Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.02: The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell, The Roundup: No Way Out, "Gertrude and Ivan Party Hard", and Vincent Must Die

I arranged Thursday's movies so that other days of the week could play out a certain way, and to be sure I got Larry Fessenden doing a Q&A, and that means The White Storm 3 was seen not at the festival proper but at the movie theater they've carved out of the old forum, which is kind of the rough equivalent of the Boston Common theater back home in a few ways - it's where the Chinese and Indian and other foreign-mainstream will play, with only a few rooms upgraded, but mostly a perfectly pleasant place to see a movie. And, like that place, I was probably the only person in the room, although what did I expect for a 3:15pm niche presentation? I imagine it would have been a lot more fun at the festival, but, again, Larry Fessenden.

That gave me plenty of time to grab some chicken before The Roundup: No Way Out, which had guests!

That's director Lee Sang-yong and producers Billy Aikman and Kim Keung-Taek, who by and large were asked questions in French and thus had their answers translated in kind, which means I didn't catch a lot of it, besides the fact that it is kind of crazy that they are cranking these out at a one-a-year clip right now - The Roundup came out in 2022 and The Roundup: Punishment is expected in 2024 - and that it speaks to what capable folks, all handling different jobs, they have as producers.

For the last show of the evening, Mitch Davis introduced and chatted with Vincent Must Die director Stéphan Castang, and that was entirely in French, so I can't say I gleaned a lot from it. Indeed, the one bit I did catch - Mitch wanted to make sure he said that director of the short that played before it, Louise Groult, correctly, which had Stéphan perk up. "Louise?" Mitch looks surprised they might be acquainted - "tu connait?" - and then there was laughter, but I don't know whether it was because the French film world can be small or because he fooled Mitch.

So that was Friday; Saturday is looking all sorts of up in the air. It may start with The President's Last Bang, or may not, if you're seeing this posted after 12:30pm. After that, I'll do The First Slam Dunk, try and see if it's easier to get into Sympathy for the Devil with Nic Cage no longer there in person (and fall back to Stay Online otherwise), finishing up with The Becomers. Shin Kamen Rider has its moments, and Divinity is recommended.


So duk 3: Yun joi tin ngai (The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2023 in Cineplex Forum #19 (first-run, DCP)

Herman Yau is a guy who tends to direct wielding a sledgehammer, but this isn't a movie that particularly needs a lot of nuance. We've seen the undercover office tormented by divided loyalties before, but Yau isn't really looking for moral ambiguity here. He's just making sure there's someone hanging around to spring into action when he really brings the hammer down.

It kicks off with that familiar scenario - after retrieving a container of "ice" that has been air-dropped in the ocean just outside the Hong Kong territorial waters, gangster Hong Sochat (Lau Ching-wan) is headed back to the city with lieutenants Billy (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing) and Wing (Louis Koo Tin-lok) when they are stopped by the police. A massive firefight ensues, during which Wing is revealed to be an undercover cop and Billy is shot. Sochat, Billy, and several other members of the gang flee to Thailand, where Sochat finds a way into the organization of a Golden Triangle warlord and Billy recuperates with the help of one of the villagers, Noon (Wang Caiyu) - while trying to hide that he, too, has been working undercover and it's a longtime friend and colleague of "Wing".

Undercover stories like this are often built as chess matches, but the Detectives have little means to affect the action for much of the movie. What that does is kind of make this a movie where Lau Ching-wan's gangster is the one driving events most of the time, while Au Chi-yuen ("Wing") is away from the action and Cheung Kin-hang ("Built") is injured and mostly sidelined. It's not a bad strategy, actually; Lau obligingly plays to the rafters (I swear there's some Brando in his accent) and handles the action as he uses his exile to worn his way into the local drug transport operation. The filmmakers could have made this a straight gangster picture, if they were so inclined.

The rest of the movie is fine, though; Aaron Kwok and Wang Caiyu are a pleasant enough pair, with Wang able to play Noon in a way that's not condescending despite her situation (she's not particularly interested in being rescued). There's a nice bond between Koo and Kwok as the undercover officers and Koo pushed back at the superiors who just don't understand real police work without making Au look like he'd be a nightmare colleague. There are plenty of flashbacks to keep the violence and melodrama levels up.

And Yau doesn't stint on the action; things kick off with a massive confrontation between the gangster and police that very quickly advances to cars just flying through the air. It's not quite nonstop carnage, but this is not a movie with a big innocent bystander population for most of the run time, so there's no reason not to go full auto and have plenty of grenades and occasional rocket launchers in use. It's staged well enough to not just be about the sheer amount of ammunition, most of the time, right down to how Lau and Koo have a pretty decent one on one in the middle of the truly gigantic carnage at the end.

Subtlety and depth left this series (a brand name rather than an ongoing story) behind long ago, but if what you're looking for is some basic Hong Kong violence, let it not be said that Herman Yau doesn't know what to do with a quality cast and a decent budget.


The Roundup: No Way Out

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festiva, DCP)

Honestly, Korean movie criminals, what makes you see a guy shaped like Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) in a room and think that this is a problem you are going to solve with punching?

The actor's character Ma Seok-do, a former boxer who became a cop, is now working homicide, and his team finds themselves called to the scene of a relatively minor case - a woman who feel from a hotel window - only to find she was dead before she fell, killed by an overdose of a drug called "Hiper". Following the trail back, they discover that local games, Japanese yakuza, and a division of crooked cops are all involved in this trade and scrambling for 20kg of the drug, which had a street value of some $300M.

The big guy's production company is rolling these out one a year at this point, and you can kind of do that when you're this focused on giving the audience what it wants: Ma is amiable, there's a criminal organization or two with enough members that folks will be running into his fists for 100 minutes or so, and the filmmakers never forget that giant stunts and set pieces are actually kind of antithetical to the series's appeal. In some ways, this movie is a bit over-complicated despite its simplicity - Detective Ma has something like six people under him, and there's maybe one gang too many - but the filmmakers keep things running smoothly. There's really only one surprise early on and not a lot of details that will be truly important ten minutes later.

Mostly, folks are there to see Ma punch some fools, and he obliges. His Seok-do is the kind of performance that looks easy because Ma is a movie star and finding the right tone to toss off one-liners, play self-deprecating while still being cooler than those around him, and seeking that something is an effort despite him being a cartoon tank is what he does. The filmmakers supply him with some good sparring partners: Munetaka Aoki and Hong Joon-young as yakuza enforcers who are fast enough to inflict some damage, especially since the former carries a katana, and give off the right sort of arrogant disdain for subordinates and rivals. Lee Jun-hyuk is more an oily, sneering bit of scum. Jun Kunimura shows up on the other side of phone calls and I hope he's around with more to do next time.

I think I said something along these lines with the last Roundup, but it applies here as well: There's not a lot of suspense in these movies, not even as much as introducing likable supporting characters and putting them in danger. The cases are built in a way such that they can come down to fist fights, with some knives and sword thrown in to create something that looks like a challenge and mysteries that can be solved by making sure suspects don't want to be punched again (i can't really defend police brutality as a running gag being being impressed at how good the filmmakers are at it). They're about the satisfaction of a mild-mannered guy punching things that need punching through a wall, and deliver that precisely.

The ending credits tease a fourth entry in this series that started with The Outlaws, "Punishment", coming next year, and I'll probably be able to copy and paste large chunks of this review when writing about it. This team doesn't reinvent the wheel, but they do keep things rolling.


"Gertrude et Yvan Party Hard"

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festiva, digital)

Man, parties in movies look like awful, miserable experiences, enough that I wonder if people really enjoy them or if they convince themselves that they do because there might be a new friend or some sex on the other side of one. I suspect that's what the short is playing with - both Gertrude (Baptiste Carrion-Weiss) and Yvan (Lou Franco) both seem out of sorts before they meet, her kind of bored and him trying too hard, but there because it's what folks their age do - but what to do with that?

I'm not sure filmmaker Louise Groult has any sort of great idea for that. They go through stupid reasons for rejecting each other, bloody ways to curry favor, being so phony they repeat each other's stories meant to make themselves sound more interesting to each other as their own, and ascribing their chance meeting to something more, and the actors are good enough at their jobs and the filmmaker has just enough of an off-kilter sensibility that one isn't groaning about how boring this is, but it is very familiar, a bit of stabbing aside. Overall, it's got the feel of something that seems like the funniest thing ever when you're drunk or high and brainstorming gags, but seems less clever by the time folks have actually made a movie out of it.


Vincent doit mourir (Vincent Must Die)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festiva, DCP)

The "high concept" is a tricky thing, and fickle. A big and outlandish premise can certainly help a movie stand out and potentially create dedicated fans, but going into either too much or too little detail can sink the enterprise. Usually, it's just one, but Vincent Must Die sends to have both happen.

That high concept is right in the title. Vincent (Karim Leklou) is an ordinary-enough graphic designer who makes a bad joke about the new intern and soon finds the kid attempting to beat him to death with his laptop computer - and then, a few days later, sees the accountant stab him repeatedly with a pen. His manager suggests working from home, but then he's attacked in the hallway. This sends him to the country home owned by his father (François Chattot); along the way, he encounters "Joachim DB", a former university professor who has gone off the grid as the same thing happens to him, and gives survival tips. But when waitress Margaux (Vimala Pons) doesn't attempt to murder him after they make eye contact, he begins to hope there might be something there.

It's kind of an odd thing that Joachim encourages Vincent to only communicate via various apps and websites, because the way that online conversations can suddenly erupt into rage and spiteful attacks with almost no warning was the first thing that came to mind, especially when those around Vincent respond by isolating him and making it his responsibility to not be murdered by coworkers, neighbors, or random strangers. It's not a perfect metaphor even at the start, of course, but it's the first thing that resonates and can certainly be broadened to look at other sorts of breakdowns in communication and civility that erupt in violence.

When writer Mathieu Naert and director Stéphan Castang are able to dive into it, though, the film is electric and transgressive, with the first out-of-nowhere attacks provoking gasps that are exactly positioned between horror and laughter, and other scenarios seemingly reveling in presenting themselves as things that no reasonable human being can deal with in a reasonable or fair manner. The movie announces itself and its big idea loudly, and the filmmakers do a fine job of reinventing itself as Vincent has to find new ways to survive and the landscape around him changes.

But, in ways that are really frustrating, they never find the best way to veer with their high concept. If it becomes a better proxy for modern discontent, it does so by becoming a force too general in how people are lashing out to mean anything specific. Bits of larger mythology get introduced, but aside from giving Vincent a reason to have a delightful little dog as an early warning system, they don't particularly intrigue as a puzzle to solve or a reality to navigate. There are hints of this happening throughout France, but the focus on Vincent is too narrow to explore that, and who Vincent is when people are not trying to assassinate him is never defined enough that his adaptation is particularly interesting, especially since Joachim just hands him a fair amount. There's actually a fairly long stretch in the middle before Vincent meets Margaux when he's not actually doing anything interesting and no place else for the film to go. Finally, there's a reversal in the last act that, like so much of the rest of the movie, seems more like a clever idea than anything particularly well thought-out.

And yet, for as random as the pairing may be in the story, the odd romance between Vincent and Margaux becomes the heart of the movie. Karim Leklou and Vimala Pons both latch onto how each is lonely but feels unable to find the connection they want, and they've got a way of warily but eagerly circling each other early on that feels genuine and doesn't hold back on how there are unsettling aspects to how they meet and their relationship thereafter. There's a set of handcuffs involved in their intimacy, and while the filmmakers recognize that one's mind will likely jump straight to kink, they're also a tool for safety, and the pair work when they're able to use them for both, a nervous blend of laughter and worry. By the end, one can look at them and say that circumstances can make any relationship disastrous, and the strong ones come up with plans for managing that.

It still leaves an unpleasant taste in one's mouth at times; I don't think a 2020s American movie would be nearly so willing as to position physical violence as a thing a romance must work around as this French one does, despite it being in the service of an obviously heightened metaphor. Even taking that into account, though, I found I didn't particularly care for Vincent Must Die; the line at the end of the terrific hook all too often doesn't go anywhere interesting.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.01: Mami Wata, "The Perfect Place to Cry", and Blackout

There may come a time when I decide I don't need to do as close to the entire Fantasia Festival as humanly possible, but 2023 is not that time. Still, I wondered - it would probably cost me an extra $1000 Canadian to attend without a press pass, and this blog and the associated Letterboxd page isn't anyone's idea of a major media outlet. Affordable sublets and AirBNBs have also been a lot harder to find for this sort of long-ish-term stay since the pandemic. I wound up, believe it or not, discovering that the University of Quebec rents some of its dorm rooms out as hotels during the summer months, and that's where I'm staying. It led to a weird situation because, being a dorm, the "front desk" is manned by what are presumably work-study students who weren't around for any sort of "early check-in" or even having a place to stash one's suitcase, so I walked around with that for a couple hours, and then had to hang around the room to charge my phone. Missed the window to pick up my press badge, so I had to buy tickets and stand in the other line like a regular fan.

(Practice, I guess.)

Because I'd been kind of slow-walking things the past few days, I didn't get on the list for the Official Opening Night film, but I'll see if it plays with English subtitles when it gets its official release on the 11th and do a "Fantasia Extra" on it if so. I'm just kind of glad, relative to last year, that this sort of thing is selling out again, and spending the first night in De Sève made a lot of other days easier.

No guests for Mami Wata, but I do enjoy the fact that Mitch gave the team behind short film "A Perfect Place to Cry", writer/director Shane Bannon and actress/producer Celina Bernstein, as enthusiastic an introduction as he would give the feature's director Larry Fessenden, because, hey, they made a fun little movie.

"Really, Larry - Talbot Falls?"

Larry Fessenden is kind of the John Cassevetes of indie horror - just always there, making his own genre pics, acting in others', and for a stretch his Glass Eye Pix company seemed to be part of just about every one of these movies made in the Northeast. You don't quite have to go deep into horror circles to find fans, but since he's almost always lived within his means, budget-wise, and had as much of an indie sensibility as a blockbuster one (he produced and appeared in Wendy and Lucy), he's never exactly broken through the way, say, Shyamalan or the A24 guys have at various points, but there are a lot of folks who love him, and I don't know if him becoming too big to hand out flyers and chat before a movie would allow the universe to keep rotating.

It was a good Q&A, too - he had a lot to say about how collaborative movie-making is, had a lot of crew join him on stage, and mentioned that a lot of cast members were just there for a day or two, which was a lot of work for the producers, but also speaks to how much folks like working with him (another thing that does is that there were cast members there to support him, but from the audience, as neither he nor anybody else was going to cross the line of promotion during a strike). He apparently met star Alex Hurt while producing a movie his son made, which was kind of funny because the actor is William Hurt's son, so there was inevitable Altered States talk, in terms of transformation, though Fessenden mentioned that they actually kept scaling the wolfman makeup back, both in homage to the original The Wolf Man and because it fit the story.

He's been doing this for 30 or 40 years and still seemed genuinely excited to be doing a werewolf movie; there's other stuff going on, but you can still tell that the guy just likes werewolves. Though not necessarily mummies - he ended the Q&A with talk of doing a mash-up movie with characters from his other works that paralleled the Universal Monsters and really didn't sound interested in having there be a mummy, although maybe an invisible man could be useful. This audience, at least, looked forward to that.

So that's Day One. Day Two is looking to be catching The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell at the multiplex, then The Roundup: No Way Out and Vincent Must Die at the festival proper. Mami Wata is recommended.


Mami Wata

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, laser DCP)

I am not sure that Mami Wata has a whole lot of depth beyond the obvious, but there's not necessarily anything wrong with doing what it at least appears to, transposing some traditional folklore into something familiar and making it striking enough to remember. This film is in no way complicated, and has some gaps, but I bet it sticks in audience's memory because it does tend well to the basics and make a strong visual impression.

Mami Wata is an ocean deity worshiped throughout western, central, and southern Africa, including the village of Iyi, where Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) rules as the Intermediary between the village and the goddess. It is not as smooth as it one was, and heir apparent Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) finds Efe's words to a mother who lost her child to the sea hollow. Both the dead girl and Zinwe are said to be "Marine Children", the ocean part of their parentage, while Efe's other daughter Prisca (Evelyne Ily) is a more conventional refugee. She is taken with another new arrival, Jasper (Emeka Amakeze), escaping his life as a soldier among the rebels, although Jasper's tales of rebellion resonate with dissatisfied villagers like Jabi (Kelechi Udegbe).

Even if none of that sounds interesting, the film is gorgeous; writer/director C.J. "Fiery" Obasi chooses a stark monochrome palette and spends much of the early going on static, well-composed shots that highlight painted faces or geometrical arrangements. White totem shells feel like they may have actual power from the way they pop against dark skin and backgrounds, and when Prisca is forced to go into hiding, the way that her plain white dress is actually bolder than her usual costume mainly serves to highlight how her painted face immediately stood for something for the audience.

The flip side is that this can make her more a symbol than a character. Both adopted daughters of the Intermediary capture their type well, with the actresses solid screen presences: Uzoamaka Aniunoh captures how the well-meaning urgency of a teenager can turn cruel with a little push, and Evelyne Ily captures Prisca as a true believer who can nevertheless be practical. They are both reflections of Rita Edochie's Mama Efe, who makes me wonder how many of these matriarchs Edochie has played before, with her rigidity but genuine care for her people. Emeka Amakeze gives Jasper just enough wounded sympathy that one almost thinks he is being dragged into a heel turn.

The big trouble is that, for all Obasi seems to have plenty to address in terms of the limits of folklore and traditional life, the desire to be modern, and how there's no way to untangle the "good" migrants from the "bad" ones, he often winds up telling a fairly generic story under the style. Prisca and Zinwe aren't much more than the Grateful and Ungrateful Daughter, and Obasi often doesn't seem entirely sure what to have Zinwe, in particular, actually do while the rest of the story is going on. The village is so insular that the filmmakers have a hard time building a story that won't run too counter to how this traditional society is being damaged by the wrong kind of outside influence without making something inside the village be more broken than they appear to want.

The movie calls itself "a folklore", and works well enough in those terms. It could, maybe, afford to be a little more conventional in spots while still being the eyeball-grabbing experiment that it is.


"The Perfect Place to Cry"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festiva, laser digital)

The nifty trick to a short like "The Perfect Place to Cry" is that it at once distills a horror trope down to its essence, in that you can imagine this moment as pulled from a feature's script, polished to perfection, and then presented as its own thing, but to also find a way for it to take a turn into being its own thing in surprising fashion. All in seven minutes.

The hook is good: A woman (Celina Bernstein) drives to an isolated spot so that she can cry over something that just happened to her without dealing with other people, only to have two of said other people show up, one (Howland Jesse) shirtless and fleeing, another (Kevin Owyang) carrying a baseball bat and implacable. The logical move, both within and from a screenwriting perspective, is for her to run, pursued by someone intent on leaving no witnesses and finding some sort of strength as a result of surviving.

Writer/director Shane Bannon doesn't go that way, instead setting up for an awkward turn and odd punchline, but for all that this is unreal and out of the ordinary, there's a couple of real and earnest things here: Folks aren't entirely one thing, and that one thing being extreme might not skew the rest of their reactions nearly as much as you'd expect, and there's a look on Bernstein's face at one point that says "maybe I should go after this person who was kind to me" even though, no, she should not, that gets at this specific sort of messy emotion.

Anyway - first "interested to see what they do with something bigger" of the festival!


Blackout

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival:, laser DCP)

"Man, they don't know how to use pitchforks, we do."

There's a whole interesting idea for a classic horror riff in that line, and I kind of wonder what the movie that got built around the idea of a town's migrant labor being the only people practically equipped to fight a monster would be, but Larry Fessenden has more on his mind even as he's careful to keep the story centered and focused on one man's situation.

That man is Charley (Alex Hurt), a building painter with talent for the other thing one can mean when saying "painter", planning to leave his hometown of Talbot Falls after the death of his father. He's got a lot of stops to make - dropping some of his father's papers off with Kate (Barbara Crampton), a lawyer, in hope that she might find something that can stop a development spearheaded by Hammond, the rich man who runs the town (Marshall Bell); giving his ex-wife Sharon (Addison Timlin) a painting by way of apology for how he ruined their marriage; making sure his friend Miguel (Rigo Garay), the sole witness to a grisly attack on two teenagers a month ago, is okay, especially in the wake of a racist op-ed in the paper by Hammond suggesting he knows more; and dropping his old car off with another friend in exchange for a particular tool. Why? Well, he's got the full moon marked off on his calendar, and his vague memories of those nights probably does not come from his binge drinking.

The title makes it clear that the Wolfman stuff is a metaphor for alcoholism and addiction, but even knowing that, Fessenden and actor Alex Hurt do an impressive job of showing how the drink and lycanthropy aren't the only things going on with this man, and that is what creates the real tragedy - he's trying to keep his life together and has people who see his potential even as they also see that he's collapsing. It feels real even as it lands into the heightened horror metaphor of it all, maybe not subtle but nuanced. Alex Hurt does a fine job of capturing just what it means to be this particular sort of mess: One feels the good intentions, talent, and wit, but also the self-destructiveness, savior complex, and tendency to feel bad for what he's done but not quite bad enough to fix it before he's good and ready. Hurt and Fessenden really put their finger on how, even as one grows to understand that an addict may not be in control, one can still get more fed up with them.

Fessenden is able to call on a nifty cast to fill in roles as Charley tries to make his way out of town, from Joseph Cstillo-Midyett & Ella Rae Peck as cops who are facing more than is reasonable without being inept, to familiar character actors like Joe Swanberg, Barbara Crampton, James Le Gros (who based on the number of times he shows up for odd jobs in the credits doesn't mind helping out while he's on set), John Speredakos, and Kevin Corrigan. The folks with beefier parts do well too - Addison Timlin hits this "ex who wants to be understanding but it's hard even when he's being a weirdo" spot dead on, for instance, while Rigo Garay gets to pull multiple layers of being put in a bad situation but having to keep going off. Marshall Bell plays a rich, kind of racist jerk at just the level where one can earnestly despise the guy without getting into whether he or the real world has gone off into cartoon villainy.

And yet, it's not dour - there's some nasty kills for those who come for that, and the movie is also very funny at points as Fessenden uses the some-days-you-just-can't-leave-town structure and finds a way that transforming under the full moon makes it even crazier. Things like transforming into a wolf who doesn't know how to drive a car while behind the wheel and thus going down a hill manages to hit both. Toward the end, at the very moment most of these movies start to get more serious, Fessenden throws more jokes in, and it kind of keeps him from needing to end the film on some grandiose note.

Which keeps things right at the level they need to be at, messy in both emotion and gore because this sort of thing can't be satisfying. Fessenden's take on this particular iconic monster is a real treat: Plenty of blood, plenty of wit, and enough genuine fondness for the various small town residents to keep the film from being hollow cynicism.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 July 2023 - 27 July 2023

A couple weeks ago, I was looking at the Facebook page for the still-not-open Alamo Drafthouse Boston, and someone in the comments was saying "can't you just have a one day sneak preview opening for Oppenheimer?" and I wanted to jump in like "what? You're in Boston! The Drafthouse is not going to do that movie better than the Somerville or the Coolidge!"

I mean, if it was open, there might be a screen freed up at Boston Common for The White Storm 3, but, c'mon, have some pride in your great local scene rather than wistfully wishing for something from Texas!

• So let's get to Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's star-studded, three-hour film about the man who led the team to build an atomic bomb during World War II, played by Cillian Murphy. Shot on genuine Imax film and likely finished on film as well, it should look fantastic, especially since many of the local places playing it have been preparing their projectors for months, eager to give the best presentation. It's at the Somerville (70mm film), the Coolidge (70mm film), Fresh Pond, the Museum of Science (Omnimax), Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton (35mm film), CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema/70mm film), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenall Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The like box office champion is Barbie, with Margot Robbie as the titular doll who suddenly finds herself gripped by thoughts that don't fit into her fantasy world and going to the real one to learn what's up with that, with Ken (Ryan Gosling) along for the ride. Greta Gerwig writes and directs (with husband Noah Baumbach teaming with her on the script). It's at the Capitol, the Coolidge, Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Horror movie Cobweb grabs a few stray showtimes at Boston Common; it's about an elementary school kid who hears strange noises from his bedroom that his parents say is nothing.
  
  The week's "Disney 100" re-release at Boston Common is Toy Story.
  
  The original Terrifier feature (as there's also an earlier short) plays Boston Common Saturday through Monday nights. The Secret Lives of Pets has matinees at Boston Common on Saturday and Wednesday. Wednesday also has two movies getting early shows before the Thursday early shows: Talk to Me at Boston Common and Assembly Row and Haunted Mansion at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema) and Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema).
• Theatre Camp, a "save the camp from its new owner" deal with theater kids, opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and Boston Common. Just the screening room at the Coolidge, though, as the big releases get the big screens.
  
  The Coolidge has some Barbie late shows too, along with the more conventional variety - Joe Dante's Piranha on Friday and Drew Godard's The Cabin in the Woods on Saturday.
• Apple Fresh Pond finds room for two Indian films starting on Friday: Ajmer 92 is a Hindi-language crime drama about a wave of rape and subsequent blackmail of young women, while Hidimbha is a Telugu-language action movie which also follows the attack of a number of girls. Padmini, a Malayalam-language comedy about a college instructor/poet who has to live down an embarrassing situation, plays Saturday and Sunday.
  
  Mainland Chinese hit Lost In the Stars still has showtimes at Boston Common. If you can make it out to the Liberty Tree Mall, they're showing The White Storm 3, Herman Yau's latest drug-war action movie, starring Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, and Lau Ching-Wan, not actually connected to the other two.
• The Brattle Theatre plays Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis from Friday to Sunday, a documentary about a design studio known in large part for their iconic record covers. Those days also feature 50th Anniversary shows of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a Peter Yates crime thriller starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle that is often considered the iconic Boston movie. There's also a special Saturday presentation of short "Game Hawker" on Saturday night, with subject Shawn Hayes there for a Q&A.
  
  Monday's Warner Brothers Centennial double feature is a pair of pre-code Barbara Stanwyck movies, Baby Face & Night Nurse, both on film; Tuesday has a Busby Berkley music, 42nd Street, also on 35mm. Later, there's a special IFFBoston preview screening of Problemista. The Dede Allen' double feature on Wednesday is The Missouri Breaks (35mm) & Bonnie and Clyde, and then Thursday is a Thrill Ride Horror pairing of Cloverfield (35mm) & Slither.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has documentary Close to Vermeer on Friday evening.
• The "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" selections at The Harvard Film Archive, all on 35mm film, are Tokyo Twilight (Friday & Sunday), The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Saturday), The Lady and the Beard (Sunday), and I Flunked, But… (Monday) with the ten existing minutes of I Graduated, But… playing beforehand. Lady and Flunked are silence, with Robert Humphreville providing accompaniment.
• In addition to Oppenheimer, The Somerville Theatre keeps the 70mm projector going after midnight on Saturday for Flatliners. They and The Capitol are also doing a cross-theater "Barbenheimer" promotion, where if you show your ticket stub from Barbie at the Capitol when seeing Oppenheimer at the Somerville, or vice versa, there's a free popcorn in it for you.
• Landmark Kendall Square has original-recipe Top Gun for Tuesday's Retro Replay show.
• The West Newton Cinema gets Barbie and a 35mm print of Oppenheimer to go with holdovers Mission: Impossible, Past Lives, Indiana Jones, Asteroid City (Friday-Sunday & Wednesday), and Super Mario Brothers (Friday matinee). Open all week!
  
  The Lexington Venue has Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club all week (except Monday and Tuesday when the theater is closed).
  
  The Luna Theater has Past Lives from Friday to Sunday, as well asa Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Barbie, Oppenheimer, Mission: Impossible, and Indiana Jones through Monday. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb plays Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, plus Rocky Horror Saturday night (it also plays Boston Common on Saturday as per usual). Twister plays on Thursday.
• The New England Aquarium is showing Jaws on the Imax screen from Monday to Saturday the 29th.
  
  And, wow, The Museum of Science apparently sold out all three weekends of Oppenheimer on the dome!
• Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films include Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the Hatch Shell Friday, Minions: The Rise of Gru at the Prudential Saturday, Talladega Nights at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, The Secret Lives of Pets & Top Gun: Maverick at Cambridge Crossing Thursday, and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory at Somerville's Seven Hills Park, also Thursday. There are supposedly two Alamo Cinema events at other bars - Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade at Dorchester Brewing on Friday (rescheduled), and Jaws at the Sam Adams Downtown Tap Room on Wednesday, but we'll see.

I am in lovely Montreal for Fantasia (look for the blog to become unusually busy!), so the only one of those movies that I will be checking out right away is The White Storm 3, which actually played the festival last night but which I passed over because it would be at the Forum while I had some free time. Still, I need all of you to go see Oppenheimer in 70mm over the next few weeks, maybe two or three times, so that it's still on the main screen of the Somerville when I get back. Deal?

Almost Certainly Short-Timers: Shadows and They Cloned Tyrone

There have been a couple Hong Kong movies like this released over the past few months that have been sitting on shelves for years - Shadows has a 2020 copyright and played the 2021 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (I'm mildly surprised I didn't watch it), while One More Chance (which didn't play Boston during its US release a couple weeks ago) has apparently been waiting around since 2019. I've got no idea when Shadows would have shot - it's entirely possible that it was pre-covid - and, whoa, is it kind of nuts that some of this stuff is just rolling out now. I wonder if it's some really Hong Kong/China-specific stuff, between not wanting to have your release torpedoed by Covid or protest-related lockdowns, or if maybe there's some "we are going hard into an ambiguous ending, and no, we won't tack something else on, because that's the whole point" stuff going on.

That played Hong Kong almost five months ago, and just showed up here this weekend, probably because everything was underperforming, so there were a few screening times to fill, and, hey, Lost in the Stars packed 'em in, so why not bring in another Chinese movie? Well, it wasn't quite just me, but I'm also not entirely sure that the other folks behind me weren't theater-hopping.

Meanwhile, In Kendall Square, Landmark picked up They Cloned Tyrone, which got a week of theatrical release before hitting Netflix, and Landmark is the place used for that these days. I've kind of got no idea how much Netflix is promoting this one - I feel like I've seen a little more about it than the usual Netflix movie but not a whole lot more - but it feels kind of odd that this played Boston but Nimona didn't. I saw a ton of advertising for the latter, and it looks like it would have been a great big-screen release, but I'm guessing that it's kind of like the Chinese movies at Boston Common: There wasn't a spare screen for Nimona because its theatrical release week was when Asteroid City came out, but there is one this week.

Both are almost certainly out of here after Wednesday or Thursday, given that Oppenheimer and Barbie will be getting a bunch of early shows before officially opening on Friday. They're both kind of acquired tastes, lucky to have a moment in front of audiences, but won't necessarily be in theaters long enough to be acquired that way.


Shadows

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)

Screenwriters and critics both probably have a tendency to pay more attention to structure and fair play than the general audience does, which can lead to movies like Shadows with a sort of timidity and defensiveness to the final film: You can't really say that the unsatisfying ending didn't get seeded throughout the previous hour and a half, but just because that criticism can be deflected doesn't mean the whole thing actually works.

At the other end of the film, the audience is initially introduced to Chu Chung-Yung, a social worker who murders his family, calls the police, and then jumps out a window, before meeting Tsui Hiu-Ching (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan), a psychiatrist with a paranormal ability to enter another person's memory and interact with their subconscious, although that doesn't necessarily guarantee she'll get through to someone like abused wife Kloudia (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying). She also occasionally consults with the police, such as Ho Shun-Fatt (Philip Keung Hiu-Man), who has her examine Chu, who only jumped from a second story window. What she sees disturbs her, though, and leads her to push Fatt to investigate fellow therapist Yan Chung-Kuan (Tse Kwan-Ho), who seems to be encouraging his patients to commit violent acts.

A brief line later on offers a possible source of Ching's ability, but as with other parts of the film, it's just enough that you can't say writer Mani Man Pui-Hing and director Glenn Chan dropped this unreal element into the film without explanation, but also seems to keep it at arm's length that the film is still more crime than fantasy/horror while still enjoying some of those genres' tropes. It never actually goes down the road of suggesting that Dr. Yan may be some sort of demon, for instance, although his apparent puppet-master abilities seem rather extreme if he's just a skilled but sociopathic psychiatrist. If he's just a guy, though, what is gained by Ching having a superpower, as opposed to just being unusually insightful?

The answer is kind of obvious, of course; from the moment that the framed Rorschach blots in Ching's office start to move, it's an opportunity to tell the story with striking visuals rather than just having her explain what's going on with distancing psychobabble. Chan and his crew don't necessarily break a lot of new ground in how they depict the characters' subconsciouses - those scenes tend to be dark, sort of fading out of existence at the margins, and fairly monochromatic with even the colors of Ching's outfits muted - but it gets the job done. There are some interesting bits in the real world, but it often seems as though those scenes are why the movie exists, and the rest is mostly about getting from one to the other.

That's most evident in the police-centered scenes: Philip Keung knows the assignment - he is there to be the grounded, hands-on contrast to the egghead psychiatrists and supernatural material - and he handles that adroitly. Fatt is kind of a stock character but Keung is undeniably good at playing him. Tse Kwan-Ho plays his villain with a bit of relish, which unfortunately often puts Stephy Tang in the unlucky position of being sincere and well-meaning but too pragmatic to really be either man's polar opposite. She's quite decent, but this isn't the sort of movie that is going to make her as bright and optimistic as Yan is dark.

She might have had more to do if the filmmakers committed to it being her story earlier on, but so much of her story is things they touch upon just enough that they can't be accused of having things come out of nowhere without actually ever feeling important. There's a formal interview meant to contrast the way Drs. Tsui & Yan look at their patients, and hints that there is something dark in her past (dark enough for the police to have a file, at least), so it's there. On the other hand, so much time is spent on the sequences with her inside someone else's mind and the various serial and spree killers that Yan is connected to that, when the last act starts raising the question of whether Ching is capable the same sort of manipulation as Yan, it seems smaller than the rest of the movie and just not what it was about.

It means that the final scenes, which offer what should be a thrilling conclusion (and one that seems utterly unconcerned with passing through Mainland censorship), doesn't actually feel like the culmination of what has happened before. I could see how it fits together, in terms of screenwriting structure and checking off the boxes, but didn't feel it.


They Cloned Tyrone

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

They Cloned Tyrone has a weird rhythm and a weird vibe, but I'm not entirely sure that its eccentricity works. Not that it necessarily has to work for me, as I am probably not its target audience, but it leaves me wondering if some of the things I found kind of interesting may play as a direct hit for others; the film is just ambitious and eccentric enough to be intriguing.

It opens with Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer in The Glen who is soft-spoken but doesn't mess around with folks moving in on his territory. Seeing that pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) didn't pay up, he goes to collect just as Charles's top earner Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) is storming out, really intending to leave for Memphis this time. His competitors are waiting to ambush him as he leaves, and put roughly a dozen bullets in him. The next morning, he wakes up with no memory of this happening and sees once again that Charles is short, though a dead man coming to collect is understandably alarming to the pimp. Together with Yo-Yo, they follow a trail to a trap house - and then down a hidden elevator, which is when things get really weird.

Not ever having been part of a community like The Glen, I can't really speak to how well-targeted specific satirical gags might be; I sort of get the general thrust of a gag that posits boisterous church-going, spicy fried chicken, or an afternoon getting one's hair straightened at the salon as being actually a means of keeping Black people pacified, but it plays more as a darkly comic general concept as opposed to each example feeling specifically clever. As an outsider, director Juel Taylor and co-writer Tony Rettenmaier often seem to not really have a single metaphor in mind, but that's fair enough, in a way; actual places like this have a mess of exterior interference, two-way assimilation, and self-sabotage to deal with. It would dull the blade a bit even if the individual pieces were more clever than they seem.

On the other hand, the world Taylor and his team build is impressive in how they often seem to be heightened just enough to pull a number of things in: The Glen is a place where everyone still seems to be driving thirty-year-old cars and watching tube televisions but Yo-Yo can also talk about blockchain. The art department seems to have zeroed in on just how far forward a 1970s blaxploitation movie can be pulled forward and a modern sci-fi thriller can be pulled back and still seem like a real setting, rather than one outside of space and time. The secret world underneath The Glen is absurd and makes no sense, but it's also something that feels like it could be there regardless, its seeming-impossibility part of the camouflage. Taylor moves the audience through the world well, whether it's time for jokes or action.

(It is, however, awfully dark at times. I'm not usually one to complain about how dimly-lit a film is or how a theater is trying to lengthen a bulb's life, in part because I don't feel I have the knowledge to know where one ends and the other begins, but there were more than a few moments, like when the trio first enters the trap house, where I struggled to see what was going on, exacerbated by a lot of the film taking place at night. On top of that, Taylor is going for a specific style, processing the image to resemble a grainy B movie, and as nifty as that looks, I'm not sure if it helps or hurts.)

Nice cast, though, with John Boyega and Teyonah Parris especially playing to their strengths. Boyega's first big role in Attack the Block was the same sort of street tough discovering a nagging conscience and a knack for leadership and he still does that very well a decade later, especially fine in the home stretch where he's got to contend with big ideas while still not breaking free of his limited perspective. Tyeonah Parris, similarly, is really excellent at keeping how smart and ambitious her character is just under a brash, stupid-sounding exterior, and it's not surprising that she easily moves Yo-Yo from a broad comic-relief sexpot to an eccentric heroine. Jamie Foxx still feels enough like a movie star that Slick Charles doesn't necessarily need to be played as an aging pimp but he gets just enough wear underneath the clichés to make him interesting. Keifer Sutherland isn't around from the start, but hits the charismatic-piece-of-work villain sweet spot that the movie needs.

There's a whole lot to like about They Cloned Tyrone, even if it does stretch a bit past the ending and kind of key on a sloppy conspiracy. But what it does well, it does quite well indeed, enough to make me wonder if is as much a case of the film stumbling as much as the film not being made with me primarily in mind.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 14 July 2023 - 20 July 2023

This week's big release actually opened back on Tuesday/Wednesday, but there's still some interesting stuff coming out for the weekend.

• That would be Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1, which continues at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), the Lexington Venue, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Boston Common fills a screen with Black Ice, a documentary that looks at the racism and resistance that Black players have often faced in hockey.
  
  Mummies, which I don't think actually got a regular release around here, is the Saturday/Wednesday kids' matinee at Boston Common this week. National Lampoon's Vacation plays a 40th Anniversary show at South Bay and Assembly Row on Sunday and Wednesday. The first Terrifier plays Boston Common on Wednesday and Thursday after the sequel did surprisingly well last fall. Barbie has "Blowout Party" preview screenings at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards on Wednesday, with Theater Camp also having an early screening at Boston Common on Wednesday.
• Landmark Kendall Square has their first Netflix preview in a while with They Cloned Tyrone which features John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris chasing down a bizarre conspiracy.
  
  Also opening is The Miracle Club, in which three Dubliners hoping to travel to Lourdes 1967 find their plans upended by the return of a former friend who has spent the past 40 years in America. It plays Kendall Square, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common.
  
  Tuesday's Retro Replay summer movie at the Kendall is Ghostbusters, with Tenet playing Wednesday as the last Nolan film leading up to Oppenheimer.
• Two new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond on Friday. Baby is a Telugu-language romance starring Anand Deverakonda & Vaishnavi Chaitanya as neighbors who go to college and meet new potential partners, while Maaveeran is a Telugu-language action-comedy. Marathi comedy Baipan Bhari Deva has a second weekend on-screen Saturday and Sunday. Satyaprem Ki Katha also continues at Boston Common.
  
  Hong Kong thriller Shadows stars Stephy Tang as a forensic psychiatrist with psychic abilities who finds herself under suspicion while investigating a murder-suicide. It appears to have sat on a shelf for a couple years after playing festivals during 2021, but plays Boston Common this week, just a few months after finally opening in its native territory. Mainland Chinese hit Lost In the Stars also continues at Boston Common.
  
  After a couple preview screenings, anime Psycho-Pass: Providence, which slots in between a two seasons of the popular series, plays Boston Common and South Bay with both dubbed & subtitled showtimes.
• The Brattle Theatre plays De Humani Corporis Fabrica from Friday to Monday, an unusual documentary that "opens the human body to the cinema", attempting to demystify its anatomy but also find a sort of poetry in it. They also have a 35mm print of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend through Sunday, as a Bastille Day celebration.
  
  Monday's Warner Brothers Centennial double feature is two silents, with Ernst Lubitsch directing So This Is Paris and Clash of the Wolves featuring their first star, Rin-Tin-Tin; it doesn't look like there's live accompaniment scheduled. Tuesday features two with James Cagney - The Public Enemy on 35mm film and Blonde Crazy, both also co-starring Joan Blondell. On Wednesday, they celebrate Dede Allen's centennial with a double feature of two films she edited, The Hustler & Odds Against Tomorrow (the latter on 35mm), while Thursday has a (passes-required) free preview of Talk to Me.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre keeps the restoration of Midnight Cowboy around even if the documentary is gone.
  
  The weekend's midnights include the pretty fun The Final Girls on Friday and a 35mm print of the 2006 version of The Hills Have Eyes on Saturday. Monday evening has both a 35mm "Big Screen Classic" show of Heat with Emerson's Andre Puca doing a pre-film seminar and a "Panorama" presentation of 20 Days in Mariupol with filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov on hand for a Q&A, though the latter is apparently already sold out. And, wow, the Thursday "Rewind!" screening of Bad Boys II is up in the screening room (with after party at Parlour) to make room for night-before shows of next week's two big openings.
• The Somerville Theatre has a 35mm Midnight Special of WarGames on Saturday and an "Attack of the B-Movies" double feature of Frankenstein's Daughter & Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter on Tuesday (fun fact - the director of the latter also directed the back half of last week's silent double feature!). There are also two free Doc.Boston programs this weekend, presumably in the Micro, so only reserve seats if you're sure you can make it (though they also have several films streaming through next weekend).
  
  Their sister cinema in Arlington, The Capitol, has Canadian Chinese-language drama Silver Screen Dreams on Sunday evening, with the cast on-hand for a Q&A afterward.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has the last weekend of their French Film Festival (yeah, I missed the start; this is what happens when you don't program film every week!), with Scarlet and Night of the 12th on Friday, Masquerade on Saturday, and then Pacifiction and Tori and Lokita on Sunday - the latter being the latest from Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
• The "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" selections at The Harvard Film Archive, all on 35mm film, are silent featurette "Woman of Tokyo" (Friday w/ Martin Marks on piano), Tokyo Chorus (Friday w/ Marks), The Only Son (Saturday), There Was a Father (Saturday), Floating Weeds (Sunday), An Inn in Tokyo (Sunday w/ Robert Humphreville on piano), and Late Autumn (Monday).
• The West Newton Cinema adds Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club (no show Thursday) to Past LIves, Indiana Jones,Asteroid City, You Hurt My Feelings (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday), Super Mario Brothers (Sunday matinee), and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (no show Friday). Closed Monday.
  
  The Lexington Venue has Mission: Impossible and The Miracle Club all week (except Monday, when the theater is closed).
  
  The Luna Theater has Lynch/Oz on Friday and Saturday, The League on Saturday, The Wicker Man on Saturday and Sunday, Midsommar on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem opens Mission: Impossible and the restored The Wicker Man alongside Indiana Jones, Past Lives, and Joy Ride through Monday. The Warriors plays a late show Friday, and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday.
• The Museum of Science is already having shows sell out for their three weekends of Oppenheimer on the dome. Similarly, The New England Aquarium is advertising a week of Jaws screenings on the giant screen the last week of July.
• It's the first really full week of outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films, including some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Boynton Yards in Somerville Friday, Minions: The Rise of Gru at the Hatch Shell Friday, Matilda (non-musical, I presume) at the Prudential on Saturday, Midnight in Paris at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, and Vivo at Lincoln Park in Somerville on Thursday.

Might (finally) check out the place in Watertown for Mission: Impossible this weekend, though I'll see it somewhere; will also see Shadows and They Cloned Tyrone, and am penciling in the Cagney/Blondell double feature on Tuesday. Maybe something else, but Thursday is time to fly north for Fantasia, when this blog really gets hopping and I run myself ragged for three weeks of vacation!

Film Rolls, Round 20: Once a Thief and Romancing in Thin Air

The legitimacy of both these rolls is kind of stretched. I'll admit that. Sometimes you've got to make weird calls on the gameboard.

Like, right here, Mookie rolls a 2, which lands him on Once a Thief. I have seen Once a Thief, although at various points I tell myself that maybe I fell asleep while it played at the Brattle, or I saw the American series pilot that Woo also directed, but, c'mon, I just put it in with all the unwatched Woos I imported and now Mookie's kind of got a ringer.

Then Bruce rolls an 8, and how far should that get him into the Johnnie To section? I ordered all the PTU: Police Tactical Unit movies during one spree, but it would be weird to not watch them in order, and if someone lands in the middle, do I just watch up to that one? I'm opting to treat them as a box set, which means that 8 is more like a 13 or something and gets Bruce to Romancing in Thin Air.

My game, my rules. Where's it get us?

Chung hang sei hoi (Once a Thief '91)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Go long enough between viewings for Once a Thief and you may suspect that you've never watched it before, because there are almost guaranteed to be moments when it is, quite simply, nothing like the movie you think you remember. And yet, while it's not unusual for a Hong Kong movie to have stylistic shifts, especially coming from John Woo, it seldom works quite as well as here. By the end of the movie, Woo has made this into a completely different sort of movie, but it doesn't really seem screwy until the very end.

It starts as a light caper, with Joe (Chow Yun-Fat), Jim (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), and Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) a crew of art thieves in Europe, pulling impressive heists ever since they were found as orphans in the streets of Hong Kong. Joe and Cherie are a couple, though Jim obviously carries a torch for the lovely Cherie. But when a heist goes wrong, Jim and Cherie return to Asia and draw closer, with things taking a turn for the melodramatic when a wheelchair-using Jim reappears, and it becomes clear that the fun "gentleman thieves" portion of their lives may soon come to an end, and not in the retirement Cherie desires.

Dang, but Leslie Cheung was a movie star, wasn't he? Chow Yun-Fat is billed first, and at this point in their careers Woo and Chow know that that they'll be mentioned together in the history of Hong Kong cinema, so they kind of play how the audience knows that up; Woo sets Chow up to shine in a way that's almost blinding, such that when he gets taken off the board for a while, the audience can feel his absence. But never fear, Cheung is an A-list romantic lead himself, and he charms the audience just as much as his Jim does Cherie. In hindsight (or even at-the-time-sight), his character is just about as believably straight as the actor is, but it doesn't particularly matter, because you still believe his leading lady has this pure romantic love for him and vice versa.

It holds the movie in place for a bit in the middle, between the joyful adventure of the European beginning - which features a mobile heist that reminds one that Woo and his team, including action choreographer Philip Kwok Chung-Fung and stunt driver Remy Julienne, are just as adroit with sleek staging as with bullet-ballet overkill - and a finale where enough bullets are flying to make it clear that this crew is not to be betrayed. The action is fantastic, of course, but there were a lot of people in Hong Kong who could work with the world's top technicians and use a lot of squibs; what makes this film great is that the exceptionally-staged violence tracks the emotion and mood so well. It's all fun, but by the end, it's a lot to the point where one maybe looks a bit askance.

Which isn't to say John Woo is making a film about how, eventually, the underworld consumes and corrupts even this sort of noble criminal; even in the last act, the film is often too goofy and the filmmakers to fond of their familiar tropes to become more than relatively lightweight entertainment. But there's something there, even if Woo decides not to bring all of it to the foreground, and the central core of Chow, Cheung, and Chung are folks who know how to keep a film like this floating.

Gao hai ba zhi lian II (Romancing in Thin Air)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's a "II" in the Chinese title for Romancing in Thin Air, and the film opens with what feels like a quick recap of a previous film about the movie stars played by Louis Koo and Gao Yuan-Yuan, but I'll be damned if I can find any sign of such a thing existing. Are Johnny To, Wai Ka-Fai, and company doing something meta here, maybe as a tie-in with the film-within-a-film stuff? Did it cause folks in Hong Kong some confusion during its initial release? I should look that up, but I kind of don't want to know until I'm finished here.

Not that it really matters, I suppose, aside from serving as a signal that there's a lot of "wait, what?" to a movie that otherwise plays as a nice, low-key romance. That's kind of how Johnnie To & Wai Ka-Fai collaborations work sometimes, I guess: To is as good at turning a script into a movie as anybody, while Wai comes up with bold stories, and they seldom work against each other but don't always achieve synergy, either.

So here, Louis Koo Tin-Lok is Michael Liu Baiqian, a much beloved actor about to tie the knot with frequent co-star Ding Yuanyuan (Gao), right up until her first love resurfaces on the day of their wedding. Michael seems to vanish into, as they say, thin air, somewhat literally: He surfaces, drunk, at a mountain hotel run by Sue (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man) in the absence of her missing husband Tian (Li Guangjie). It should be closed for the season, if not completely, but Sue is certain her husband will return and will need everything in place when he does, despite it being almost certain that he has died of exposure years ago.

I have mentioned before that it's kind of intimidating just how good To, someone best known in the West for his gangster pictures and action, is at romance. Romancing in Thin Air is kind of standard fare in its way - Sue is going to help Michael dry out, he will prove more than just some callow celebrity, and odds are good that Michael's management will track him down and Tian's fate will be revealed just at the moment when it will most test the bond that the pair have found. This may be formulaic, but that's fine; it's a formula that folks can relate to despite the heightened circumstances, and To's got Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng. Koo being cast as a movie star is obvious but works due in part to its obviousness; Louis Koo with two day's growth of beard and shaggy hair still looks like a "disheveled" movie star. Cheng, even before we see flashbacks, does nice work making sure that the audience has some idea of how Sue has adopted this place, as opposed to being a local to be either awed or unimpressed by Michael.

The thing about Michael being a movie star is not just that there are higher stakes, though - fame and art has a specific way of twisting the story, and it makes the last stretch of the film kind of fascinating in how it connects to the start: Being with someone like Michael means that Sue's story is no longer her own - not just because there are now fans who are going to be all up in their business, but because, for an artist, everything is fodder for their art. Michael may intend to respect that, but, inevitably, not only will the world at large have an investment in Sue and Michael, but Sue and Tian's love story will become something else as well. Indeed, though the film seems to reference another film from the viewer's world that does not exist, it is also, in a way, a sequel to its own film within a film, an ouroborus of narrative that, while it never finishes devouring itself, perhaps hints at the danger of the arts always looking inward.

Or, perhaps, it's just a charming romantic drama from playful filmmakers. Either way, it's a reminder that To is more than crime and simple stories can be satisfying and have room for ornamentation.


A strong pairing of favorite filmmakers, leading to things getting a little tighter:

Mookie: 69 ½ stars
Bruce: 70 stars

Ah, looking at my camera roll, I see this was the night the building's pipes burst. Good times! (Not actually good times)

Monday Double Feature: The League and Lost in the Stars

An odd case where I worked backward in building a double feature because, initially, Lost in the Stars was only playing shows 9:30pm and later with the last show on Monday as Mission: Impossible grabs all the screens on Tuesday, and as you might expect considering that this is apparently the biggest movie of the summer in China, the folks next door in Chinatown bought up tickets even before i knew it was playing, so that last show on Monday was my best shot at a decent seat.

After I did that, AMC put on more shows (and it's playing for a second week), but I wound up sticking with my reservation, although that meant finding something earlier because it can be a pain to pull myself out of the apartment at 9pm. Factor in AMC's 20 minutes of trailers and how a lot of movies are well over two hours these days, and it can be tough to make a twin bill work.

Maybe not surprisingly, it was looking like I was going to be on my own for The League, in part because of its weird booking strategy: Magnolia Pictures apparently booked with AMC directly for three weekdays, which is a Fathom-like booking but doesn't get it into the Fathom block of previews, and I don't think I saw a trailer before any films. The most advertising I saw online was tweets about it playing AMCs in Chicago. Some other folks did show up, all of us, I think, at least middle aged, and I don't know that I saw any folks of color either, though I wasn't looking behind me from my third-row seat.

On the other hand, Lost in the Stars was fairly busy, already pretty packed when I arrived and then filling up behind me.

And, after that, a good twenty-minute wait for the Green Line Extension heading home, arriving there at 1am with a 9am conference call scheduled the next day, which is a big part of why I don't do a lot of double features that aren't built as such. Who goes to those 10:45pm shows at an AMC with how early the T stops running?


The League '23

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (special engagement, DCP)

As documentaries that probably don't tell their intended audience a whole lot that they weren't already aware of, The League at least had the benefit of being about something fun and only having to compact thirty or so years into a feature length presentation. It is, as I tend to say about a lot of these docs, Negro Leagues 101, but as someone who could use that, I certainly found my curiosity piqued.

Those 30 years are roughly the length of time between World War I and Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Director Sam Pollard doesn't exactly present it as the story of Black businessmen who owned the teams and shaped the leagues, from "Rube" Foster, whose Chicago Giants were the lynchpin of the original Black National League, to rival owners in Pittsburgh, to Effa Manley in New Jersey, who saw clearly that the white leagues signing their players without compensation would lead to the Negro Leagues' collapse. There's plenty of time spent on the famous players - one will hear the stories of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson - but as the story of the leagues, the film focuses on the people who made things happen, directly.

The timing of it was lucky for me, arriving during the MLB All-Star break when there's relatively little actual baseball, leaving the major papers ceasing their daily sports coverage as one of the bigger stories in sports, because a major theme is that sports are important to a community, in both tangible and emotional ways. There's sentimentality here, but also nuts and bolts of how sports teams can be a central part of a community, even when they are not one of the most visible, accessible pictures of Black excellence. The filmmakers are good at recognizing how they're intertwined without diminishing either.

It's well put together, too, making good use of the names the audience is likely to know but also giving plenty of time to those they might not, and doing a fair job of mixing recreation, animation, and plenty of archival material together so that it's seldom overdone, or static (there's a danger of feeling like you're rehashing Ken Burns in substance and style here that is mostly avoided) Maybe a little too smooth at times; the transition from grainy home movies to something sharper can supply a bit of excitement at the filmmakers perhaps finding some great archival material that is probably actually a recreation, with the same happening on voice-overs one may presume are from audio interviews but are actually actors narrating, especially when there are on-screen titles for the speaker. It's not exactly fraudulent, but it does raise the question of whether one is seeing the thing raw or someone's interpretation. That comes right down to one of the central threads; the film is largely based upon the writings of former umpire Bob Motley, but it's not clear when one is hearing his voice, or if one ever is.

A bit of a shame, that, as there's something especially apt about having one of the League's umpires being a primary point of view - an ump is by nature both an insider and expected to call a fair game, compared to players or executives who may have agendas. It's the same story, in many ways, but told well and down the middle.


Xiao shi de ta (Lost in the Stars)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)

Chen Sicheng of Detective Chinatown fame knows his mysteries, so it's not exactly surprising that he would be part of adapting a 50-year-old French stage thriller into a modern Chinese movie, though others direct and contribute to the script. His name being attached to the story's solid hook certainly got my attention, and it has been a massive summer hit in China; if you're looking for a nifty little thriller as a massive blockbuster, you could do a lot worse while it's playing North America for a couple weeks.

The film opens with He Fei (Zhu Yilong) bursting into a police station on Bankal Island (a resort implied but never stated to be in Thailand), in a panic because his wife Li Muzi (Kay Huang Ziqi) has been missing for 15 days, but with no evidence of foul play, the police can't help him, though an ethnically Chinese officer, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), offers to help. But when He Fei wakes up the next morning, there's a woman in his bed (Janice Man Wing-San) who claims to be Li Muzi, and she's got the passport, photos, etc. to support the assertion. With just days before his visa expires, He Fei hires lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni) to help him get to the bottom of this.

Based on a play by Robert Thomas, "Trap for a Lonely Man", that has been adapted for television and film at least ten times in nearly as many languages, and I'm tempted to dig up one of the English-language versions to see if it was a more leisurely, chatty thing than this occasionally frantic production with room for a chase or two, although one way to make it work as a movie is to have He Fei and Chen Man literally running down every bit of evidence. I'm not sure that the film ever entirely recovers from introducing itself with a great premise for a psychological thriller and then bounding ahead at full speed rather than giving the ambiguities time to fester in the audience's collective mind, though; it's the sort of mystery where mentioning a potential twist seems to eliminate it as a possibility, and folks in the audience are probably already wondering whether this is more like Gaslight, The Game, or something else well before the filmmakers are ready to spring a surprise.

I suspect that, even as the Chinese filmmakers modernized and made the story their own, the core of it is something that could easily attract actors, with Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni having a pair of fun opposites to play, especially since Zhu has a chance to play the gaslit husband as an everyman rightfully panicked by all these things happening to him that make no sense, with Ni countering as the cool lawyer who is believably good at everything the story needs her to do, trusting that this sort of chemistry doesn't require a sexual or romantic component. Still, Janice Man's "impostor" probably channels the film's exact gonzo energy best; whether she's the con artist He Fei thinks she is or is having her actions twisted by his delusions, she unbalances every scene she's in, in precisely the right way (right down to how just a little sexiness can feel quite dangerous to someone concerned with reasoning out a puzzle).

Chen, co-writers Gu Shuyi & Yin Yixiong, and directors Cui Rui & Liu Xiang could maybe stand to find more ways to use Ni Ni, both to add a little tension to having to operate in plain sight and to make a movie that doesn't really spend much time questioning He Fei's point of view a bit more ambiguous. Still, you can see why this has been a massive hit in China, and thus one of the biggest movies of the summer worldwide. It's slick and fast-paced, and if the finale may seem like a lot to swallow, making one believe that this is possible is only half of what a thriller has to do along with making it click emotionally, and the pieces fall into place nicely, right down to a scene that has me think that made me smile at how properly cowardly it was. It's also beautiful in spots, with Cui, Liu, and company teasing the audience with mirrors and lighthouses, and eventually coming up with a nifty demonstration of how how to take transformative inspiration from something like "Starry Night", compared to the "immersive Van Gogh" exhibits.

I'm tempted to give it a second look sometime when I know to expect magic rather than moody, on top of seeing how else it has been adapted. It's a mystery just good enough to be worth seeing how many clues were planted that one missed without becoming too ponderous.

Film Rolls, Round 19: Plain Jane to the Rescue and Heroes Shed No Tears

Do I take notice when some older John Woo movie has been reissued in Hong Kong (or elsewhere) and pick up a copy? Yes, obviously, enough that I carved out a small section for him on the game board.

Mookie gets in there by rolling a three and lands on Plain Jane to the Rescue, which feels like a genuine oddity when looked at from the other end of John Woo's career but was not particularly unusual for the start.

Bruce rolls a ten, which would also have landed him on Plane Jane, except that you have to pull the case off of the shelf in order to watch the movie inside, so that puts him on the next John Woo film, Heroes Shed No Tears, which sounds like a much more typically John Woo title, doesn't it?

So, that gets them at the same spot on the board for the first time since they started - how close will their scores get?

Ba cai Lin Ya Zhen (Plain Jane to the Rescue)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24-25 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I had no idea what to expect going into this, and was semi-shocked to see that the first chunk was broad slapstick, and I chuckled to myself that even though it's pretty logical that a guy as good at action as Woo would also do that sort of thing, this must be the closest thing Woo has done to silent comedy. Then, while opening IMDB to write this, I would discover Laughing Times. Now I'm really curious about Woo's wacky slapstick comedy period!

"Plain Jane", in this case, is Jenny Lam Ah-Chun (Josephine Siao Fong-Gong), who bounces through jobs in highway repair, film sets, and factories before somehow landing one teaching the uncouth father of corporate raider type Mr. Sha (Charlie Cho Cha-Lee) how to behave properly in public. She enlists the help of her boyfriend Tseng Fei Fang (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying), although they sort of like the disreputable old man a lot more. It also allows them to discover that Sha is looking to trick his father (Michael Lee Ming-Yeung) into signing over some property he needs for the sort of mass-displacing real estate development that sort of guy is always working on.

It's an odd duck of a film, the third "Plain Jane"/"Lin Ya Zhen"/"Lam Ah Chun" (depending what language you're speaking) film that star Josephine Siao Fong-Fong did, all with different writers and directors, and I'm genuinely curious just how much the tone varies between them. It's funny stuff that lands right between Hong Kong-specific and something that applies more broadly. It occasionally feels like Siao had a notebook full of Plain Jane gags and Woo's job was to build a movie around them,which is fine. It's what the silent comics did, after all, and Woo and co-writer Lau Chun-wah manage to build it from a collection of random-seeming gags to a finale that is no less chaotic but does sort of seem like the finish of a thing.

Hong Kong comedy - particularly from this period - can be tremendously broad even when not riffing on silent slapstick, but Josephine Siao finds the right note to make Jenny both a likable everywoman and a chaos magnet, the glue that keeps the episodic movie going and grounds it through the weirdness. She's got fun chemistry with Ricky Hui despite the fact that Woo sets them up as decidedly not lovey-dovey or bantering; they're a comfortable pair who work as a good team. Michael Lee Ming-Yeung and Charlie Cho Cha-Lee are both bigger-than-life as father-and-son Sha while still able to fit into a story, while a bunch of others nail their smaller rolls, with, Roman Tam, Maggie Li Lin-Lin, and Chan Sing doing the nifty trick of playing themselves and having it work even if you'd never heard of them.

Siao, by the way, seems pretty fascinating, a child star who worked at an insane clip until she was 23 (though many were two-or-three-part movies), went to college in America, came back to have a more reasonably-paced career until she was about 50, then retired to work as a child psychologist, though she is apparently still well-respected and liked within the entertainment industry. For all that this is something of a signature role, it's likely not representative of her career, but I hope more of her work winds up on my shelf - and the same goes for more John Woo slapstick comedies.

Ying xiong wu lei (Heroes Shed No Tears)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

This is the next film John Woo made after Plain Jane to the Rescue, and it sure feels a lot more like a John Woo movie than that - operatic action punctuating a story built to move to the next bit with a relative minimum of fuss. It's also raw and such a frequently nasty mess that it stayed on one of Golden Harvest's shelves for a number of years until Woo's star had ascended to the point where having an extra film of his to release was an asset.

It follows a pack of mercenaries led by Chan Chung (Eddy Ko Hung), operating out of Thailand with their eyes on drug dealers and others operating out of the golden triangle, and they're but one mission away from obtaining American green cards. But, of course, everything goes completely sideways, as they wind up on the wrong side of a corrupt colonel in the Vietnamese army (Lam Ching-Ying) and saddled with both a European journalist (Cecile Le Bailly), while Chan's family is fleeing with them.

Woo had been directing movies for ten years by the time he made this, but this was the first that was full of the kind of gunplay and grandiose violence he would become known for, and as such it still feels like something of a learning experience. The action is staged well and comes at a rapid pace, with a wildness to it that keeps the movie exciting - anything can happen and small things will frequently explode into something enormous. Woo brings the staging chops he'd developed over a decade of martial-arts movies and slapstick comedy, and even if he's not quite marrying the action to emotional beats yet, he knows how to build an action scene.

That's fun for a while, but soon he's thrown so much at the audience that, even with the film only being about an hour and a half long, he's got nowhere to go. There's some flab in the center as the crew stops in a village to rest and get into mischief and fights, and a point where the edgy excitement of nobody being safe tips into sadism because, once you've started killing characters off but aren't going to stop to react to that, you've got to kill them in crueler, gorier ways, and more at a time.

And on top of that, the film has a kid who winds up kind of obnoxious in two equal and opposite ways, and when a film has one wondering with some frustration how, with all those bullets flying, one hasn't caught the pre-teen, it can quickly cease being entertaining or exciting violence.


Mookie makes up a little ground, and I almost want to fiddle with the ratings a bit to have him close a little more:

Mookie: 66 ¼ stars
Bruce: 67 stars

So tied in terms of distance from the end that I temporarily had to move the Funko thing separating the John Woo and Jonnie To sections so that they could both stand in the same place!

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 July 2023 - 13 July 2023

I note, amused, that an event sponsored by the still-not-open Alamo Drafthouse off their site has been postponed because of "building issues". Which is just a riot, because, as I've mentioned before, we could really use those extra screens right now, because AMC was really squeezing a Chinese import until it nearly sold out..

• Joy Ride, in which a group of Chinese-American friends go to China to find one's birth mother and get into hijinks, opens at Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  There's also Insidious: The Red Door, with star Patrick Wilson directing the latest entry in the franchise, in which bad things happen because his character has hypnotically suppressed the events of previous films but those memories are starting to return. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  A number of Disney hits will be returning to theaters to celebrate the company's 100th anniversary, with the first - Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl at Boston Common this week.
  
  Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 opens on Wednesday (with early shows Tuesday) at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), the Lexington Venue, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill. There are also "See It First" screenings on Sunday (Boston Common, Assembly Row).and "Early Access" screenings on Monday (Jordan's in Imax, South Bay in Dolby Cinema, Assembly Row in Dolby Cinema).
  
  Trolls: World Tour plays matinees at Boston Common on Saturday. Concert film Odesza: The Last Goodbye Cinematic Experience plays Boston Common, Kendall Square Friday night. There are 50th Anniversary shows of another concert film, David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders from Mars, at Boston Common and Kendall Square on Sunday and Boston Common on Monday. Negro Leauge documentary The League plays at Boston Common on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which is apparently not so much a "making-of" documentary as one that examines the time, place, people, and film itself more than the process. Director Nancy Buirski will be on hand for a Q&A for the 4pm show on Sunday, and the theater will also have late-evening shows of the new restoration of Midnight Cowboy all week.
  
  Also opening at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, West Newton, and Boston Common is The Lesson, featuring Richard E. Grant as a legendary author, Julie Delpy as his wife, and Daryl McCormack as a new assistant who is in for more than he bargained for.
  
  Midnights at the Coolidge feature I Know What You Did Last Summer on Friday and the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Saturday, both on 35mm. Samurai Summer continues with a marathon of "The Samurai Trilogy" (Musashi Miyamoto, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, and Duel at Ganryu Island, all directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Toshiro Mifune) in the screening room, plus 35mm prints of Kwaidan on Tuesday and Kill! on Wednesday. Monday's BIg Screen Classic is The Birdcage, and Thursday's is The Muppet Movie, the latter on 35mm film and with a seminar from Boston Globe film critic Odie Henderson.
• Holocaust drama Persian Lessons, in which a concentration camp prisoner who owns a Persian book attempts to survive by teaching his jailor Farsi despite not actually knowing the language, opens at Landmark Kendall Square. It was Belarus's Oscar submission back in 2021, but disqualified because there weren't enough Belarussians in the cast & crew, and has just made its way to North American theaters.
  
  Tuesday Retro Replays at the Kendall during July is a series of summer movie classics, starting with Jaws this week. Wednesday's Christopher Nolan film is Interstellar.
• Plenty of new Indian films at Apple Fresh Pond on Friday. Neeyat stars Vidya Balan as a sleuth called upon to solve a murder on the estate of an exiled billionaire (Ram Kapoor) and plays in Hindi. 7:11pm is a Telugu sci-fi flick where present-day skullduggery and time travelers from the future collide, 18+ (aka "Journey of Love") is a Malayalam-language romantic comedy, and Rangabali a Telugu-language one. Baipan Bhari Deva, a Marathi comedy about six estranged sisters coming together for a competition, plays Saturday and Sunday. All but Neeyat and held-over Telugu comedy Samajavaragamana clear out on Tuesday to make room for Mission: Impossible. Satyaprem Ki Katha also continues at Boston Common.
  
  The top movie in China so far this summer, Lost In the Stars, a thriller in which Zhu Yilong plays a man whose wife disappears on vacation only to have an apparent impostor claim her identity. It also stars Ni Ni, Janice Man Wing-San, and Du Jiang. It opens at Boston Common with what was originally limited showtimes, although they have added more when the others more or less sold out by Thursday night. If you can make it to the Liberty Tree Mall, they also have matinees of Chinese film Love Never Ends through Monday (shame it's such a tiny release; I've liked a couple of filmmaker Han Yan's previous movies).
  
  There are two Ghibli films showing at Boston Common this week - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Sunday (dubbed) & Tuesday (subtitled) and Castle in the Sky on Monday (dubbed) & Wednesday. Sci-fi anime Psycho-Pass: Providence plays Boston Common and South Bay Tuesday (dubbed) & Thursday (subtitled).
• With the Fourth coming, The Brattle Theatre has Lynch/Oz, the latest movie-nerd deep dive from Alexandre O. Philippe, through Monday, this one, as you might guess from the title, exploring the influence that The Wizard of Oz has had on David Lynch. If you want examples, the Brattle will also be showing Wild at Heart (Friday/Saturday), The Wizard of Oz (35mm Saturday/Sunday/Monday), and Mulholland Drive (35mm Sunday/Monday).
  
  On Tuesday, they start the "vertical" summer calendar with the first "Warner Brothers Centennial: The Golden Years" show, a 35mm print of The Adventures of Robin Hood. One Wednesday they team with IFFBoston & The Roxbury International Film Festival for a free-with-pass preview of Earth Mama, while Thursday is the 20th annual Trailer Treats program, almost two hours of trailers, shorts, and music videos on 35mm film from the Brattle's collection.
• The Somerville Theatre has a new 4K restoration of Godard's Contempt playing (mostly) in the big room with the fancy projector.
  
  They also have a (late) Canada Day "Silents, Please!" double feature on Sunday, with Jeff Rapsis accompanying Mantrap & The Canadian, both on 35mm film.
• The Museum of Science brings "Serengeti" back into the Omnimax rotation along with "Jane Goodall - Reasons for Hope" and "Everest". Tickets are also on sale for Oppenheimer on the dome for the Fridays & Saturdays of its first three weekends of release.
• The Harvard Film Archive has plenty more "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro"; this week's presentations are Floating Weeds (Friday, preceded by 16mm short "The Lion Dance"), Good Morning (Saturday/Monday), Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Saturday), Equinox Flower (Sunday), and That Night's Wife (Sunday). All are on 35mm film; Thet Night's Wife, a silent, has Martin Marks accompanying on piano. They also have several ceramics made for Ozu's movies on display in the office, with small groups allowed to take a closer look before and after the films upon request.
• The West Newton Cinema opens Tiger Within, a story of connection between a homeless teen and a Holocaust survivor (Ed Asner), The Lesson, and Past LIves. They also hold over Hannah Ha Ha (no show Wednesday), Indiana Jones, Ruby Gillman, Asteroid City, You Hurt My Feelings (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday), Super Mario Brothers (Saturday matinee), and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (no show Friday). Closed Monday.
  
  The Lexington Venue hasAsteroid City through Sunday, with Past Lives playing those days plus Wednesday and Thursday, Mission: Impossible opens Wednesday.
  
  The Luna Theater has Sanctuary on Friday and Saturday, Grease Saturday and Sunday, a Weirdo Wednesday show, and Night of the Living Dead on Thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has Indiana Jones, Past Lives, Asteroid City, and Joy Ride through Monday. There are "Summer Rewind" shows of Dazed and Confused on Saturday & Sunday afternoons.
• Outdoor screenings per Joe's Free Films include Dirty Dancing at Boston Landing on Friday & Wednesday, Top Gun: Maverick at the Prudential on Sunday, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (on 35mm film) on the Greenway in association with the Coolidge's "Science on Screen" program Wednesday, and Minions: The Rise of Gru in Somerville's Lincoln Park on Thursday.

Planning on Joy Ride, The Lesson, and Lost in the Stars; possibly The League, Mission: Impossible, and/or Robin Hood. Neeyat looks like it might be my sort of thing, but I'm not sure I can expect English subtitles even on Bollywood movies these days.