Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 May 2024 - 6 June 2024

A sort of in-between week, since people thought Furiosa would blow up much bigger, but nothing really scrambling to capitalize.

• Ezra, which features Bobby Cannavale as a stand-up comic with an autistic son whom he brings on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles, plays the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, and Assembly Row.
  
  BUFF selection In a Violent Nature, which is kind of a Friday the 13th movie from Jason Vorhees's perspective (a clever-ish idea but hard to make scary or thrilling) opens at CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, and South Bay.
  
  Summer Camp has Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard as three old friends who met at camp as kids but fell out of touch getting reacquainted at a reunion, with Eugene Levy as a love interest. It plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and South Bay and, not going to lie, I'm a bit surprised that there's only a six-year range for the stars of the movie, as I'd pegged Woodard as much younger than Keaton.
  
  Young Woman and the Sea is an old-school PG-rated Disney family film, with Daisy Ridley as Olympic swimmer Trudy Ederle, attempting to be the first woman to swim the English Channel. It's at West Newton, Boston Common, and Kendall Square.
  
  Babes expands to the Somerville Theatre and the Seaport, already at Coolidge, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, Assembly Row, and CinemaSalem.
  
  Arsenal Yards brings back Top Gun: Maverick for matinees Friday to Sunday. The Muppet Movie has 45th anniversary shows at South Bay and Arsenal Yards on Sunday & Monday. Spider-Mondays wrap up with Spider-Man: No Way Home at the Coolidge, Boston Common (through Thursday), the Seaport, and Assembly Row (through Thursday). There's an extra-early screening of Bad Boys: Ride or Die at Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema) on Wednesday before the regular-early ones on Thursday
• Maybe the week's biggest opening is Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle, a theatrical tie-in to the popular anime & manga about a high-school volleyball team, this one involving an all-or-nothing contest; it's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row; check showtimes for languages.
  
  A lot of Indian films open at Apple Fresh Pond to fill some screentimes. Mr. & Mrs. Mahi (also at Boston Common) is a Hindi-language sports drama about a couple in an arranged marriage who bond over their love of cricket, with the husband coaching his more talented wife. Savi, also in Hindi, stars Divya Khosla Kumar as a housewife with a plan to break her husband out of a British maximum-security prison. In the Tamil language, there's action movies Hit List and Garudan. The Telugu-language releases are chase movie Bhaje Vaayu Vegam, action-comedy Gam Gam Ganesha, and period crime story Gangs of Godavari.
• I think we're getting more westerns that superhero movies this summer, even if The Dead Don't Hurt - opening at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Kendall, Boston Common, and South Bay - doesn't necessarily read as traditional, with Vicky Krieps and director Viggo Mortensen as an immigrant couple whose lives go in different directions as Mortensen's Olsen chooses to fight in the Civil War.
  
  This weekend's midnights at the Coolidge are Cynthia Rothrock in Martial Law on Friday and a 35mm print of Sam Raimi's Darkman on Saturday. There's a special Panorama showing of Butterfly in the Sky, with the panel discussing the documentary about LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow featuring folks from public television, libraries, and bookstores. Monday's Big Screen Classic is a 35mm print of 12 Angry Men with a pre-show seminar featuring Emerson College's Peter Horgan; Spider-Man: No Way Home plays later.
  
  On Wednesday, they head out to the Charles River Speedway in Brighton to screen Wayne's World.
• Landmark Kendall Square opens Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, an Italian film about a mid-1800 cause celebre, in which the Catholic Church seized a Jewish boy whom his nurse had secretly baptized to send him to their schools.
  
  Retro Replay screenings return to the Kendall on Tuesday for a month of Pride-themed selections, starting with Brokeback Mountain.
• The Brattle Theatre opens "Man Ray: Return to Reason", a collection of four avant-garde silence newly restored and scored by Jim Jarmusch & Carter Logan's band Sqürl from Friday to Monday. It splits showtimes on those dates with Omen, a BUFF selection in which a Congolese man who grew up in Belgium returns to introduce his pregnant wife to his family and finds his homeland very strange indeed.
  
  On Tuesdays and Wednesdays in June, they get a jump start on the summer vertical schedule with "Peele Apart", pairing a Jordan Peele film with his inspirations. This week, it's Get Out, playing with the original Candyman on Tuesday and Rosemary's Baby on Wednesday (Get Out is DCP; the others are 35mm). On Thursday, they celebrate Prince's birthday with a double feature of Purple Rain & Sing O' the Times, the latter on 35mm.
• Depending on how you look at it The Alamo Seaport is either playing Don Hertzfeldt's new short film "ME" and attaching the feature edit of It's Such a Beautiful Day or bringing back the latter with the new short as a bonus; either way, it's 90 minutes of Hertzfeldt's distinctively (and sometimes deceptively) lo-fi but strangely affecting work.
  
  Backspot, with Devery Jacobs as an ambitious college cheerleader, gets a somewhere-between-run-and-rep booking with shows Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. rep calendar also has Spider-Man: No Way Home on Monday, Tetsuo: The Iron Man late shows Monday and Wednesday, a movie party for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Down Part 2 on Tuesday, and Back to the Future: Part II on Wednesday.
• Aside from The Somerville Theatre picking up Babes, they also have a Midnight Special of Black Tight Killers on Saturday. They restart "Tale of Two Studios" shows on Monday (note that they had been Wednesday), with Meet Me In St. Louis & On the Waterfront, the former on 35mm film.
  
  Evil Does Not Exist moves up the 77 to the Capitol.
• The Museum of Science has two screenings of documentary To Be Takei in the Mugar Omni theater on Friday and Saturday, neatly spanning Asian American & Pacific Islander and Pride months. They have also put showtimes for Inside Out 2 on sale.
• The Embassy has The Bridge on the River Kwai on Sunday and Monday. The listing says 4K; I hadn't realized they had upgraded their projectors, but it makes sense Landmark would have taken the old ones.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has one Korean film to support their exhibition this week - Snowpiercer on Friday - but the other three are about the Korean diaspora: Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV on Saturday afternoon (part of the Art Docs series), Minari on Sunday, and Past Lives on Thursday.
• The main Belmont World Film series is completed, but they have two more weeks at the West Newton Cinema for World Refugee Awareness Month, with Swedish Oscar submission Opponent, which features Payman Maadi as a wrestler who arrived in Sweden as a refugee from Iran. There will be Swedish pastries and a talk with Persian-American filmmaker/educator Homa Sarabi beforehand.
• The Harvard Film Archive is closed for the summer, but they have recently uploaded a whole mess of filmmaker introductions and discussions going back to 2008 to their Conversations page, and there are probably worse ideas than browsing that, finding the referenced films, and streaming both.
• The Lexington Venue opens Ezra and Nowhere Special, holding over Sight. They're open Friday to Sunday and Thursday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Ezra and Young Woman and the Sea, holding over Furiosa, Challengers, If, Farewell Mr. Haffmann (no shows Monday & Tuesday), The Fall Guy, and Wicked Little Letters (not scheduled Thursday).
  
  The Luna Theater has Civil War Friday, Saturday, and Thursday. On Sunday, they welcome the band Negativeland for a double feature including documentary Stand By for Failure with a live performance of "We Can Really Feel LIke We're Here" augmented by visual artist SUE-C. No Weirdo Wednesday show on the calendar yet.
  
  Cinema Salem adds In a Violent Nature and I Saw the TV Glow to Furiosa, Babes, and IF through Monday.

It's kind of all catch-up - even the Hertzfeldt shorts are me coming in late because I used to see them at festivals and now he's kind of bypassing that - and maybe Young Woman and the Sea and The Dead Don't Hurt.