Room at their Paramount Theater that much themselves (a shame; they had a fun program when it first opened), but they will this weekend, with writer/producer/star Rafael Casal hosting Blindspotting on Friday night, with more screenings on offer Saturday and Sunday. After that, the room is once again the setting for the free Bright Lights series, with Let the Corpses Tan on Tuesday and You Were Never Really Here on Thursday.
  • The Regent Theatre in Arlington finishes school vacation week with a Grease sing-along on Friday evening and three programs from the New York International Children's Film Festival on Saturday. They also have encores of Joni 75 on Sunday.
  • Where to see the Oscar-Nominated Shorts? The Documentaries are at the Somerville (Friday) and the Luna (Saturday); the Animation is at the Coolidge, the Kendall, the Somerville (Friday), The ICA (Friday/Sunday), and the Luna (Saturday); the Live Action at the Coolidge, the Kendall, the Somerville (Friday), the ICA (Sunday), and the Luna (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday). The ICA also shows animated feature nominee Mirai as part of their Saturday "Play Date".
  • The Luna Theater also has Annie (Saturday/Sunday), The Princess Bride (Sunday), Dirty Dancing (Monday), and "Weirdo Wednesday".


My plans include trying to cram Alita, How to Train Your Dragon, Extreme Job, and Cold Pursuit in around not just the Oscars, but a day trip to New York for the second annual Hong-Kong-a-Thon on Saturday and then the first half of a flight to the real thing on Thursday (I am, as you may expect, very excited).

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