Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 29 March 2024 - 4 April 2024

If you don't have plans for Easter, the local independent theaters are each offering a lot of movie for just one ticket. But if you want a more conventional sort of big…

• ... there's Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, with Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Godzilla, and King Kong reuniting with Godzilla vs Kong director Adam Wingard (whose longtime collaborator Simon Barrett co-writes) to apparently spend more time exploring the Hollow Earth and face a new monstrous threat. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's (Imax 2D0, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax Xenon 2D/3D, Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser 2D/3D, Dolby Cinema 2D & RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  In the Land of Saints and Sinners features Liam Neeson as a former gangster whose past has come home to roost in the form of a revenge-seeking Kerry Condon, with Ciaràn Hinds as the cop trying to keep the small town in which he lives from exploding. It's at Boston Common and Causeway Street. Asphalt City features Tye Sheridan as a New York City paramedic being mentored by grizzled partner Sean Penn (with Mike Tyson as their boss?); it's at Boston Common.
  
  Late Night With the Devil , gets a full slate of shows at Boston Common and Causeway Street and expands to the Seaport, South Bay, and CinemaSalem.
  
  A number of Blumhouse films return to Boston Common, Assembly Row for the weekend, with Sinister Friday, The Purge on Saturday, Ouija: Origin of Evil on Sunday, Insidious on Monday, The Invisible Man '20 on Tuesday.
  
  Hate to Love: Nickelback, has an encore Saturday afternoon at Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Assembly Row. They Shot the Piano Player plays Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening at Boston Common. Someone Like You, in which a man seeks out a woman who came from the same IVF batch as his best friend and falls in love (romantic or icky depending on your temperament) plays Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row from Tuesday to Thursday<./LI>

• Landmark Kendall Square also has three boutique-house openings this week. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor gets the most showtimes, looking at how in 1964, Ms. Doda became America's first topless dancer and didn't hide that her breasts were augmented. About Dry Grasses, a movie from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon about an art teacher apparently stuck in Anatolia, has fewer times in part because it's epic-length. It shares a screen with High & Low: John Galliano, a documentary about a notable and volatile fashion designer.
  
  Tuesday's New Hollywood presentation is Serpico.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is officially a six-plex now! Screens 1 & 2 are the ones that have been there for decades, 3 & 4 are the tiny rooms added in the last decade or so, and 5 & 6 are the new rooms somewhere in between. They bring in One Life and Immaculate to fill things in, and also open Ennio, a documentary on film composer Ennio Morricone, for one show a day on screen #6 (it's also at the Lexington Venue).
  
  March's video game midnights wrap up with 35mm prints Lara Croft: Tomb Raider on Friday and Silent Hill on Saturday. Sunday offers another chance at the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy on 35mm in their extended versions, while Monday has a print of Duck Soup for the Big Screen Classic. On Tuesday, they start the April "What's the Score" series with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - one of Morricone's most famous, appropriately enough - with optional seminar beforehand with musician James Heazlewood-Dale, continuing Wednesday with a 35mm print of the original 1933 King Kong. On Thursday, they wrap the Debra Granik retrospective with her documentary Stray Dog.
• Indian movies turn over almost completely at Apple Fresh Pond this week! Hindi movie Crew stars Kareena Kapoor, Tabu, and Kriti Sanon as an airline flight crew involved in a caper/heist thing. The Goat Life is the first Malayalam-language movie I can recall getting to the mainstream multiplexes, starring Prithviraj Sukumaran as a "guest worker" who winds up in the middle of Saudi Arabia herding goats; it also stars Jimmy Jean-Louis, whom you may remember as "The Haitian" on Heroes and other Western productions, and also plays Boston Common (with both Malayalam & Telugu screenings). Telugu-language comedy Tillu Squared features Sidhu "Starboy" Jonnalagadda as a guy who lands in the middle of a murder mystery, while Yuva is a Kannada-language action movie about a gang war at an engineering school (which seems unlikely, but maybe they're different in India). Also, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar plays Friday to Monday after one show last week; Telugu action movie Legend has a tenth-anniversary show on Saturday.
  
  Hong Kong horror movie Back Home stars Anson Kong Ip-Sang as a man returning to his childhood home after having grown up in Canada and once again finding that he can see ghosts; it's at Causeway Street. Mainland Chinese film YOLO continues at Causeway Street and Boston Common.
  
  Musical drama A Fragile Flower opens at South Bay, with Vietnamese pop star Maya as a singer who faces challenges during her rapid ascent to the top of the charts. Vietnamese romance Mai continues at Causeway Street and South Bay.
  
  Korean thriller Exhuma continues at Boston Common and Causeway Street.
  
  Japanese films hanging around are Perfect Days at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Luna Lowell (plus one show at the MFA), with The Boy and the Heron still at Fresh Pond and West Newton - apparently it's had a "re-release" but just never left those places.
• We sort of need a portmanteau word for these bookings where The Alamo Seaport in particular shows a movie a couple times on its opening weekend but not for more enough to really call it a run. Rungagemtns? Or just old-fashioned playdates? Anyway, this week, it's Lousy Carter, with David Krumholtz as a not-particularly-popular university professor told he has months to live, playing Sunday evening and late Monday afternoon.
  
  Elsewhere on the rep calendar, there are Time Capsule shows of Clifford (Saturday/Monday/Tuesday) and Forrest Gump (Sunday/Monday), plus preview shows of Dogman (Wednesday for Victory Members), The First Omen (Wednesday), and Sasquatch Sunset (Thursday).
  
  Man, imagine being told your new movie was booked in a theater but they'd be playing it fewer times than revival showings of Clifford.
• The Brattle Theatre has more of Cinema Ritrovato On Tour this week, with the famed repertory festival from Bologna bringing a number of highlights of the 2023 edition stateside, many recent 4K restorations that show off the Brattle's new projector. Entries include Fists in the Pocket (Friday), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Friday), A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (Saturday), a "Cinema's First Nasty Women" program (Saturday), Caught (Saturday), Fear and Desire (Saturday), Joe Dante's The Movie Orgy (Sunday), Hyenas (Sunday), and Memories of Underdevelopment (Sunday). Note that The Movie Orgy is free - first-come-first-serve with no advance tickets - but it's also a five-hour mashup, so maybe you've got to be as obsessive as Joe Dante for it! Not part of the festival, but still a recently-restored classic, is the monthly Stop Making Sense show Saturday night.
  
  Midweek, they have a tribute to recently-deceased character actor M. Emmet Walsh, featuring Straight Time (35mm Tuesday/Wednesday), Blood Simple (Wednesday/Thursday), Blade Runner (Final Cut Wednesday/Thursday), and Calvary (Thursday). Double features of the non-Blade Runner movies Wednesday & Thursday.
• The Somerville Theatre and IFFBoston present Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros for two shows on the main screen Sunday, which takes up the day because it's a four-hour Frederick Wiseman deep dive into a great French restaurant (hopefully whatever folks get from the concession stand won't feel too disrespectful). Monday's "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" double feature is The Killers & Deception (the former in 4K and the latter on 35mm film), while Tuesday features the rescheduled double feature meant to open the series, a 35mm Veronica Lake twin bill of This Gun for Hire & The Glass Key. Wednesday's MGM/Columbia pairing is the 1925 Ben-Hur & Desert Bride, the former on 35mm film and both (I believe) with Jeff Rapsis on the organ. Thursday's Smooth Cinema show is a 35mm print of Running Scared
  
  The Capitol has Scarlet Street for Capitol Crimes on Friday & Monday and Thelma & Louise for "Good for Her!" Saturday & Tuesday.
• The Harvard Film Archive begins "Chronicles of Changing Times: The Cinema of Edward Yang", a retrospective of one of Taiwan's most notable directors, with two shows that are already sold out - Yi Yi on 35mm Friday and A Brighter Summer Day on Saturday, as well as A Confucian Confusion on Sunday. The former two will screen again the first weekend of May.
  
  Also on the schedule are a second screening of Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Aristotle's Plot (35mm Sunday) and their new 35mm print of The Conversation (introduced by Steven Biel) on Monday.
  
  Joe's Free Films also shows a half-dozen other free specialty film screenings at various locations on the Harvard campus between Tuesday and Wednesday; RSVP required in most cases (information on the calendar).
• The Museum of Fine Arts has two films from their "Festival of Films from Japan" this week, with Blue Giant (also part of "Created Worlds: Animation from Around the Globe") on Friday evening and Perfect Days on Thursday (though it's marked as sold out).
• This Monday's Belmont World Film presentation at Fresh Pond is The Old Oak, director Ken Loach's final film, which centers around the titular pub in a decaying mining town where Syrian refugees are being settled. Jeff Thielman of the International Institute of New England is the guest speaker.
• The Midweek Music Movies and More show at The Regent Theatre this Wednesday is The Arc of Oblivion, with a pair of local archivists on hand to introduce & discuss this film about how records are kept and the filmmaker's attempt to build an ark in Maine. They also have an outdoor short film program, The Kendall Mountain Film Tour 2024, on Thursday.
• Stopmotion is this week's Thursday Bright LIghts in the Bright Screening Room of the Paramount Theater, with director Robert Morgan visiting for a Q&A.
• Dune: Part Two in The Museum of Science is sold out on Saturday, but there are seats for Friday and the next two weekends.
• The Lexington Venue has One Life (Friday/Saturday/Sunday), Ennio (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday/Thursday), and Problemista (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Thursday).
  
  The West Newton Cinema picks up One Life and Problemista, continuing Cabrini, The Zone of Interest (Saturday/Sunday), Kung Fu Panda 4, Dune: Part Two, American Fiction (no show Thursday), Wonka (Saturday/Sunday), The Boy and the Heron (no show Thursday), and The Holdovers (no show Thursday). Closed Monday and Tuesday this week. They also host Boston Jewish Film's presentation of Between the Stone and the Flower, with documentary subject Genie Milgrom present to talk more about embracing her Jewish heritage on top of her Cuban/Catholic one.
  
  The Luna Theater has Perfect Days Friday and Saturday, Metropolis on Sunday, a Weirdo Wednesday show, and Late Night with the Devil on Thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has Late Night With the Devil, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Godzilla X Kong, and Glitter & Doom from Friday to Monday, apparently the only local(ish) theater where the "fantastical romance" built around the music of the Indigo Girls is playing.

Already reserved tickets for GxK (and, honestly, kind of wish I had time to re-watch the MonsterVerse beforehand), will probably hit Back Home and In the Land of Saints and Sinners, plus a couple at the Brattle, maybe figure out how to catch up on some other stuff (Love Lies Bleeding, Mai, Ghostbusters) around hitting Somerville double features all week WIsh I could trust Fresh Pond to have English subtitles on Crew, because that looks fun.