Start the week by getting your IFFBoston tickets, end it by getting your Coolidge tickets. And get vaccinated! No excuses!
- By the time this posts, IFFBoston will have tickets for their virtual festival on sale for everyone, notably including opening night movie Summer of Soul. That comes online at 7pm on Thursday, with other features generally showing up at noon through the next week and a half. The full complement of shorts will also be available on Thursday at noon for those who want more filmed goodness, since we're not quite at post-screening parties yet.
The ReelAbilities Film Festival also kicks off on Thursday, with most (if not all) of their films available to stream throughout, and an opening night event with author Riva Lehrer discussing her memoir Golem Girl.
- The Brattle Theatre gets a couple of new releases in their virtual room: The County is the new film from Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson, with Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir as a widowed farmer who finds all sort of trouble in her small town. Work Songs, meanwhile, is a documentary about the relationship of people in their jobs, taking inspiration from Studs Terkel and leaning on interviews and observation. They join Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, Hope, Małni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, Center Stage, and The Fever in the virtual cinema. You can also order some snacks from their site and pick them up over the weekend.
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre brings in About Endlessness, a dark but whimsical series of vignettes that apparently let writer/director Roy Andersson noodle on a variety of subjects. It joins In Silico, a documentary about an attempt to simulate the entirety of the human brain, as well as "Snapper", Hope, the three Oscar Nominated Shorts programs (Animated, Live-Action, and Documentary, also available virtually from The ICA and Landmark), and City Hall in the virtual theater.
They've also announced dates and times for what will be playing on the main screen during the first of three weekends of Big Screen Classics starting May 13th, with tickets going on sale on the 7th, with about 68 seats available per screening.
- Wicked Queer sort of changes virtual venues this weekend, with their 17 short film packages and feature Wojnarowicz ending on Friday, but two new features whose titles translate themselves - Ma Belle My Beauty and NIMBY - Not in My Backyard - showing up in the ArtsEmerson virtual screening room that evening and running through the weekend.
ArtsEmerson also partners with The Boston Asian-American Film Festival for "Projecting Connections: Chinese American Experiences" starting on Thursday, with three short documentaries on noteworthy figures in America's Chinatowns. Before that, BAAFF has a virtual sneak preview of The Paper Tigers on Saturday, including a conversation with the filmmakers. I covered it as part of Fantasia last summer, and it's a bunch of fun.
- Belmont World Film is reaching its conclusion; A Good Man plays through Monday (including the last-night discussion); the final film in the series, Cuban coming-of-age story Agosto, begins its run on Tuesday.
- The Regent Theatre has a 50th Anniversary "Reflections of Who's Next" show streaming from Friday evening to Sunday, with Wonderous Stories and a number of Broadway performers covering that album. They also continue to stream Long Live Rock: Celebrate the Chaos, and will live-streamt their hosting of the Boston Gay Men's Chorus "Encore" gala on Saturday evening, with a silent auction leading up to the event and a live one going on during the stream.
- I forget what the exact reason for Zhang Yimou's Cliff Walkers not being out yet is - he had three films completed and unreleased at one point last year - but it opens globally this weekend, a thriller with four spies returning to Japanese-controlled China on a secret mission in the 1930s. It plays Landmark Theatres Kendall Square (closed Monday/Tuesday), Boston Common. Another Chinese thriller, Home Sweet Home, opens at Boston Common and has a family of four see their lives thrown into chaos when an interloper takes up residence in their basement.
Also opening are a couple things that seem counter-intuitive enough to be interesting. Limbo, for instance, mines comedy from the story of Syrian refugees waiting to find out the results of their asylum requests on an isolated Scottish island; it plays the Kendall and Boston Common. Four Good Days, meanwhile, finds Mila Kunis taking the role of a heroin addict trying to get clean with the help of her estranged mother (Glenn Close). That one is at the Kendall and Boston Common.
Horror movie Separation opens at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay; it's a "widower tries to get a new start but his daughter is seeing things which may be her mother or something more sinister" thing.
Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train gets the Imax screen at Boston Common, and also continues at Kendall Square, Fenway, South Bay, and Chestnut Hill. It apparently did almost as well as Mortal Kombat last weekend.
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World gets a Dolby Cinema re-release at Boston Common and South Bay, while The Fast and the Furious starts a countdown to movie #9 with the original playing Friday night at Boston Common, Fenway (for reward program members), and Arsenal Yards. 25th Anniversary screenings of Fargo play South Bay and Arsenal Yards on Sunday/Wednesday. Arsenal Yards also has religious golf movie Walking with Herb on Friday and Saturday.
- The West Newton Cinema shows Maine-produced documentary Privacy & The Power of Secrets on Friday night and Saturday afternoon; it finds common threads in the lives of isolated lighthouse keepers, China's "social score", crimes against Maine native peoples, and an animal-testing laboratory in Texas. They also continue to show Together Together, the Oscar Shorts, Godzilla vs Kong, The Father, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom & Jerry (Sunday only), and Nomadland through Sunday, and are available for private rentals.
- The Somerville Theatre and The Capitol are still not showing movies, though the Capitol has their ice cream shop and concession stand open.
- Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Majestic/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge has extended the slots available to reserve online through the end of April now offers early and late evening chances to rent Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including Wolfwalkers, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, Minari, In the Mood for Love, and Sound of Metal; the AMC app lists some "sold out" showtimes that are probably just meant to show the movies are available as part of rentals. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out, and Apple Fresh Pond has plans to re-open in May. There is, as yet, no word on AMC re-opening the Assembly Row theater when that's possible next week.
I'm likely going to hit the Chinese movies, maybe
Limbo, and do some catch-up before IFFBoston kicks off.
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