Friday, June 14, 2019

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 June 2019 - 13 June 2019

It's a weird stage of the summer, when everything at the Coolidge is also playing at more mainstream theaters, and it's not necessarily awards stuff. But maybe, if folks start looking back when voting this year...

  • First up is Late Night, with Mindy Kaling as a woman hired to join an all-male writer's room for a talk show, with Emma Thompson as the host. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.

    Another surprisingly-wide opening is The Dead Don't Die, with Jim Jarmusch putting together an all-star cast led by frequent collaborator Bill Murray in an arch, self-referential comedy about a zombie outbreak. That plays the Coolidge, the Somerville, Kendall Square, Boston Common, South Bay, Revere.

    The Coolidge continues a month of popular midnights without a theme but "this is obviously a midnight movie" with House on 35mm Friday night and A Field in England on Saturday. There's a live concert on Wednesday, and a 35mm "Rewind!" show of A League of Their Own on Thursday.
  • There's a fair amount of turnover at Kendall Square, which opens up two screens for The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a Sundance award-winner with Jimmie Fails as a man settling into the house his grandfather built decades ago, though the city has changed and is in many ways squeezing its people out. There's also American Woman, with Sienna Miller as a woman whose life is turned upside-down when her teenage daughter - a new mother herself - disappears. Both also play at Boston Common.

    The Kendall also picks up Quebecois caper The Fall of the American Empire, in which an under-employed delivery driver finds himself in the middle of a robbery with a chance to abscond with some bags of money, though it's never that simple. Friday night's show of Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation will be hosted by producer Susan Bellows and two folks from the concert, though it plays all week.

    There's also a GlobeDocs presentation of Lovesick on Wednesday, with director Ann Kim, co-director Priya Desai, and The Boston Globe's Meredith Goldstein on hand for a discussion after the film.
  • Sequels to franchises that have been sitting around a while are the main attractions at the multiplexes, with Men In Black: International getting most of the deluxe screens and the 3D upconversion. It introduces a new set of partners in Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, and probably makes less impressive use of Emma Thompson than Late Night. That's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (Imax 2D), Boston Common (including Imax 2D), Fenway (including RPX 2D), the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax 2D), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D & Dolby Cinema), Revere (including XPlus & MX4D), and the SuperLux (2D only). There's also Shaft, with Jessie T. Usher joining Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson as the third generation of John Shaft, this one a less-cool millenial in what appears to be a more comedically-oriented take on the series (which now has three films with the same title in the same continuity). That can be seen at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row, and Revere.

    Assembly Row and Fenway have 30th Anniversary screenings of Field of Dreams on Sunday and Tuesday (with Revere only on Tuesday). Fenway and South Bay screen documentary Emanuel, about the 2015 Charleston church shooting, on Monday and Wednesday. Revere shows Magic Mike Tuesday evening.
  • The Brattle Theatre shows the new restoration of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of War and Peace, a 422-minute monster of a movie that is broken into four parts screening from Friday to Monday. The Saturday, Sunday, and Monday schedules are viewable as a marathon, or you could catch it every night at 8pm. After that, it's probably a big shift to Trash Night on Tuesday, with Wednesday and Thursday still listed as "TBA".
  • Rainbow's Sunset opens at Boston Common, hailing from the Philippines and telling the story of a senior who comes out as gay to his family so that he can be with his ailing lover.

    Apple Fresh Pond still has Bharat hanging around, along with Malayalam true-life thriller Virus (through Sunday) and Hindi thriller movie Game Over (through Wednesday). Nepali caper Jatrai Jatra plays Sunday, while Indian-American dark comedy Remember Amnesia plays Monday.
  • West Newton appears to be the only place opening Papi Chulo, with Matt Bomer as a man striking up a friendship with the migrant worker (Alejandro Patiño) hired to help him work on his house while suspended from his job. That theater also hosts the second week of Belmont World Film's annual World Refugee Month series on Monday, with Swiss/German documentary Eldorado playing Monday along with Oscar-nominated short "Lifeboat" and a speaker from the Refugee and Immigrant Assistance Center.
  • Because The Museum of Fine Arts doesn't play movies a couple days a week, it makes sense that Arab Film Week stretches over ten days, wrapping up this weekend with Yomeddine (Friday), The Blessed (Saturday), Akasha (Sunday), and Dear Son (Sunday). They have more screenings of the "Van Gogh in Japan" Exhibition-on-Screen (Friday/Saturday) and Before Stonewall (Saturday), before stretching The Roxbury International Film Festival out a bit in the other direction. The festival co-presents a screening of Boyz n the Hood in tribute to the late John Singleton on Saturday, with actor Morris Chestnut in conversation with festival director Lisa Simmons beforehand. There's a free outdoor screening of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on Wednesday, and then the official opening night on Thursday, with Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am in the afternoon and Una Great Movie in the evening.
  • Summer means it's time for The Harvard Film Archive to do a deep dive, which this year means The Complete Howard Hawks, including Only Angels Have Wings (Friday/Sunday), Tiger Shark (Friday), Bringing Up Baby (Saturday/Sunday), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Saturday) on 35mm this weekend. Monday's "Extreme Cinema: The Action Documentaries of Kazuo Hara" show is also the month's "Cinema of Resistance" feature, a 16mm print of Sayonara CP.
  • The Regent Theatre has a premiere of Ed Asner: On Stage and Off on Tuesday, with Q&A afterward, presumably with Asner, who will be performing "God Help Us! A Political Comedy for Our Times" at the theater on Thursday.
  • The Somerville Theatre has 48 Hour Film Project screenings on Tuesday, the latest of The Boston Underground Film Festival's "Dispatches from the Underground" - Robert Putka's We Used to Know Each Other - on Wednesday, and Jack Attack! Entry Prizzi's Honor on Thursday.
  • Cinema Salem has fashion-designer doc Halston in their small theater this week. The Luna Theater has Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, a nifty documentary about film's first woman director, on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday, Rafiki and a dubbed screening of Okko's Inn on Saturday, and Jaws for most of Sunday, along with the surprise free movies of "Magical Mystery Movie Club" on Saturday & Sunday,and Weirdo Wednesdays. The AMC at the Liberty Tree Mall has 5B, a documentary about SF General Hospital's AIDS ward during the early days of the academic (co-directed by Paul Haggis), and indie thriller Vault
  • Outdoor screenings have started to show up on Joe's Free Films, with Ferris Bueller at the Boston Harbor Hotel on Friday, The Lego Movie 2 in Mission Hill (Friday) and Jamaica Plain (Saturday), a Pride screening of Love, Simon in Assembly Row on Saturday, the Coolidge hauling a 35mm projector to the Greenway for American Graffiti on Tuesday, and an as-yet-undetermined movie in Cambridge's Raymond Park on Thursday.


I will probably go for Late Night, Men in Black, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and Shaft, trying to cram as much else as I can in there before heading out for vacation next weekend.

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