A thing that amused me, earlier this year, was AMC sending me a message about how the price for A-List would go on my next billing cycle but I'd get four movies a week, and then seeing them change the pre-screen ads to emphasize the laser projection. Were they going to have to change them again in a few weeks? So far, no, even though I've been able to do four a week for a month or so. I'm guessing they'll roll the upgrade out to current members first and then launch it later in the year or in 2026.
Obviously, they should do some sort of cross-promotions with Letterboxd's "#LastFourWatched" hashtag when they do. It just occurs to me that it should probably be "#LastFourWatchd", but maybe that's taking things too far.
Anyway, for various reasons, I wound up using them one-a-day for four days in a row this weekend/early week, and while there's almost a pattern - parents having kind of alarming attitudes toward their kids being in danger - Malice doesn't quite fit it. Also, surprisingly, the father in Jurassic World Rebirth comes across looking like a pretty good parent, all things considered, which is usually not the case when your decisions lead to your kids almost being eaten by dinosaurs!
E yi (Malice '25)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
Malice (or E yi, to use its Mandarin name and avoid confusion with the Nicole Kidman/Alec Baldwin/Bill Pullman movie from 30-odd years ago) is a pretty good thriller with some interesting things to say until it becomes even more heavy-handed in its last act, and while this is the part where you might expect to ascribe that to Chinese censorship, I'd kind of expect something similar no matter what its origins were. Filmmakers everywhere are vulnerable to twist overload and scolding what media has evolved into since they got their start, after all.
It opens with a heck of a hook, though, as pediatric cancer patient Yu Jingjao (Yang Enyou) races through an eerily empty hospital at night, chased by nurse Li Yue (Chen Yusi), with Jingjing's foster mother Wu Yusie (Ting Mei) following them to the roof when she finds her daughter's room empty, arriving just in time to see them go over the wall. The official investigation of the incident will be led by Captain Liang Guan (Huang Xuan), but it's the work of his soon-to-be-ex-wife, journalist Ye Pan (Zhang Xiaofei) that will have the greatest impact on the case, as she and her team, notably intern Chen (Li Gengxi) post their own findings on Li Yue's lurid history in real time, feeding their website's colorful commentators who shape public opinion.
That opening is the most overtly stylish section of the movie, making it briefly look like a supernatural horror story or the climax of something with a serial killer, but it's soon revealed as something of an anomaly as the film cuts to Ye Pan delivering a lecture about journalistic ethics. That's more the filmmakers' speed for the rest of the movie, and that's not exactly a bad thing; with one of the folks who went off the roof dead and the other in a coma, more action would eliminate more possibilities than it would open, and for most of the movie, the big twists tend to do double duty: When a source caling himself "Lord Dao" (one of a number of cameos and special guest stars I'm not quite familiar enough with the recognize by name) appears on Ye Pan's live stream, it both upends what the audience knows and further highlights the recklessness of real-time journalism and "self-media", which is in many ways the real thing that the film's three credited writers and two credited directors want the audience to ponder as opposed to a murder mystery.
Unfortunately, the film is in some ways too efficient in its tight 100 minutes: Two prior related stories reported by Ye Pan are mentioned just enough to be tied together near the end, along with her crumbling marriage to Liang, and there's a sort of forced parallelism to it, where you can see how this reflecting that and that reflecting this is meant to tie the whole thing together, but so much of it being revealed in the homestretch means the writers' hands are too visible. It's only underlined by how, suddenly, characters are talking about who the "malicious woman" is, especially to non-Chinese ears; it's a phrase that sounds like a trope/attitude that the audience supposed to be familiar with but is so carefully underlined that I suspect it sounds heavy-handed even to the film's local audience.
It's frustrating, because one can see where the mystery story is clearly playing into the idea of the public's willingness to buy into the trope of the malicious woman and the media criticism looks like it fits the idea but maybe doesn't quite. Plus, both the mystery threads and the media criticism are pretty good until the filmmakers decide to stop the film dead with extra twists and lectures that make sure that both the audience and characters get what they're saying, and it's not even crashing in a way that implies censorship or regulation is necessary. Things are going well until the filmmakers suddenly seem to become confident in their bad instincts and timid about their good ones.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, RealD 3D laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
When Jurassic World came out, there was an interview with director Colin Treverrow about how the idea behind it was "what if people got bored with dinosaurs?", and while it's not a bad idea, it's potentially poisonous if the filmmaker can't make a film that says this stuff is cool and exciting anyway. Treverrow, it turned out, wasn't the guy to do that; his two movies played out the premise but never gave the sense that he had an antidote for it. Gareth Edwards, working from a screenplay by returning writer David Koepp, seems to have a better handle on the whole thing, as well as a much better handle on what makes for a good adventure movie.
There are different sorts of tragedy in how this attitude manifests as the film opens: A flashback to how the need to engineer bigger and badder dinos has fatal results, a scene where a confused bronto that escaped from a New York City zoo is confused and dying in a modern world the climate and ecosystem are hostile (which also rolls back some of the prior film's unwieldy status quo), and the introduction of Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who studied under Alan Grant and is kind of heartbroken to see how these creatures he loves no longer seem to inspire wonder. This could all be just world-building, necessary extrapolation to get from the previous six movies to a story about an expedition to another island where genetically-engineered dinosaurs have escaped containment, this time to recover DNA that may be crucial in creating human heart medication, but there's sadness here.
And that's a good thing; it's got the audience in the right mood as they're introduced to Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as mercenaries who are too professional to wear their feelings about recently lost comrades on their sleeves, and kind of ready when Koepp and Edwards decide they are going to fight against it. The trailer may have featured a version of John Williams's music that was as slowed-down and lower-keyed as you'd expect by the time a series reaches a seventh film and is playing to people who take The Lore seriously, but it shows up in its full, bombastic glory surprisingly often when we arrive on the island, and there's a spot where one may be expecting an action scene but instead gets an earnest and mostly-successful attempt to recreate the awe provoked by the first movie, or a trip to a natural history museum with a dino skeleton.
And around that, Rebirth is a thoroughly capable adventure movie, occasionally catching one aback with how often other blockbusters often seem to strain for its basic competence. Edwards stages a couple of action sequences on boats really well, taking into account how they move and make everything a little harder without ever letting the audience get lost, for instance. Scarlett Johansson reminds the audience that she's a movie star who can create the right sort of chemistry with everyone else in the cast to make things feel fleshed-out even if they're not actually complicated. The side plot about a family that winds up on the island as well actually works when it would usually be pandering idiocy; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in particular makes the father feel like he knows his kids and is looking out for them rather than like someone annoyed by their presence.
The film stretches on a bit, and the finale doesn't entirely come together as it sinks in that Koepp & Edwards don't have anything new left up their sleeves that six other movies about folks running from corporate hubris in the form of resurrected life forms (with it raining at night to cover any shortcomings in the VFX) haven't covered, with a chase through dark tunnels not the best way to show off the misshapen, almost tragic "D-Rex". It's nevertheless a darn satisfying movie whose makers would rather make it fun than mean and seldom misstep even if they also seldom innovate.
40 Acres
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2025 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
40 Acres is not the first film in the post-apocalyptic survival genre to have Black creators and a majority-Black (and Native American) cast - heck, Breathe just came out last year, so not even the first in a while - but it's got a chip on its shoulder that other films of its ilk don't necessarily carry. Its family does not feel that they have not carved a safe space out of the chaos around them, specifically because of their backgrounds, and the tension of it is a vise that feels specific even as the themes and actions are familiar.
The matriarch of that family is Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler), an army veteran who returned to her family's Canadian homestead - which they arrived at as escaped slaves around the time of the American Civil War - just as ecological and societal collapse began. She has an 18-year-old son, Emanuel (Kataem O'Connor), In the decade or so since, she has married Galen (Michael Greyeyes) who has a teenage daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson) of his own; they now have two daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare). The family are strong farmers and even better at defending their territory, as seen when a group of marauders get too close in the opening. Hailey won't give her location away to anyone, even the people she communicates via CB that she considers friends, which might protect them from a rumored band of cannibal marauders. But Manny is starting to buckle under this pressure, and he's just caught sight of a beautiful woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who is about his age and not his stepsister in a nearby swimming hole.
I suspect that one of the reasons director R.T. Thorne and his co-writers break the film into chapters that shift perspective and emphasis is to prevent Danielle Deadwyler from making it hard to see anybody else with her white-hot intensity. Hailey is the sort of tightly-wound martinet that these films usually reveal to be the real danger compared to the zombies and cannibals, and Deadwyler seldom seems to be holding anything back as she lashes out at the family who occasionally act like children or otherwise don't seem to be at 110% all the time. She's a force of nature and kind of terrifying, even with a load-bearing flashback where what she's seen before returning home seems to have staggered her and the occasional scene with Michael Greyeyes as someone she can't exactly let her guard down with but who can at least talk to her.
But because Deadwyler burns so bright, you've got to get Manny away from Hailey to see what being her son has made of him, and Kataem O'Connor is really great there, cowed but also rebellious as he can be even when he's got no-one to talk to about it. Manny is smart enough and self-aware enough to recognize that being isolated and on a constant combat footing has warped him, and he talks like a guy with holes in his experience who can't be the sort of person his mother wants him to be but can't quite figure out what else he can be. His scenes with Milcania Diaz-Rojas are fun because her Dawn is too worldly to immediately respond to his infatuation in kind and both she and the audience can recognize that his earnest good intentions can read as really dangerous.
Thorne and company keep the audience's eyes on the family dynamics enough that it's not exactly a surprise when he springs the trap doors that will put this blended family into a fight with outsiders - he never gets tunnel-visioned enough to treat what's going on outside the house as a distraction - but it's a flipped switch that leads to things getting slasher-movie bloody with a mean streak that one can't say the filmmakers haven't warned the audience about. It's impressively deployed violence - there's a shot Thorne holds for long enough for everything the film told the audience about mass extinction in passing to line up with everything we know about Galen before the film twists a knife, for example - and it goes to pulpy heights without ever feeling less than serious and potentially deadly. He shows the audience just enough of the marauders to make the audience see how their leaders could be charismatic enough to be followed without tempting the audience to think of them as more than monsters who need to die, even if it's Manny who has to kill them.
And that's the thing at the heart of the film that may be unresolvable: Hailey, Manny, and the rest live in a time where the need to be constantly vigilant and ready for action cannot be denied even if it can't be a healthy way to live, and the Black & Cree characters probably feel it in their bones in the way that Caucasian audiences like myself need to be shown. It doesn't have a single answer for how one stays alert and also stays sane, even as that's becoming the reality for more and more people.
28 Years Later
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
It was interesting to rewatch 28 Days Later and 28 Months Later ahead of this long-awaited third film (which itself is the start of a trilogy), because it really highlighted how much the first clicked into place when the former started to have something to say about rage and how hollow the second felt for not doing much more than building zombie-apocalypse lore. 28 Years Later lands someplace in between - I am deeply uninterested in its new infected variants and how a village isolated by the plague goes about its business, but when the filmmakers focus on the need to create mythology in the face of tragedy so big in one way or another that it beggars comprehension, that kind of becomes fascinating.
(Which, come to think of it, was the theme of Sunshine, director Danny Boyle's last collaboration with writer Alex Garland, back in 2007, and I wonder if their perspectives are a bit more in line this time!)
That doesn't make the first half - and first trip to the mainland from an island that is only connected to the mainland by a causeway at low tide - bad; it opens with a nifty sequence that is clearly going to echo through the trilogy. But it mostly exists to give the audience the lay of the land for when 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) returns in the second half, and introduce new forms of infected - "alphas" and "slow lows" - that don't necessarily follow from the pure blind rage of the previous movies. There's some good zombie action and Boyle does some interesting things with fever-dream flashbacks, but even the things we haven't necessarily seen before feel more like talented filmmakers trying to make the most of a played-out genre rather than an exciting addition to it.
It's when Spike returns home and doesn't see the way father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) misrepresents the expedition as his story that things get interesting. What he's found important is very different from what Jamie intended to show him, and his return seeking a doctor for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) eventually leads him to a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who represents a sort of traditional take on zombie stories and Ralph Fiennes's Dr. Kelson, who has gotten a bit peculiar over the last 28 years but represents a humanist point of view usually treated with mockery in these movies. The scenes between Fiennes, Comer, and Williams are odd but rich, a commentary on what we lose when we worry about security above all else and how truth hurts more than the well-intended lie but it creates a solid foundation. Spike matures, but not as this genre usually defines maturing - becoming hard and willing to sacrifice - but by starting to question his assumptions and choosing to learn more.
I'm not entirely sure I'm interested in where the last scene(s) indicate the series is going next year, but I can't say there's not potential.
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Friday, July 11, 2025
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 11 July 2025 - 17 July 2024
We are in the "one or two movies grabbing every screen" portion of the year.
- This week, that's the latest take on Superman, written and directed by James Gunn with David Coreswet at Clark Kent, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. Not sure what the story is, but it's the first time Warner has launched Superman movies with a larger DC Universe in place. It's at the Somerville, the Capitol, Fresh Pond (including 3D), The Museum of Science (Omnimax Fridays & Saturdays), West Newton, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Laser 2D/3D & Dolby Cinema & RealD 3D & Spanish subtitles), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax Xenon 2D/3D & Dolby Digital & RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser 2D/3D & Dolby Cinema & RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
Also opening is Abraham's Boys, which is subtitled "A Dracula Story", featuring Titus Welliver as Van Helsing, who apparently moved to America with his sons after defeating Dracula, although maybe he's not totally defeated. It's at Boston Common and South Bay.
Kids matinees include Pokemon: Detective Pikachu at Kendall Square Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday; The Wild Robot at Fresh Pond Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, and Kung Fu Panda 4 at South Bay Monday/Wednesday.
This Is Spinal Tap is held over at Boston Common Friday to Sunday. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has 50th Anniversary shows at Boston Common Sunday & Wednesday. - Landmark Kendall Square opens Sovereign, featuring Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay as father-and-son believers in sovereign citizenship who will eventually cross paths with Dennis Quaid's police chief.
Tuesday's comedy classic is The Jerk. - Apple Fresh Pond opens Hindi-language gangster film Maalik, starring Rajkummar Rao; Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan, a Hindi-language romance about a visually-impaired couple; and Tamil-language drama Oho Enthan Baby. Hindi-language romantic anthology Metro… In Dino continues at Fresh Pond, where Bangladeshi action movie Taandob plays Saturday afternoon.
Anime Jujutsu Kaisen: Hidden Inventory/Premature Death - The Movie plays Wednesday & Thursday at Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport.
Chinese thriller Malice continues at Causeway Street. - The Brattle Theatre has an encore of Streets of Fire on 35mm for the Friday Film Matinee. After that, they have a run of Familiar Touch, with Kathleen Chalfant as a woman whose mind is breaking down on the other side of 80. Co-star H. Jon Benjamin will be on hand for a Q&A Friday. It also plays Saturday & Sunday, plus matinees Monday & Thursday. They also have late shows of Christiane F. in a new restoration Friday to Monday.
In rep, Ari Aster programs a number of westerns - The Wild Bunch Saturday afternoon, Unforgiven Sunday afternoon on 35mm film, and No Country for Old Men Wednesday afternoon - ahead of an IFFBoston preview of his new film Eddington on Wednesday. There's also a "Pics and Crafts" show of Marie Antoinette on 35mm film Monday, and the start of their Robert Altman series on Tuesday with M*A*S*H & Brewster McCloud (the latter on 35mm). - The Coolidge Corner Theatre rearranges showtimes, but mostly keeps the same movies. Midnights this weekend are Kill Bill, with Volume 1 on Friday and Volume 2 on Saturday, both on 35mm film. They also have documentary Sabbath Queen, which follows performance artist Amichai Lau-Lavie over 21 years before he returns to the thousand-year family business of being a rabbi, on Sunday afternoon, with director Sandi Dubowski on hand for Q&A.
They also have The People's Joker on Monday evening, kabuki-derived horror movie Demon Pond on Tuesday, Dog Day Afternoon for Wednesday's Big Screen Classic, a 35mm Cinema Jukebox show of Saturday Night Fever on Thursday, and a cult classic show of Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion later Thursday night.
(They're also the venue for Boston Jewish Film's Summer Cinematheque screening of Marathon Mom on Thursday, with tickets available on BJF's website.) - The Harvard Film Archive has more 35mm Mikio Naruse: Untamed (Friday evening/Sunday afternoon), A Wife's Heart (Friday night), and Sudden Rain (Sunday evening). They also welcome Yugoslav auteur Karpo Godina for bahrudin "Bato" Čengić's Life of a Shock Force Worker (with Godina's "Sunday Picnic") Saturday evening, a program of experimental shorts Saturday night, and episodes 1 to 3 of Frame for a Few Poses on Monday evening.
- The Museum of Fine Arts screens La Chimera on Friday evening, with a panel of the museum's experts on hand for a conversation afterward.
- WBUR's CitySpace has a "Set in Boston" screening of The Bostonians on Friday night, with Sean Burns & Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Megan Marshall discussing it afterward.
- The Somerville Theatre has a 35mm double feature of Die Hard & Working Girl on Saturday evening (apparently it's a Bob's Burgers thing), with a midnight screening of Hundreds of Beavers later that night. Independent film Sunlight plays Sunday and Tuesday evening. Monday's Great Remakes double feature are the '58 and '86 versions of The Fly (the latter on 35mm film). Wednesday's Summer Camp show is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? on 35mm, and Thursday features music documentary Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos.
The Capitol Theatre has a 4th Wall show with Digital Awareness providing visuals for A Monolithic Dome, War Machine, and Astral Bitch on Saturday. - The Seaport Alamo has an "Agfadrome" screening of 1977 South Korean folk horror film Io Island on Wednesday.
- The Regent Theatre has two movies on Sunday evening, with actress Taylor Treadwell there for meet & greet before American Warrior in the afternoon and documentary Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine with director Alfonso Maiorana there for a Q&A in the evening. On Wednesday, they team with The Book Rack with The Princess Bride, with a post-film discussion about the adaptation.
- There's a pretty full slate of outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films: Moana at the Charles River Esplanade on Friday, Miss Congeniality at the Prudential Center on Saturday, 5 on Wednesday (Moana 2 at Boston Harbor Shipyard, Despicable Me 4 at Timothy J. Toomey Jr. Park in Cambridge, Moana at Castle Island and Point Break on 35mm at the Rose Kennedy Greenway via the Coolidge), and Flubber at Urban Park Roof Garden in Cambridge & The Outsiders at Somerville's Lincoln Park on Thursday.
- The Lexington Venue is open all week but Monday with Familiar Touch, Friendship, and Hot Milk.
The West Newton Cinema opens Superman and Bad Shabbos, continuing Jurassic World Rebirth, Elio, Materialists, The Phoenician Scheme, and The Life of Chuck.
Cinema Salem has 28 Years Later, Jurassic World Rebirth, and Superman through Monday. The original The Toxic Avenger is Friday's Night Light show, with podcast The Spooky Picture Show hosting a 40th anniversary screening of Day of the Dead on Saturday, plus a Wednesday Classics show of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
If you can make it out to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, they've got a four-walled booking of influencers-getting-picked-off horror movie Skillhouse. The Dedham Community Theatre holds overFrench film Mr. Blake at Your Service.
Friday, July 04, 2025
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 July 2025 - 10 July 2024
Huh, maybe I should have done a 5-day week last time, because this weekend is pretty quiet aside from Wednesday's openings.
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre and Boston Common open IFFBoston closing night film Sorry, Baby, with writer/director/star Eva Victor playing an instructor at a small liberal arts school still reeling from something that happened when she was a grad student.
The Coolidge also opens a special 25 Anniversary Edition of Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love which reintegrates some footage he cut before its original release.
No midnight show on Friday night, but Green Room plays Saturday. Monday's Queer Cinema presentation is a 35mm print of All About My Mother; Tuesday's Kaidan Kimodameshi show is Kuroneko, also on 35mm film; Wednesday's Big Screen Classic is the original Sabina on 35mm; and Thursday's is Francis Ford Coppola's 2005 "Complete Novel" cut of The Outsiders. - Chinese thriller Malice, starring Zhang Xiaofei (recently seen in Yolo and Last Suspect) as a reporter investigating two people who fell to their deaths.
Apple Fresh Pond opens Hindi-language romantic anthology Metro… In Dino; Telugu-language action film Thammudu; and Tamil-language 3BHK, about a family looking to buy a home in the city Hindi-language sports movie Sitaare Zameen Par continues at Fresh Pond. - Jurassic World Rebirth opened Wednesday, and continues at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema & RealD 3D & Spanish subtitles), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Dolby Cinema & RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema & RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
40 Acres opened at Boston Common on Wednesday.
Kids matinees include The Goonies at Kendall Square Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday; Kung Fu Panda 4 at Fresh Pond Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday and Arsenal Yards on Tuesday, and Despicable Me 4 at South Bay Monday/Wednesday.
41st Anniversary shows of This Is Spinal Tap play Boston Common, Arsenal Yards Saturday/Sunday/Monday. There are secret previews at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row on Monday (possibly that sequel!). Less secret is Superman playing Tuesday at Boston Common (Imax Laser), South Bay (Imax Xenon), Assembly Row (Imax Laser), plus "Opening Night Fan Events" on Thursday at Boston Common (Imax Laser), South Bay (Imax Xenon), Assembly Row (Imax Laser) - The Brattle Theatre continues their "Spawn of Jaws: Blockbusters & Wannabe Blockbusters" series withRaiders of the Lost Ark on 35mm Friday & Saturday, Close Encounters Friday, Dune '84 on 35mm Friday & Tuesday, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on 35mm film Saturday (double feature with Raiders), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial on 35mm Saturday & Sunday, Poltergeist on 35mm Saturday & Sunday, Conan the Barbarian and a 35mm print of Action Jackson Sunday, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension on Monday & Thursday, Big Trouble in Little China on Monday, Beverly Hills Cop on 35mm & Flash Gordon on Tuesday, Batman on 35mm & Howard The Duck on Wednesday, and then wrapping things up with their annual 35mm Trailer Treats show and Streets of Fire on 35mm Thursday.
- The Somerville Theatre has a midnight special of Cats on Saturday. They begin their "Great Remakes" series on Monday, with a double feature of 1951's The Thing from Another World & 1982's The Thing, the latter on 35mm. They screen indie Stealing Pulp Fiction on Tuesday, a Summer Camp show of Ash Wednesday on Wednesday, and the new 4K restoration of Shall We Dance? on Thursday.
The Capitol Theatre the "Peninsula Dreams Film Festival" on Saturday afternoon, and then a "Blame Canada! USO Show" presentation of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut in the evening, with a pop-up arcade and musical performances before and after the show. - The Harvard Film Archive gets a bit of a late start on their summer deep dive, "Floating Clouds: The Cinema of Naruse Mikio". The film that gives the series its title plays Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, with Sudden Raid Saturday night, Yearning Sunday evening, and Sound of the Mountain Monday evening. All film this weekend - and I believe for the entire series - are on 35mm film.
- The Seaport Alamohas Attack the Block on Monday, and Hot Spring Shark Attack on Wednesday
- Landmark Kendall Square is doing comedy classics in July, kicking off the weekly series with National Lampoon's Animal House on Tuesday.
- The Regent Theatre has documentary Why Are You You? on Wednesday, which shares an abbreviation with subjects the Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (by design, I imagine).
- Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films include Finding Nemo at the TimeOut Market on Monday, Inside Out 2 at Hoyt Field in Cambridge on Wednesday, and Paddington at Assembly Row & The Wild Robot at Somerville's Lincoln Park on Thursday.
- The Museum of Science returns "Superhero Dogs" to its Imax shorts rotation, and tickets are on sale for Superman when it opens in a couple of weeks.
- The Lexington Venue is open all week but Monday with F1, plus free matinees of Stars and Stripes Forever on Saturday and Yankee Doodle Dandy on Sunday.
The West Newton Cinema continues F1, Jurassic World Rebirth, Elio, How to Train Your Dragon, Materialists, The Phoenician Scheme, and The Life of Chuck. Thursday's Ty Burr Film Club show is The Night of the Hunter.
Cinema Salem has 28 Years Later, Jurassic World Rebirth, F1, and M3GAN 2.0 through Monday. Wednesday has the 1937 A Star Is Born, with the mystery Weirdo Wednesday show down the hall.
If you can make it out to the Dedham Community Theatre, they are showing French film Mr. Blake at Your Service, starring John Malkovich as a widower who takes a job as a butler to Fanny Ardant, with Émilie Dequenne also in the cast.