Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 19 July 2019 - 25 July 2019

This should be fast, right? Folks are generally running scared from one thing, which quite frankly has me glad to be filling all my free time with festival films so I won't be even the least bit tempted.

• That one thing, of course, being the CGI version of The Lion King, which seems like the dictionary definition of "artistically pointless but with obvious commercial appeal". It gets all the big 3D/deluxe screens, playing at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), the Studio Cinema Belmont (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton (2D only), Boston Common (including Imax 2D/3D), Fenway (including 2D/3D RPX), the Seaport (including 2D/3D Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax 2D/3D & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D/3D & Dolby Cinema), the Embassy (including MX4D & XPlus), Revere, and the SuperLux (2D only).
  
  Theaters will carve out a few showtimes for other things, including Apollo 11 at Boston Common and the Luna on Saturday afternoon. There are 30th anniversary screenings of Glory at Fenway and Assembly Row on Sunday and Wednesday (Revere on Wednesday only) and 40th Anniversary screenings of The Muppet Movie on Thursday at Fenway, South Bay, and Revere, although South Bay is the only one with evening shows of that one. Documentary This Changes Everything plays Fenway, South Bay, and Revere on Monday, while anime Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? - Arrow of the Orion has subtitled screenings at Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, and Revere on Tuesday.
• IFFBoston Closing Night film The Farewell opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and Boston Common, and it's a bit of a gem, starring Awkwafina as a young woman not sure she can go along with her extended family's decision to not tell her grandmother she has cancer but arrange a fake wedding so that the can all get together one last time.
  
  The weekend's midnights include Return of the Living Dead on 35mm Friday, with co-star Linnea Quigley in person, and Cemetary Man on Saturday. Monday's Big Screen classic is His Girl Friday on 35mm, with an optional seminar, and then they kick off a "Summer of '69" series with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on Thursday.
• There's yet more IFFBoston alums popping up, including a surprisingly decent release for the genuinely weird The Art of Self-Defense, which features Jesse Eisenberg as a man who turns (obsessively) to karate after being mugged, although something may be amiss at the dojo run by Alessandro Nivola and Imogen Poots. That one's at the Somerville, Kendall Square, Boston Common, and the Seaport. The Kendall also gets Sword of Trust, Lynn Shelton's new one which features a ragtag group trying to find a buyer for a unique Civil War relic. The Kendall also has encore screenings of Between Me and My Mind on Monday evening.
• Apple Fresh Pond adds Telugu language action-comedy iSmart Shankar and Tamil actioner Kadaram Kondan to the Hindi Super 30.
  
  Over at Boston Common, it appears that Looking Up, with Deng Chao as an astronaut recalling his relationship with his son amid peril, has managed to make it through the censorship minefield, while The White Storm 2: Drug Lords sticks around for another week, although it looks like it will be the first movie bumped when they need to put on more screenings of The Lion King.
• The Brattle Theatre won't be playing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood next weekend (but plenty of places will, including on 35mm film), though they're giving fans time to get ready with El Mundo del Tarantino: A Kill Bill double feature on Friday, Sabata and a double feature of The Hateful Eight & Django Unchained on Saturday, Inglorious Basterds paired with The Devil's Brigade on Sunday, and a twin bill of Pretty Poison & Jacques Demy's Model Shop on Monday. The Saturday and Sunday screenings are on 35mm film, and a portion of the ticket sales for the Harvey Weinstein-produced films will go to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.
  
  There's no listing for Tuesday as yet, but Wednesday has a free IFFBoston preview of Blinded by the Light (pass required), and Thursday has a special premiere screening of Braniac: Transmissions After Zero, with filmmakers on hand.
• Silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis visits the The Regent Theatre on Wednesday for a screening of Woman in the Moon, Fritz Lang's odd but enthralling 1929 vision of what a trip to the moon might be like.
• The Somerville Theatre plays Bring It On as Saturday's Midnight Special, and a double feature of The Stunt Man and Hooper as the last "Play It Cool" shows for a couple of weeks before Once Upon a Time in Hollywood starts hogging the large screen on Thursday night. All those special shows are on 35mm. Their friends at The Capitol do a bit of rep programming themselves, but use digital projection for their Throwback Thursday show of Casablanca on the 25th.
• The Harvard Film Archive continues The Complete Howard Hawks with I Was a Male War Bride (Friday), To Have and Have Not (Friday), The Thing from Another World (Sunday), Air Force (Sunday), and his silent Fazil (Monday), the latter with live accompaniment by Robert Humphreville, and all on 35mm. That series interrupted on Saturday for a "Moon Movies" show of The Right Stuff, preceded by a tour of the Houghton Library. There's also apparently a free show of The Reader featuring a talk with the original novelist on Tuesday, although that is not on the HFA's schedule.
• There's yet more of the French Film Festival at The Museum of Fine Arts, including Last Year at Marienbad (Friday), Non-Fiction (Friday/Thursday), High Life (Friday), Amanda (Saturday), The Freshman (Saturday), In Safe Hands (Saturday), Naked Normandy (Saturday), A Faithful Man (Sunday), Invisibles (Sunday), Sophia Antipolis (Sunday), Sink or Swim (Thursday), and A Man in a Hurry (Thursday).

West Newton hosts Boston Jewish Film's Summer Cinematheque series on Wednesday with Back to the Fatherland, with the documentary followed by a Skype Q&A with the filmmakers.

• Cinema Salem has Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché in their screening room this week. The Luna Theater shows Late Night on Friday and Saturday evenings, Apollo 11 Saturday afternoon, A Nightmare on Elm Street on Sunday and Stop Making Sense on Tuesday, in addition to the Sunday morning and Wednesday night surprises. AMC's Liberty Tree Mall location gives off-peak times to Luke Grimes & Frank Grillo in Into the Ashes and aging-superhero comedy Supervised, which features Tom Berenger, Louis Gosset Jr., Beau Bridges, and a bunch of other people who probably also deserve better.
• Joe's Free Films has plenty of opportunities to see movies outside, with a couple chances to catch Into the Spider-Verse while Somerville's "Summer of Sequels" changes things up with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man 2.

I am still in Montreal living and breathing Fantasia, and think I can skip Looking Up, so I'll just see twenty-odd other movies.