Friday, March 01, 2019

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 March 2019 - 7 March 2019

Is next week this week yet? I'm somewhere over Asia now and have no idea. Looks like a quiet movie week back home.

  • The biggest release is apparently A Madea Family Funeral, in which Tyler Perry doesn't appear to be killing off his signature character but is supposedly retiring her as she plans a disastrous-looking memorial for a relative. That plays at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere.

    Boston Common, meanwhile, opens documentary Apollo 11 for a one-week engagement on its Imax screen, while they, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row also bring back A Star Is Born in a special "Encore" version which adds an extra 11 or 12 minutes of footage. Meanwhile, the Imax screens at Jordan's Furniture and South Bay pick up How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. In terms of one-offs, Gone With the Wind has 80th anniversary shows at Fenway and South Bay on Sunday, while Revere has anime Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission on Tuesday.
  • The other major opening is Greta, which by dint of coming out on a slow week and looking like a basic thriller while being directed by Neil Jordan and starring Isabelle Huppert manages to span the multiplexes and art houses. That includes The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Somerville, Kendall Square, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. The Coolidge also opens A Tuba to Cuba, mostly in the small rooms, which follows the leader of New Orleans famous Preservation Hall Jazz Band as he traces the roots of his music back to the island.

    First Friday of the month means one of the midnight shows is "Martial Art House", in this case a 35mm print of The Super Inframan, downstairs, they start a month of killer robots with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, continuing the theme on Saturday with Chopping Mall. There are two special screenings with guests on Sunday: horticulturist Angela Luckey and Boston Museum of Science's manager of living collections Jackie Peeler introduce a Science on Screen Jr. show of Mary and the Witch's Flower, while producers Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer introduce a preview of To Dust, in which a grieving widower becomes obsessed with the process of decay. There's a Stage & Screen presentation of West Side Story on 35mm Monday night, CatVideoFest on Wednesday, and a special big-screen presentation of Free Solo on Thursday.
  • Kendall Square has CatVideoFest on Monday, and also opens Ruben Brandt, Collector - a Slovenian animated film with English dialogue in which a psychotherapist with nightmares about monsters from famous has a number of art thieves as patients who decide to help him by stealing the paintings..
  • Fenway and Apple Fresh Pond both open Bollywood romance Luka Chuppi while continuing Gully Boy, with Apple also opening Hindi-language thriller Sonchiriya and Telugu thriller 118. Total Dhamaal also continues. Boston Common continues their runs of China's The Wandering Earth and South Korea's Extreme Job.
  • The Brattle Theatre has the new restoration of Detour from Friday to Sunday, and then shuts their doors for the rest of the week to have their restrooms renovated.
  • The Harvard Film Archive will have Park Chan-wook visit for a free discussion Tuesday afternoon (tickets first come, first serve at the door), and will prime the audience by showing his first film, Joint Security Area (Friday 7pm), and his most recent in The Handmaiden, so study up! They also start a Lucretia Martel retrospective with The Headless Woman (Friday 9pm on 35mm) and show The Stormy Night, one of the few surviving silents from the early days of the Chinese film industry in Shanghai (Saturday 7pm, with music by Jeff Rapsis). Then they welcome Laura Huertas Millán to present short programs on Sunday and Monday nights.
  • March brings a new calendar at The Museum of Fine Arts, and it's a varied one. They start runs for four interesting films, with Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu switching to documentary work to follow a former star trying to make the game safer Infinite Football (Friday), Jean-Luc Godard's latest essay The Image Book (Friday), Jupiter's Moon, a supernatural thriller from White God director Kornél Mundruczó (Friday/Thursday), plus Bauhaus Spirit: 100 Years of Bauhaus (Saturday), which ties in with one of the museum's exhibits. They also celebrate the 80th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz with shows Friday and Sunday, begin a "5 Women Filmmakers" series with Debra Granik's Leave No Trace (Sunday), and run a 35mm print of How to Get Ahead in Advertising on Thursday as part of their monthly "On the Fringe: Adventures in Cult Cinema" series.
  • The Somerville Theatre has their first "Slaughterhouse Movie Club" presentation of the year on Friday, with a burlesque show of "Big Trouble in Little Somerville: The Porkchop Undress" at 8pm and then Big Trouble in Little China at 9. On Sunday, the Alloy Orchestra makes their annual visit as part of the CrashArts program, and this time they're going with a classic, accompanying the restoration of Metropolis on Sunday afternoon.
  • The Oscar-Nominated Shorts continue to show after the awards, with Animation & Live-action sharing a screen at the Kendall, while The ICA has those two on Saturday and the two Documentary programs on Sunday
  • The Luna Theater is going to be showing the Harry Potter movies for the next few weekends, starting this weekend with Sorcerer's Stone playing Friday and Saturday and Chamber of Secrets on Saturday and Sunday. The Witches of Eastwick plays Sunday, Oscar-winning documentary short "Period. End of Sentence." on Monday and Big Sur on Tuesday before Weirdo Wednesday.


Odds are I won't be seeing any of them - I'm on vacation in Hong Kong, so I'll be getting familiar with the places where a lot of favorites are set and shot. Still, I'll almost certainly unwind at a local theater some night or other and hope that there are English subtitles!

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