Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 January 2020 - 16 January 2020

I'm not sure whether Disney has backed off their demands that Star Wars get the premium screens for four full weeks or if they're getting around it by having two premium screens and SW gets the biggest.

• So, 1917 gets to be on the second-biggest in a lot of cases as it expands to Boston this weekend, with the real-time thriller following a couple of soldiers as they make their way through the front lines of World War I to deliver an important message. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the The Lexington Venue, West Newton, the Kendall, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street (including "Wide Screen"), Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), the Embassy, Revere (including XPlus), and the SuperLux.
  
  The Coolidge has a pair of 35mm alien invasions late this weekend, with The Faculty on Friday and the first of three weekly screenings of John Carpenter's take on The Thing on Saturday. Sunday morning, the Goethe-Institut presents The Components of Love, about a couple whose breakup is complicated by the fact that he has raised her child as his own. A digital restoration of The Incredible Shrinking Man has a "Science on Screen" show on Monday, with BU professor Tyrone Porter connecting it with nanotechnology, with Open Screen on Wednesday.
• Also expanding is Just Mercy, featuring Michael B. Jordan as a young attorney attempting to overturn a death penalty conviction, with Jamie Foxx as the accused and Brie Larson as a colleague. Larson and director Destin Daniel Cretton's worked together on Short Term 12, which was pretty darn great. It's at the Capitol, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street (including shows with pre-recorded Q&As), Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, the Embassy, Revere, and the SuperLux.
• The material playing the multiplexes doesn't look quite so impressive, the sort of thing that gets dumped in January. Underwater looks like a pretty lousy monster movie, but it's interesting for being the first movie William Eubank has directed from someone else's script, and I think I said he should do that after both his previous films. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere. There's also Like a Boss, with Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne as friends who start a cosmetic company and get financed by a businesswoman played by Salma Hayek and looks awful in the exact way a movie about women written and directed by men does. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Revere.
  
  Much more promisingly, Weathering with You, the new film by Makoto Shinkai, has "fan screenings" on Wednesday and Thursday, both dubbed and subtitled, at Boston Common, Fenway, and the Seaport, and Revere, and I expect it to hang around at least Boston Common next week.
• Boston Common appears to be one of three theaters in the country to get Liberation, which looks like a big Chinese "main melody" action flick. The trailer is kind of screwy in it's "imagine a world without war" after a couple solid minutes of violence. They also continue cute-animal comedy-drama Adoring and Ip Man 4: The Finale.
  
  Darbar, the new action movie with Rajinikanth, continues in both Tamil and Telugu at Apple Fresh Pond, while another big star, Deepika Padukone, plays against type in Chhapaak, as an acid attack survivor. It's in Hindi, as is historical action epic Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Telugu-language action movie Sarileru Neekevvaru opens there and at Revere. Oddly, Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo, about a wealthy man and his driver who accidentally switch children when they're born at the same time, opens at Fresh Pond on Saturday. They also keep Good Newwz around. Interestingly, their websites shows nothing playing on Wednesday.
• The Brattle Theatre has their annual (Some of) the Best of 2019 series, which includes some that didn't play here much if at all. Atlantics on Friday, for instance, went straight to Netflix. There are matinee screenings of Laika's Missing Link during the weekend, before double features of The Farewell & Booksmart on Saturday and Fast Color & Captain Marvel on Sunday. The locally-based screenwriters behind Crawl are there for the 7pm show Monday, with the lesser Ready or Not paired with it as a double feature. The Chambermaid plays Tuesday, while Midsommar (the original cut) is paired with The Souvenir on Wednesday. Transit plays on Thursday, with Hustlers as a separate-admission show at 9:15pm
• The Museum of Fine Arts continues their run of Celebration with shows on Friday, Saturday, twice on Sunday (one a "Jump Cut" screening), and Wednesday. They also show Waves on Friday and Sunday, Matthew Barney's Redoubt on Saturday, and The Lighthouse on Wednesday. On Thursday, they start their annual Festival of Films from Iran (which is either great or terrible timing) with Cold Sweat, about a woman who becomes Captain of the country's women's soccer team only to have her jealous estranged husband forbid her from leaving the country.
• The ICA continues the program of short films from the Ottawa International Animation Festival with two shows each on Saturday and Sunday.
• The Boston Underground Film Festival has their annual "Dispatches from the Underground" in The Somerville Theatre's microcinema on Wednesday, showing five of the best shorts from last year's Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.
• The Regent Theatre has something called The End of Quantum Reality On Tuesday, which purports to be about how physics has reached a dead end.
• The West Newton Cinema has daily 1pm shows of Reality Queen!, apparently once titled "A Week in London" after its title character London Logo, spending a few days being interviewed. Their "Coming Soon" page shows Three Christs opening, but no showtimes.
• It's members' weekend at The Harvard Film Archive - if you're a member, you've probably already gotten the email about what's playing.
• The Luna Theater has screenings of Uncut Gems on Friday and Saturday evening, The Lighthouse on Saturday afternoon, In Fabric later Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening, and The Shining on Sunday. There are also free surprises at the Magical Mystery Movie Club Sunday morning and Weirdo Wednesday.
  
  Cinema Salem brings Temblores to their screening room.

The Boston Museum of Science joins the list of theaters undergoing renovation, promising the Omnimax screen is being "upgraded" to a digital laser system. Hopefully they'll still be able to play the big film as well.


I am down for 1917, Just Mercy, Atlantics, Fast Color, Weathering with You, and, yeah, I'll probably get to Underwater before some of the stuff I've been putting off.