Friday, March 08, 2019

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 March 2019 - 14 March 2019

Still in Hong Kong, and kind of amazed to what extent the new Marvel movie is just dominating bookings here - I wanted to duck in from the rain a couple of times and it was hard to find anything else. It's gonna be nuts in America, I figure.

  • Can't necessarily blame the rest of Hollywood for giving it a berth - Captain Marvel is the studio doing the superhero thing well and selling us on Brie Larson's Carol Danvers as the last missing piece for Avengers: Endgame. It's got a nifty cast, looks great in 3D, and though I don't know if Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck are really local favorites any more, it's kind of crazy to see people who were IFFBoston staples for a while doing a big superhero movie. Anyway, it's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond, The Lexington Venue (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (2D Imax), Boston Common (including Imax 2D), Fenway (including 2D/3D RPX), the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax 2D & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D & Dolby Cinema), the Embassy (2D only), Revere (including XPlus & MX4D), and the SuperLux (2D only).

    With a few extra screens to fill even with that, Boston Common opens The Kid, which features Ethan Hawke as Pat Garrett, Dane DeHaan as Billy the Kid, and Jake Schur as a boy who witnessed the showdown. Vincent D'Onofrio directs and pops up in the morie, as to a few other interesting names. Meanwhile, Apollo 11 moves from the Imax screens to others, now playing at the Coolidge, the Somerville, Boston Common, Fenway, the Embassy, Revere, and Cinema Salem.

    Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere have Tom Baker's last Doctor Who story, "Logopolis" presumably cleaned up and HD-ified, on Wednesday; those theaters plus Boston Common, South Bay, and Revere also have a "fan event" preview of Five Feet Apart that same night (Haley Lu Richardson darn well better have fans). Fenway also has Russian hit Tobol: The Conquest of Siberia on Wednesday, for one night only. Anime fans (and those who love bizarre punctuation) get Fate/Stay Night [Heaven's Feel] II. Lost Butterfly at Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Thursday. Revere also shows Clueless on Thursday.
  • Kendall Square kind of does some post-Oscars housecleaning to open four new movies. Climax and The Wedding Guest also open at Boston Common, with the former being the new one from Gaspar Noe bout a party including a troupe of dancers that goes way off the rails when LSD gets into the drinks and the latter starring Dev Patel as a man who goes to a wedding in Pakistan to kidnap the bride-to-be - a situation that also gets out of control!

    They get a couple to themselves, too. Birds of Passage, which has been getting a lot of buzz, is a highly-regarded film from Colombia about an indigenous family struggling to control the local drug trade. They also get Mapplethorpe, a biography of the controversial photographer starring Matt Smith, and will have producers Eliza & Nate Dushku on hand for Q&As Friday and Saturday evenings (note that the first is listed as sold out).
  • After a preview last weekend, The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens To Dust in the small rooms, starring Géza Röhrig as a Hasidic widower who becomes obsessed with the mechanics of decomposition and Matthew Broderick as a biologist who winds up as sort of an enabler.

    The killer-machines midnight series starts early this weekend (11:30pm) to give them time to show a couple of long ones. On Friday, that's 2001: A Space Odyssey on 35mm, and on Saturday it's Blade Runner 2049. There's Open Screen on Tuesday, and an early sneak of Gloria Bell on Thursday.
  • In a bit of a swerve, this week's Asian action film opens at South Bay, with Furie starring Veronica Ngo Thanh Van as a former gangster who is going to have to beat the living crap out of the guys who kidnapped her daughter. She hasn't had a lot of parts that went international after the one-two punch of The Rebel and Clash (aside from Rose's sister in The Last Jedi), so it's good to see her back in action. Meanwhile, Boston Common's run of The Wandering Earth seems a heck of a lot more successful than how the movie is doing in Hong Kong.

    The big Bollywood opening this week is Badla, a thriller featuring Amitabh Bachchan as a lawyer and Shah Rukh Khan as his client with a matter of hours to solve a murder before appearing in court; it plays Fenway and Apple Fresh Pond. Both continue Gully Boy while Luka Chuppi also sticks around Fresh Pond. Fresh Pond also has their first VOD special in a while, showing I'm Not Here - which features J.K. Simmons, Sebastian Stan, and Iain Armitage as a man at various stages of his life, with Maika Monroe, Harold Perrineau, and Mandy Moore popping up in his memories - a couple times a day.
  • The Brattle Theatre will be running a double feature of the new and old versions of Suspiria this weekend, with the remake also playing Wednesday. As for the rest of the work-week, they have a DocYard presentation of Of Fathers and Sons on Monday (with director Talal Derki skyping in), a "Cinema in Context" show of Network on 35mm Tuesday, and a special screening of Blade Runner (the final cut) on Thursday.
  • The Harvard Film Archive kicks off a New Thai Cinema series this weekend, featuring The Songs of Rice (Friday 7pm), Vanishing Point (Friday 8:45pm), Eternity (Saturday 7pm), and Railway Sleepers (Sunday 4pm). Saturday afternoon features the start of a series of anime matinees, with Wolf Children the first of three by Mamoru Hosoda. They have an encore of Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman on Sunday evening, and then a short film program - "Woman with a Camera: Female Filmmakers from the Bauhaus" - on Monday evening.
  • The Museum of Fine Arts continues their runs of Corneliu Porumboiu's Infinite Football (Friday/Sunday), Jupiter's Moon (Friday/Saturday/Thursday), Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book (Sunday). "Five Women Filmmakers" has its next two entries with Madeline's Madeline (Saturday) and You Were Never Really Here (Thursday), and while the special showing of Where the Pavement Ends on Sunday is not part of that series, it will feature a post-film discussion with director Jane Gillooly, Khary Saeed Jones, and Aparna Agrawal, moderated by the Roxbury Film Festival's Lisa Simmons.
  • The Regent Theatre has a fair chunk of film this week, with A Hard Day's Night on Friday evening, a matinee of The Wiz Saturday morning, Jesus Christ Superstar Saturday afternoon, and 40th anniversary screenings of Hair Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Only JCSS is listed as a sing-along, but who knows if they'll turn subtitles on, given how much they like such things there. They also team with the Northeast Comic Con for a special screening of the 1953 The War of the Worlds on Thursday, with co-star Ann Robinson on-hand for a Q&A and autographs.
  • Bright Lights returns to the screening room in the Paramount after spring break with Danseur on Tuesday, although the discussion will be with the makers of attached short "Movement in Structure" (director Shaun Clarke and dancer John Lam). Madeline's Madeline plays Thursday, with faculty discussion. Remember, though targeted to Emerson studios, these shows are free for everyone.
  • The Somerville Theatre starts their "Jack Attack!" series on Thursday with The Raven, which should be a lot better considering who is involved (Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Roger Corman adapting Poe), but it's got an early part for Jack Nicholson and plays on 35mm film.
  • The Oscar-Nominated Shorts have their last few shows, with Animation having showtimes all week at the Kendall and one sold-out show at The ICA on Sunday - although there are still tickets for the Live-action shorts at the ICA Sunday.
  • The Luna Theater has Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Friday and Sunday, CatVideoFest 2019 on Saturday and Tuesday, Jimi Hendrix on Monday, and who knows what on Weirdo Wednesday.


Captain Marvel opened in Hong Kong on a rainy Wednesday, so I've already seen that, and I've got no idea right now how jet-lagged I'll be after flying home. Might only catch Furie.

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