Friday, January 29, 2021

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 29 January 2021 - 4 February 2021

The City of Boston is moving back to a later re-opening phase on Monday, one which allows theaters to open, but as of yet, I haven't seen any signs that Icon/Arclight are planning to take advantage, though the AMCs are set to re-open next Friday. There's a storm coming anyway, so we all might as well catch up on the things that may be nominated for the best non-English-Language Oscar.
  • The Brattle Theatre opens three, joining Another Round. As mentioned last week, Japan offers True Mothers, in which the mother of an adopted child meets the woman who may be her son's birth mother six years later. From Sudan, there's You Will Die at Twenty, in which a mother is given a prophecy that her son will die young and the belief skews both their lives. Lastly, for this week, Atlantis from Ukraine takes a look a post-collapse society in 2025. They join Psycho Goreman, Identifying Features, Film About a Father Who, Spoor, Acasa, My Home, and City Hall in the Brattlite's new-release section.

    The new entry on the "Brattle Selects" side also hails from Ukraine, with "The Maya Deren Collection" a near-complete collection of her short films, previously scattered among various services at differing levels of quality but now all restored. That section also features Ousmane Sembène's Mandabi and Black Girl.
  • The Coolidge Corner Theatre and Goethe-Institut will host Kosovo's entry Exile through Sunday; it follows a Kosovar engineer living in Germany certain his harassment is due to his being an immigrant. Hungary's Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is available for another week as well, along with My Rembrandt, Some Kind of Heaven, Through the Night, The Reason I Jump, and City Hall.

    The After Midnite crew adds Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1980s brain-melter Santa Sangre, in a new 4K restoration whose physical-media release has a crazy-expensive pre-order. It joins 1980s throwback Psycho Goreman. There are also a number of talks on the schedule, three in conjunction with the Sundance Film Festival: Two Science on Screen presentations, with Beasts of the Southern Wild on Friday and For All Mankind on Monday, plus a "Women in Horror" roundtable in partnership with After Midnite on Tuesday. After that, there's the regular Thursday night Coolidge Education with critic Scott Tobias talking Once Upon a Time in the West. For all of those, you've got to get hold of the movie yourself, then come back at the appropriate time
  • This week's Bright Lights at Home presentation is The Big Scary "S" Word, which traces the American socialist movement, both historically and in its current resurgence. It will be available from noon Wednesday through 7pm Thursday (limited to 175 free tickets), with a Zoom webinar Thursday at 8pm featuring director Yael Bridge
  • The first film to hit HBO Max alongside theatrical release this year is The Little Things, a serial-killer thriller written and directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto. It plays Friday to Sunday at The West Newton Cinema (which also has documentary Some Kind of Heaven), and Chestnut Hill the same days, which also has Wonder Woman 1984, The Marksman, News of the World, Wonder Woman 1984, and The Croods: A New Age.
  • The Regent Theatre has another streaming presentation of Jimmy Tingle's featurette "2020 Vision" on Saturday evening (one-hour featurette followed by comedy and talk), with virtual tickets marked as "pay what you can".
  • The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival has their schedule up and tickets on sale; it runs 10-15 February.
  • The Somerville Theatre is still closed but The Slutcracker: The Movie still appears to be available. Ice cream and other goodies available at The Capitol, their sister theater in Arlington, has ice cream and snacks Wednesday through Sunday.
  • Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMCs and Showcases out in the suburbs. The Coolidge is showing slots available to reserve online through the end of February for both Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including In the Mood for Love, Sound of Metal, and Wolfwalkers available along with the option to bring your own disc. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out.
Six foreign-language film submissions makes for a double-feature a night over the weekend, or one nightly until the Coolidge gets France's Two of Us next Friday.

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