Maybe Not Directly Related But...: Cloudy Mountain and The Rescue '21

I don't know to what extent Cloudy Mountain was inspired by the Thai cave rescue of 2018; maybe not at all, but when you see these two a week apart, figure how long a narrative feature with this amount of effects takes to produce, and note that there were Chinese forces helping in Thailand that were only fleetingly mentioned in coverage, and note that Cloudy Mountain does have a former elite soldier trying to lead folks trapped in a cave to safety (among a lot of other stuff).

That character is a railway soldier, not capitalized in the subtitles although it kind of feels that way, especially after seeing a trailer before the movie for another actually named "Railway Soldiers", making me wonder if this is a thing that China is pushing particularly hard right now, certainly another odd "multiple movies about the same thing coming out at once" situation. One sort of odd thing was how Cloudy Mountain had an over-the-credits epilogue about the heroism of railway soldiers and how they pulled China together and their successors are doing the same thing with high-speed rail, including notes about how many of these people died during the construction. On the one hand, did the filmmakers feel like they didn't have quite enough propaganda to pass the censorship board, especially since there was a subplot about management unreasonably expecting this massive engineering done on time no matter what which would absolutely be about greedy businessmen rather than government if the film were made in the West. Even taking that into account, "hundreds of people died" is a weird flex; if communism is all about the workers, doesn't that include worker safety?

That sort of thing makes The Rescue a nice contrast; its filmmakers studiously avoid almost every opportunity for hero worship in order to just tell the story. I suspect that it helps that they've done enough mountaineering documentaries (including ones where co-director Jimmy Chin is a subject) to be realistic about how these folks are wired, and that "daring" and "heroic" aren't the same, to the point where they in some cases are very careful how it's presented. They repeat how the plan to use general anesthetic is desperate several times, to the point where you can feel them hammering on the nail but… Well, I guess we're back to safety here, right? Film especially can fall victim to the human desire to see something have a clever, easily-digested solution, but Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi understand danger well enough to say, no, we're not doing that.

In a way, that focus on safety makes it an interesting contrast with their last picture, Free Solo, where they notably shot the climbing sequence of the title from something like a kilometer away so that their subject wouldn't feel the pressure of the cameras on him. Thinking about how they must have shot the reenactment scenes in The Rescue, it must have been the opposite: Cameras packed into incredibly tight spaces, trying to get good footage of something just a couple feet away, probably a whole bunch of people the audience can't see just off-screen just in case something turned dangerous.

Anyway, both of these have left local theaters but are not yet available on streaming, although if you go looking you can get a Chinese patriotic adventure named "The Rescue" on Prime Video, which, well, isn't the same thing, but is kind of in the same neighborhood. They are both pretty darn good if you enjoy watching people faced with a dangerous crisis and immediately pulling together to work the problem, which is incredibly cathartic after the past year or two.

Feng Bao (Cloudy Mountain)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

China's National Day generally brings a spate of patriotic behemoths to the box office, star-studded flag-waving blockbusters like this year's The Battle at Lake Changjin and My Country, My Parents. Cloudy Mountain as a movie is kind of the opening act for that - a somewhat lower budget and less star power, maybe not pushing so hard, but trying to be the same sort of crowd-pleaser. It's a solidly and sometimes surprisingly successful sort of minor disaster movie, not likely to make best-of lists but managing to deliver what it promises.

Yudang Mountain is the landmark in question, located in southwestern China near the town of Yunjiang; a 20-year project to build a tunnel for high-speed rail nearing completion. Conscientious director of blasting Hong Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) and scientist Ding Yajun (Chen Shu), also his girlfriend, are still performing a full brace of tests because the terrain is made of unpredictable karst, and what looked like a simple operation can suddenly turn dangerous. He's also making a bit of effort to avoid his demanding father Yunbing (Huang Zhi-Zhong), a former railway soldier, even going off to check some sensors while Yajun picks him up. That's when everything literally starts to come apart, with cave-ins, sinkholes, and rockslides, and project manager Lu Xiaojin (Jiao Junyan) trying to aid rescue workers while assuring her superiors that the tunnel is not in any danger.

Director Jun Li and co-writer Song Sha don't particularly break new ground here, but there's a lot to be said for hitting the ground running and serving up the good stuff. The visual effects in this movie may not be quite top-tier, but they're plenty effective, and they don't spend much time making the audience wait for the action. Jun and his crew shoot energetically with China's many large-screen and 3D theaters in mind, swooping through the air when the action is in the mountains and building boxes with the occasional terrifying drop or chimney while crawling through caves. They follow the typical disaster movie template from initial warning to major event to needing to rescue the trapped while also planning a large-scale mission to prevent something worse, with family issues and bureaucratic interference along the way. The cast appears to be people who Chinese audiences would find familiar faces from television, with Zhu Yilong and Chen Shu an appealing young couple while Huang Zhi-Zhong and Jiao Junyan certainly feel like folks who have played lots of demanding fathers and stern-but-honest middle managers.

It gets a little messy when the disasters aren't front and center, in large part because the filmmakers don't really seem to have an idea of how to come to a climax; lots of moments of transition and resolution happen offscreen, denying the audience moments of satisfaction (whether schmaltzy or stoic) and a clean pivot to the next stage. Along those lines, there's a weird bit where the thinly-sketched folks that the Hongs are trying to rescue just hang back while they go through their family dreams and the audience can't help but notice the implication that they're not as important, and it's not the only time that happens. The actual finale has a hard time juggling the impulses for heroic self-sacrifice and unlikely victories. It often feels like the producers hired folks who are good with the effects and worried less about the rest.

And, of course, the film eventually starts aggressively checking off the "what the film board wants Chinese films to be" boxes; one can't help but notice that the inspiring speech includes "westerners do that, but we do this" when there aren't any non-Chinese people in the movie. And yet, the drive to "reflect socialist values" also winds up being one of the film's strengths: There is something bizarrely soothing about this frenetic movie - just watching people reflexively and competently pull together and help out when faced with an unexpected crisis feels ridiculously good.

Cloudy Mountain is rough in a lot of places, but it's a capable big spectacle that was probably a lot of fun in Imax/3D/D-box, though it doesn't get that sort of release in North America. For two hours of bad stuff happening and good people getting stuff done, though, it's pretty satisfying.

Also at eFilmCritic

The Rescue '21

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2021 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #4 (first-run, digital)

As I mentioned in the recent review of a fictional film, there is very little more satisfying than watching very competent people just get down to doing good with their skills, and that's what The Rescue is in more or less undiluted form. The audience knows the story of how a boy's soccer team was rescued from a cave in Thailand, at least during the film's initial release three years after the event, so the filmmakers just get down to fleshing it out with detail without getting overly technical.

If you're reading this review or seeing the film later, the Tham Luang cave rescue was quite a big deal in mid-2018 - a dozen members of a local soccer team and their coach failed to come home on 23 June, but their bikes were found outside a cave that they often spent time exploring, one which floods every summer but usually not for another month. The government responds quickly, but a local British expatriate who has spent time in the caves quickly recognizes that traversing the now-underwater passages requires the specialized skills of recreational cave divers like Britain's John Volanthen and Richard Stanton (who, coincidentally, has just met a nurse from the area) - although discovering that the team is somehow still alive after a week raises the question of how you get them through over a mile of a dark, twisting underground river: It takes two or three hours to traverse and even the Thai Navy SEALs tended to panic over a much shorter distance.

Even if this hadn't been worldwide news relatively recently, the title of the film probably tips most viewers off as to how it ends, and savvy viewers aren't going to be too far off when they guess what happened to the one retired naval officer who is brought up by name but not part of the interviews. Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin seem well-aware that this film may have audiences coming at it from different places over time, and as such make sure that they pay careful attention to both telling the story and explaining the story, using clear graphics to show the scope of the situation and laying out what is going on as things progress, never presuming what the audience knows or wants to know at a certain point.

As a result, it's an impressively humble movie. The filmmakers are careful to not push awe at the rescuers too much, wither in the form of a build-up or humblebrag, though there's still the same sense that these folks are wired differently, and not always for the better, that the filmmakers bring to their mountaineering docs; it's just somewhat muted to reflect how their own accomplishments and what they might sacrifice for them are not the main issues here. There's attention paid to more mundane logistics, such as the folks who are doing less immediately-dangerous boots-on-the-ground civil engineering to make sure that rain doesn't raise the underground river and flood the caves even more. Perhaps more notably, there's willingness to step back from emotional storylines that aren't crucial to the job at hand. One of the divers has just met a woman who might give him a personal connection to the area? That's nice, and an interesting detail but Chin and Vasarhelyi are not going to get anywhere near making a movie where a dozen Thai kids potentially dying primarily plays as a way for a middle-class English guy to achieve some personal growth. Similarly, while they acknowledge that there is mythology around this place and a monk present tied to that, it's not what the movie is about, even if one might be tempted to make that a thematic centerpiece.

They also don't see reenactment as a chance to dazzle as some might. On-the-scene documentary footage was relatively limited and often more useful for showing how challenging the circumstances were (even with handlamps, you can't see much at all), so they have to recreate for clarity, but try to call attention to themselves as little as possible, either in terms of being flashy or overly faithful to first-person perspective. By the time the credits mention that many scenes are recreated on-site with the original divers, a viewer will think that, yes, they kind of had to be, but it feels both immediate enough and enough like a regular movie that those in the audience will be thinking more about what they're seeing than how they're able to see it.

Whoever eventually makes a feature version of this story probably won't be quite so humble; they'll want personality-clashing drama, views into the rescuers inner lives. It's fine to make that movie; those things are all part of the story. The route these filmmakers take, on the other hand, makes for great, plain-spoken communication, and audiences so often need that much more than conventional dramatics given extra weight by being based on a true story.

Also at eFilmCritic

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 November 2021 - 11 November 2021

Happy Diwali to all those who celebrate; happy Another New Marvel day for those who celebrate that.

• Eternals is the third of six Marvel adaptations coming out in a seven-month window, meaning they're starting to get into the more obscure corners of the universe, with this group a Jack Kirby creation, immortals placed on Earth to protect from an alien threat. It's got a killer cast, with Gemma Chan, Angelina Jolie, Don Lee (aka Ma Dong-Seok), Bryan Tyree Henry, Salma Hayek, Kit Harrington, Kumail Nanjiani, and Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao in the director's chair. It's at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common (including Imax/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D),Fenway (including RealD 3D), South Bay (including Imax/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Kendall Square, Assembly Row (including Imax/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), the Embassy, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  After being delayed a couple months because Paramount was apparently more nervous about the pandemic, Clifford the Big Red Dog opens on Wednesday (plus Tuesday early access shows), with Darby Camp as Emily Elizabeth plus John Cleese, Tony Hale, David Allen Grier and Tovah Feldshuh and others in smaller roles. It plays the Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Paramount+.
  
  The week's TCM anniversary screening is High Society, playing Wednesday at Fenway, South Bay, and Arsenal Yards. There's also a special presentation of Rocky IV at Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Thursday, with Sylvester Stallone's the new cut adding "Rocky vs. Drago" to its name and forty minutes to its runtime. Veteran's Day on Thursday also brings a few days of screenings of American Sniper at Boston Common.
• It's also about when when Oscar season usually starts, and given that The Crown evidently ran the table at the Emmys, one of the early contenders has to be Spencer, featuring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana as her marriage to Prince Charles is starting to fall apart. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, The Somerville Theatre, Boston Common, Kendall Square, the Embassy. There's also The Souvenir: Part II, which comes pretty soon on the heels of the first film with Honor Swinton Byrne as a film student, playing The Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common.
  
  The Coolidge also has some specials: Abel Ferrara has midnight shows for the weekend, with The Driller Killer playing on 35mm film on Friday and King of New York on Saturday, that one also part of Noirvember. There's also Jennifer's Body Saturday night, with a Haus of Oni horror drag show to kick things off. The Monday Science on Screen show is WarGames, with MIT's Srini Devadas talking about cybersecurity and AI beforehand. Noirvember continues Tuesday with In a Lonely Place on film (one of Bogie's darkest and best), while Thursday's 35mm Rewind! show is Napoleon Dynamite, with after-party at Parlour
• The Brattle Theatre kicks off the November/December calendar with two new releases. El Planeta is an oddball black-and-white entry with writer/director Amalia Ulman and her mother Ale playing an estranged family reuniting after the death of the daughter's father and getting into hijinks in "post-crisis" Spain; it has the main time slots Friday through Monday and afternoon shows Tuesday and Thursday. The late show is The Spine of Night, an old-school bloody animated fantasy in the tradition of Fire & Ice and Heavy Metal; it also gets a 7:15pm show on Tuesday with co-director Philip Gelatt on hand for a post-film Q&A.
  
  The DocYard's screening is on Wednesday this week, with director Wang Qiong on hand to discuss her epic-sized but intimate documentary All About My Sisters, which tracks the long process of healing for a family broken apart by China's one-child policy, whether it be official or unofficial. It will be in the The Brattlite next weekend, but for now the online room still has Taiwan's Detention.
• Apparently the Indian film industries are planning a big re-opening for Diwali. Sooryavanshi comes from Bollywood (Hindi-speaking), starring Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Ajay Devgn, Ranveer Singh, and Jackie Shroff in an action flick that spins off director Rohit Shetty's Singham and Simmba movies; it's at Apple Fresh Pond and Boston Common: Fresh Pond also opens Annaatthe, the new Tamil-language film starring Superstar Rajinikanth, in which he plays a man who must rescue his sister who has fallen in with bad people in Kolkata; there's also Tamil-language actioner Enemy. In Telugu, they get romance Manchi Rojulu Vachayi
  
  My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission continues with subtitled and English-dubbed showtimes at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row. There's also a special presentation of One Piece: Strong World at Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards (dubbed on Saturday, subtitled Tuesday).
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square picks up another Netflix release, though barely - Brazilian human trafficking drama 7 Prisoners is only scheduled for one mid-afternoon matinee per day, even during the week. Another Netflix premiere, Red Notice with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, pops up at Fresh Pond for what looks like one day on Sunday.
  
  An even shorter run goes to the 2021-2022 New York Dog Film Festival, slated for one screening at the Kendall Wednesday evening.
• The Boston Jewish Film starts its virtual program on Sunday, including a dozen or features streaming during the two week event, and even more short films. There are also live-streamed conversations on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, as well as a (sold-out) in-person screening of "Space Torah" at the Museum of Science's Omni theater on Thursday
• This week's Bright Lights at Home feature is Not Going Quietly, which follows activist Ady Barkan as he finds that his ALS diagnosis refocuses his efforts. It's available for 24 hours starting at 7pm Wednesday (with free "seats" limited to 175), followed by a Thursday-night Q&A with director Nicholas Bruckman and activist Liz Jaff.
• The Regent Theatre has documentary/concert film Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, which features footage of both the original Joe Cocker tour in 1970 and the Tedeschi Trucks Band-led reunion 50 years later, for two shows on Thursday.
• The ICA has their first film program in a while with the 2021 edition of the touring program of Sundance Film Festival Short FIlm Tour playing the first of three shows Thursday night.
• The West Newton Cinema adds The Eternals to their program of The French Dispatch, Dune, and No Time to Die. The Lexington Venue has No Time to Die and The French Dispatch Friday through Sunday, apparently sharing a single screen.
• The Museum of Science has Friday/Saturday night screenings of Dune in the Mugar Omni Theater Dome through the end of November.
• Cinema Salem has Last Night in Soho, Eternals, and The French Dispatch (all of which have open-caption shows Monday afternoon), plus Noirvember screenings of Out of the Past on Sunday and Thursday. No Night Light screening this Friday, apparently.
  
  The Luna Theater is doing "A24 Month" this November, with the studio's The Witch on Friday with Saturday featuring a masked matinee of that film, plus The Lobster, Swiss Army Man, and Moonlight. Spike Lee has Sundays this month, with BlacKkKlansman this week. There's a free-to-members "Weirdo Wednesday", and a free screening of Tenet as part of UMass Lowell's Philosophy and Film series (including post-film discussion) on Thursday.
• More virtual "Devour the Land" show streaming from The Harvard Film Archive this week with Jonathan Perel's Corporate Responsibility (available from Friday to Monday using long shots of corporate headquarters as a background for how large corporations and the government have been complicit in human rights abuses.
• Joe's Free Films shows a Saturday-morning screening of documentary Damrell's Fire at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum (did you know we had one of those?) with director Bruce Twickler there for Q&A.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.

Anyone know a good place to eat near the Museum of Science before a long movie like Dune on Friday? I'll be there, also catching The Eternals and The Spine of Night, likely fitting a few other movies in as well.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 29 October 2021 - 4 November 2021

It's Halloween weekend, which means fun spooky things, horror movies we've been waiting a year for, and, incidentally, another chance to see an anime release make absolute bank without ever seeming to break into mainstream pop-culture conversation.

• The week's most anticipated release is probably Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho, a time-tripping movie that finds a would-be actress in modern London psychically cast back fifty-odd years to become entangled in a gruesome murder. It stars terrific young actresses Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy and looks like it finds a malevolence in Matt Smith's sharp features that Doctor Who utterly avoided. The Coolidge Corner Theatre has one of only a few 35mm prints in the country (check showtimes for when it's playing on screen #1, including a Sunday Masked Matinee); it also plays The Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, Fenway, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards, the Embassy, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  35mm Halloween celebrations at the Coolidge include a midnight show of Scream 2 on Friday night; a 12-hour all-film marathon at midnight Saturday, kicking off with composer Alan Howarth playing some of his themes and introducing Halloween III: Season of the Witch, followed by The Bride of Frankenstein and four or five more surprise films; plus a special Sunday-afternoon Big Screen Classic of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. There's a Sound of Silents presentation of Nosferatu on Monday with Jeff Rapsis on the organ, and then Noirvember begins with Touch of Evil on 35mm Tuesday.
• The preview for Scott Cooper's Antlers has been playing for a long time as it got caught up in the Twentieth/Disney purchase and then covid, but it finally hits screens with Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons as a schoolteacher and sheriff pulled into a student apparently being stalked by a monster in the Pacific Northwest. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and the Embassy.
  
  Amanda Seyfried stars in A Mouthful of Air as a children's book author who has to face some deeply-rooted issues when she has a child of her own, with director Amy Koppelman adapting her own novel; it plays Boston Common. Down the hall at Boston Common, Michael Shannon stars as a new crew coach at an Ivy League school in Heart of Champions, released just a week too late to tie into the Head of the Charles regatta; it also plays Arsenal Yards.
  
  Boston Common has one last surprise "Thrills & Chills" screening on Friday evening. There's the original Ghostbusters at Boston Common all week; The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Boston Common Friday to Sunday; A Quiet Place Part II at Boston Common Monday to Wednesday. This weekend's Universal Monster double feature includes Lon Chaney as The Wolf Man and Claude Rains as The Invisible Man, playing Saturday afternoon at Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row. Potentially less spooky is The Doors: Live at the Bowl '68 Special Edition on Thursday evening at Fenway and Kendall Square.
• My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission is the latest installment of a series of popular manga adaptations that have bounced between television and film, with this extra-sized adventure having the young superheroes tracking down a villain who has made superpowers go out of control. It has both subtitled and English-dubbed showtimes at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Kendall Square (dubbed Friday/Saturday/Tuesday/Thursday, subtitled Sunday/Monday/Wednesday).
  
  Apple Fresh Pond opens two Telugu-language films: Romantic is an action romance with Akash Puri & Ketika Sharma, while Varudu Kaavalenu is a romantic comedy starring Naga Shaurya & Ritu Varma. They also keep Tamil-language Doctor around, and have been pre-selling tickets for the new Superstar Rajinikanth film, known as Annaatthe in Tamil and Peddanna in Telugu, which opens next Thursday.
• In addition to picking up The French Dispatch downstairs, The Somerville Theatre has The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday and a special 35mm presentation of the classic 1931 Dracula on Sunday with Jeff Rapsis providing a live soundtrack (the film itself is unscored; note that Jeff will be at the Coolidge the next night with Nosferatu). They also have Warren Miller's Winter Starts Now on Wednesday and Thursday. Oddly, none of these special presentations are listed as displacing other movies on their site, and they've got Slaughterhouse Society in the Crystal Ballroom on Saturday night, so I don't know if you should check back before buying a ticket for regular movies (Dispatch, Dune, No Time to Die), or if they can use the 30-seat Microcinema for that now.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square opened Netflix film Passing, Rebecca Hall's film about two Black women (Tessa Thompson & Ruth Negga) in 1920s New York who could pass as white, on Wednesday.
• The Brattle Theatre continues "Folk Horror Beyond The Wicker Man" series with Ganja & Hess (Friday), the original Candyman (Friday), Hereditary (Saturday), Alison's Birthday (Saturday), The With (Sunday), Kier-La Janisse's series-inspiring documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Sunday), Pumpkinhead (Sunday on 35mm), Lake of the Dead (Tuesday), Clearcut (Tuesday), Kuroneko (Wednesday on 35mm), Eyes of Fire (Wednesday), Marketa Lazarová (Thursday on 35mm), and A Field in England (Thursday). Taiwan's Detention, online at The Brattlite is a fairly modern sort of folk horror itself.
  
  On Monday, there's a special The DocYard screening with director Courtney Stephens pulling benshi duty and narrating her film Terre Femme live, with a Q&A afterward.
• The feature portion of the online The Boston Asian-American Film Festival ended last week, but the five short film programs are available through Sunday night, with a pass that includes all of them only $30.
• The Museum of Science has Friday/Saturday night screenings of Dune in the Mugar Omni Theater Dome through the end of November, although tickets sell out early.
• Soy Cubana is this week's Bright Lights at Home feature, available for 24 hours starting at 7pm Wednesday (with free "seats" limited to 175). Streaming it also gives access to a Thursday-night Q&A with directors Jeremy Ungar & Ivaylo Getove and producer Robin Miller Ungar.
• The West Newton Cinema adds at least two screens of The French Dispatch to Dune and No Time to Die. The Lexington Venue has No Time to Die Friday/Saturday and The French Dispatch Friday through Sunday.
• Cinema Salem goes full-bore into Halloween with Last Night in Soho, Lamb, and Halloween Kills from Friday to Monday. One-offs include Scream and a "Night Light" show of Fulci's The Beyond on Friday plus A Nightmare on Elm Street and Carpenter's Halloween on Saturday and Sunday. They kick off their Noirvember celebration with The Big Sleep on Monday and Thursday. The online programming of The Salem Horror Fest continues through Halloween Sunday.
  
  The Luna Theater has Lamb Friday and Saturday (including a masked matinee): Let the Right One In on Saturday, Carpenter's Halloween on Sunday, and a free-to-members "Weirdo Wednesday".
• This week's "Devour the Land" show streaming from The Harvard Film Archive is California Company Town available from Friday to Monday; Lee Anne Schmitt's film explores various abandoned towns that popped up around a specific industry and disappeared once that energy was spent.
• Joe's Free Films has Field of Dreams screening outdoors at the Temple Emmanuel in Newton on Wednesday.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.

I'll head to the Coolidge for Last Night in Soho on film, might go for Dracula and Nosferatu with Jeff Rapsis, and am eying the piles of discs that threaten to overwhelm the living room.

Just Made It Fit: Days and Prisoners of the Ghostland

The Brattle's schedule came out before I booked my trip to Washington, DC, so I did, in fact, spend a fair amount of time hemming and hawing about whether or not I wanted to fly 450 miles to see baseball the same weekend that would likely be the only time that these two movies from singular filmmakers would be playing in the area, let alone at one of my favorite venues (over and above "is it wise to get in a metal tube for a couple hours, for any reason, in 2021?"). Eventually, I settled for tweaking the dates on the trip so that I would return on the second-to-last day of their run. DC-to-Boston is only a couple hours on a plane, and I scheduled it for a reasonable hour, so I wasn't even a little wiped out when I headed to Harvard Square.

Oddly enough, the Brattle's Covid capacity was kind of perfect for Days, because it's a movie you want to see in a theater - it's gorgeous and has a couple of moments when it's nice to hear/feel other people react - but maybe not a packed one where you're sensing another person's presence that close to you or even accidentally touching hands. Movies about isolation are odd things - they don't feel quite right in theaters but feel like an attack when you're at home - so it's oddly appropriate to have a little of it imposed upon you to watch this one.

(I do wonder how many storyboards were necessary for this movie, though. A couple dozen? Fifty? More, but half of them for one scene?)

After that, it was a little bit of hanging around for Prisoners after that and, I'm not going to lie, it's not great. I think part of it is that I can just never get into the sort of disconnected-but-taking-stuff-in mindset that a lot of weird movies seem to require; if I'm noticing the cool stuff, I'm also noticing the bits of the plot that don't work. Maybe it's never going in for alcohol or weed or something. I'll probably get a copy on disc anyway - Sono/Cage deserves a second look and you want to encourage crazy stuff on 4K - but it's a bit of a letdown.

Still, between this evening and the double feature a couple days earlier, I had a week of movies by Justin Chon, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Sion Sono, right before the start of Nightstream, which isn't a bad run at all.

Rizi (Days)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)

As much as I've enjoyed the work of Tsai Ming-Liang in the past, I purchased my ticket for Days based on a gorgeous still that came across my Twitter feed a few months ago. I eventually got that image, and it was part of a shot that was impressive itself, so, hey, success. Nevertheless, there were times leading up to that scene when I wondered if the filmmaker was having a laugh at his audience's willingness to embrace nothing happening, afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes, but Tsai eventually earns that inaction.

It opens with a middle-aged man, Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng) staring out a window, watching it rain, and Tsai holds that shot, as he tends to do throughout the film; then takes a bit of a nap in his bath, Elsewhere in Bangkok, the younger Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) prepares dinner for himself, a process that involves starting two or three fires in clay mounds. They go about their relatively solitary business until they inevitably meet, with Non hired to give Kang a massage in a hotel room booked especially for the purpose.

The film opens with an on-screen advisory saying that the film is intentionally unsubtitled, which depending on one's mindset can seem almost taunting at first, not just doing something pretentious and unconventional, but drawing attention to it. The actual effect is the opposite; it lets Tsai keep the audience's focus on the "action" and imagery rather than the bottom quarter of the screen without having to force the already-taciturn characters to be unnaturally silent. They're not saying of consequence, and it comes across whether you speak Mandarin or not. It's counter-intuitive, but Tsai has been doing this sort of thing long enough to know what he's up to.

Not every bit of deliberate minimalism is so obviously effective; those who have seen some of Tsai's movies before will not be shocked that he lets his scenes breathe, to put it mildly, even and especially when not much is happening. It's not that Tsai doesn't make some good use of this - he and cinematographer Jhong Yuan Chang frame some beautiful shots, and the frequent rain on the soundtrack is enveloping but not oppressive. Scenes go on long enough that one can't help but study them and the two men at the center. Kang is sphinx-like, often still, not particularly active until he starts prepping his hotel room for the massage. Non isn't exactly fleshed out, but one can see him concentrating on immediate concerns, not quite easy-going but pulling back a little as he gets set to do his job. The massage itself is almost comic in its elongation - a lot of attention paid to one particular area - and it's hard not to think back to that opening disclaimer when Kang is suddenly not talking, really, but making expressive noises.

During and after all that, one does eventually get to a sort of understanding of how numbed and repressed Kang is, only able to feel anything with a lot of groundwork and effort, only to see that sensation drain away almost immediately, though some of the film's most gorgeous moments happen in that window, as the camera pulls out and the city seems alive and full of connected people, even if it doesn't last. There's art in how that realization presents itself after two hours of impatience, blooming and fading until Kang things are back to where they started.

Its time on the big screen came and went quickly, but I'm not sure I could have watched it with a remote control in my hand; it demands one's entire attention but also encourages one's mind to wander until a viewer finds the thing that interests them in a scene. It likely works best in a theater because of its isolation, although there is more than enough striking imagery to make it an interesting watch at home.

Also at eFilmCritic

Prisoners of the Ghostland

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)

I don't know that there is ultimately more to Prisoners of the Ghostland than Sion Sono playing with cross-genre apocalyptic imagery and Sofia Boutella eventually reminding viewers that she moves better than just about anyone else on film. A more straightforward movie might not need more, but this one is so buried under messy world-building and thick accents that would have been comically but comprehensibly dubbed over in the 1980s crud it imitates that it's hard to enjoy the sheer weirdness on display.

It takes place in the sort of future where one can see Hero (Nicolas Cage) and Psycho (Nick Cassavetes) robbing a bank with the aesthetics of an Apple Store in one scene and then in the next see Hero caged up in the remains of a "Samurai Town" amusement park run by a local warlord - or "Governor" (Bill Moseley) - who offers him a deal: His foster daughter Bernice (Boutella) has gone off into the badlands, and Hero is the man to do it, outfitted with a special explosive costume that will blow off his arms if he tries to raise a hand to her, for example. Of course, rescuing her means overcoming his own demons, finding her amidst a village of cultists who believe complete nuclear annihilation will come if the town clock strikes the hour, and dealing with how she's retreated so far inward that she can't even speak, which is a problem because unless her voice resets it, the suit will blow Hero to smithereens rather than let him escape.

Director Sion Sono has been a mainstay for fans of Japanese cult cinema for decades now, in part because he has been so prolific that he would often have not just one movie at an annual genre festival, but two or even three (or that one would be a four-hour anything-can-happen thrill ride) and in part because he seemed to grow more energetic as he aged, setting a faster pace and filling his films more to bursting. This is his English-language debut, but his stamp is nevertheless all over the film: Even the silent or withdrawn characters have big personalities, he'll happily jump over anything that seems to be just marking time between the fun parts, and he'll give the viewer striking new sights regularly. He doesn't write the screenplay, and while at some points that hardly seems to matter - he's jumping from idea to idea and basically using it as a skeleton to play with images of the apocalypse and how they are used in film - at others one starts to wonder. The Ghostland is a jumble of genre archetypes, and mashing them together even if they don't quite fit is what these movies are often about, but his instincts don't always match the story by Aaron Hendry & Reza Sixo Safai. When a filmmaker as eccentric and talented as Sono creates something from the ground up, he knows how to skip to what feels like it should come next even if it leaves important information and events out, but he's seldom able to find that sort of rhythm here. It's the sort of chaos that highlights how little the whole thing seems to be fleshed out, rather than a pinball machine which rapidly redirects the audience but also has them wondering what the next bit of action will be.

The light shows he sets off are nevertheless often pretty good, of course. He and his crew build environments that always seem a bit more interesting than one might expect given that the basic idea has shown up a lot. There's just enough functioning neon in Samurai Town (and other decorations just beginning to show signs of wear) that the seemingly pre-apocalyptic bank is just within reach of making sense, for example, an outpost of the rich among those trying desperately to hang on. The mix of different forms of madness in the Ghostland never settles into one metaphor, but why should it? Some people facing the collapse of everything they know are going to worship false prophets, some are going to wrap themselves in a cocoon until they become mannequins, and others are going to try and turn back time. Sono and company aren't going to go particularly deep on any of these ideas, but the different forms of madness are both more and less overwhelming.

It also doesn't hurt that he's got Tak Sakaguchi and Sofia Boutella on-hand for when things start getting crazy. Tak is on-screen as the Governor's bodyguard with a troubled conscience, but he's doing just as much work behind the camera (under the name Toshiro Takuma) as Sono's action director. His signature quick movements and ability to handle a large crowd of extras are a good match for the director's fast pace and willingness to try anything. Boutella, as usual, makes great use of having entered show business as a dancer; whether being twisted and still in the way the average person without exceptional body control can't be early on or cutting through the action in the way few others can at the climax.

Nicolas Cage, meanwhile, is enthusiastic if not nearly so physically accomplished as those co-stars, and while many fans of his greatly enjoyed his relative restraint in Pig, even those who don't find his collaboration with Sono as a reason for giddiness would still be excited about his diving into a movie this crazy. The thing is, it seems as if Sono is as much a fan of Nicholas Cage as any other cult film nerd and more or less expects the magic to happen on its own, but Cage does actually need to be directed. This performance has moments of inspired madness but also plenty where Cage doesn't seem to know what variety of ham the scene needs. He's famous for his commitment to even the most out-there parts, but there's not a whole lot for him to commit to where Hero is concerned. There's no core for him to bring to the surface in garish fashion.

It's almost as if these two strong personalities were too deferential to the other when they needed to butt heads or have one clear vision. It's not enough to make Prisoners boring or not worth watching once - it's got too singular talents involved for that to happen - but if this is the only time that Sono and Cage work together, it will go down as one heck of a missed opportunity.

Also at eFilmCritic

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 October 2021 - 28 October 2021

Part of it is that they just got the new toy, but I notice that only the Somerville Theatre is bragging about their 4K projection, and that's kind of crazy to me. I know the Kendall has a 4K projector in screen 1, but they never point out when something is using it, for instance, and Fenway no longer highlights which shows are "RPX" on the Regal app (or which screens have 4K projection). Me, personally, I'm happier to sit in the Somerville with their basic seats and basic snacks but the best projection than the opposite, but so many theaters prefer to push the other way.

One projection thing to note that may be of interest to some: AMC has greatly increased the number of open-captioned shows they have, so if you're hard of hearing, have trouble with accents, or just like having the subtitles on when you watch movies, take note of those shows when booking tickets (and, of course, do the same if you find that distracting).

• The big opening this week, after a year's delay and controversy over the same-day-streaming thing, Dune, the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, this one from Denis Villeneuve and covering half of the first book with an eye on adapting the whole series. It plays The Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Kendall Square, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Fenway (including one RealD 3D show a day), South Bay (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), the Embassy, Chestnut Hill, and HBOmax.
  
  Ron's Gone Wrong has not been delayed quite as long, I don't think, but it seems like it's been kicking around a while. Set in the near future, it posits that most young people have a personal robot, although the one young Barney is given is a somewhat erratic refurb. It's at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.
  
  There's also Becoming Cousteau, a documentary on the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, built in part around restorations of the copious footage he and his families and companies shot during his life. That plays The Capitol and Boston Common.
  
  Boston Common has surprise Thrills & Chills screenings on Friday and Wednesday, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday (Arsenal Yards, CinemaSalem, and The Coolidge play it that night as well). The annual Studio Ghibli Fest starts quite late this year, kicking off with Howl's Moving Castle at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row. Shows on Sunday and Thursday are dubbed; those on Monday are subtitled. There's also a Lupin the 3rd anniversary special at Boston Common at Monday, with a new dub of the very first episode and the first two of the new series. Insane Clown Posse documentary The United States of Insanity plays Tuesday at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row. An "Uncut Experience" of last year's thriller The Call plays Fenway on Wednesday.
• Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch is finally hitting theaters after a year's delay, getting the rare both-big-screens openings at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (including a Sunday Masked Matinee). It stars just about everyone from his in his ever-expanding repertory company and then some in a series of vignettes about a magazine modeled on The New Yorker. The preview is a lot of what sometimes makes Anderson insufferable, but also a lot of why people love him. It's also at Kendall Square, Boston Common.
  
  The Coolidge's special engagements lean toward celebrating spooky season, with a 35mm print of Blacula at midnight on Friday and both An American Werewolf in London and Rocky Horror at midnight Saturday. The Big Screen Classic on Monday is the digital restoration of The Exorcist, and the Rewind! Show on Thursday is Scream. They also have their first 35mm screening of Last Night in Soho later that night (the AMCs are having Dolby Cinema previews on Wednesday).
• Aside from the big openings, Landmark Theatres offers two streaming-service productions before they hit video. Kendall Square gets Amazon's The Electrical Life of Louis Wan, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the eccentric artist of the title and Claire Foy as his wife. The trailer, if I recall, is a visual knockout even if Cumberbatch is chewing all the scenery. Over at the Embassy, they get Netflix's The Harder They Fall, a Western starring Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, and Delroy Lindo, the latter as Lone Ranger inspiration Bass Reeves. Note that the Embassy is still only open Thursday to Sunday.
  
  The Kendall also has the 2021 Cat Film Festival on Wednesday night, which is also when they open Netflix's Passing, Rebecca Hall's film about two Black women (Tessa Thompson & Ruth Negga) in 1920s New York who could pass as white.
• Over at The Brattle Theatre continues the IFFBoston Fall Focus preview series through the weekend, with some shows sold out and just a few seats left for the rest, including Belfast on Friday; Happening, The Worst Person in the World, and Joy Ride (with Q&A) on Saturday; and Petite Maman and C'mon C'mon on Sunday.
  
  On Monday, they start a "Folk Horror Beyond The Wicker Man" series, anchored by Kier-La Janisse's massive documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror on Monday (and another show on Halloween), as well as The Blood on Satan's Claw on Tuesday, Night of the Eagle (on 35mm) and The Lair of the White Worm on Wednesday, plus Jug Face and The Wind on Thursday. The Brattlite continues Taiwan's Detention online, which isn't folk horror, but is still creepy as heck.
• Cloudy Mountain isn't the biggest Chinese action movie of the season (I'm guessing Well Go or someone is looking for a good slot for The Battle at Lake Changjin), but it looks like fun, with a father and son racing against time to find a way to prevent a number of cascading natural disasters from destroying their home town. It's at Boston Common.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond plays host to Caleidoscope Indian Film Festival Boston, or the in-person portion, which includes has Telugu-language horror movie Kalkokkho (aka "House of Time") on Friday, Bengali drama Searching for Happiness (with Q&A) and Kannada-language drama Dollu on Saturday, and Malayalam drama AHR on Sunday (there's also a second location in Littleton and several films available on demand). The theater also continues the runs of Telugu-language romantic comedy Most Eligible Bachelor and Tamil-language Doctor.
• The Boston Asian-American Film Festival continues through Sunday, with a "Filipino Friday" triple-feature of Wherever We May Be, The Girl Who Left Home, and Lumpia with a Vengeance; A Letter to A'ma, Sky Blossom: Diaries of the Next Greatest Generation, and Americanish, all with Q&A on Saturday; and closing night film Who Is Lun*na Menoh on Sunday. I can vouch for Americanish, which I saw at the New York Asian Film Festival.
• The Museum of Science is going to be running Dune in the Mugar Omni Theater Dome on Friday and Saturday evenings for at least the next month - the first time they've done this with a feature film, in part because they've gone digital - although it looks like the first two weekends' worth are sold out. I believe "Ancient Caves" is a new-ish addition, with "Superpower Dogs" and "Back from the Brink" also continuing
• Bright Lights at Home offers up one more chance to see Małni – Towards The Ocean, Towards The Shore, available for 24 hours starting at 7pm Wednesday. Filmmaker Sky Hopkina and professor Kathryn Ramey will call in for a Thursday-night Q&A, with shows free but slots limited.
• The West Newton Cinema has Dune, The Velvet Underground, No Time to Die, and Shang-Chi.
  
  The Lexington Venue is open through Sunday, either with one screen or No Time to Die on both.
• Cinema Salem is, as you'd imagine, all in on spooky stuff with Lamb and Halloween Kills from Friday to Monday. One-offs include The Craft and a "Night Light" show of Alice, Sweet Alice on Friday; Universal Monsters Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man on Saturday (plus a sold-out Rocky Horror), Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein on Sunday; Frankenstein and Dracula Saturday and Sunday; and An American Werewolf in London on Thursday. The Salem Horror Fest comes back to life with online programming from Friday to Halloween.
  
  The Luna Theater has Lamb Friday and Saturday: The Velvet Underground twice on Saturday (with the 1:35pm show a masked matinee), on either side of She Freak, The Lost Boys on Sunday, and a free-to-members "Weirdo Wednesday". There's live comedy on Thursday.
• This week's "Devour the Land" show streaming from The Harvard Film Archive is "A Land for War" available from Friday to Monday; the featurette looks at California's Fort Ord over a decade of filming and archival footage from forty years earlier.
• Joe's Free Films shows Coco playing outdoors on Palmer Street in Harvard Square (the organizers are not technically supposed to say what's playing for contractural reasons, but it's easy to figure out).
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.

I'm gonna try and see Dune in 3D and at the Somerville, plus The Last Duel and maybe head out for some of the pre-streamers.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 15 October 2021 - 21 October 2021

I feel like we, as provincial Bostonians, should be more excited about a new Ben & Matt movie, even if it's not as Ben-and-Matt-y as it could potentially be.

• It's kind of crazy that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck haven't co-written a movie since they won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting, but they both worked on the screenplay for Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, although apparently not quite so much as a team, with Affleck moving to a smaller part than his original co-starring role. It recounts the story leading up to the duel of the title three times, from the points of view of a knight (Damon), his squire (Adam Driver), and the former's wife (Jodie Comer), who claims the latter assaulted her. It's at The Capitol, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Kendall Square, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, the Embassy, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Also opening is Halloween Kills, the sequel to the 2018 Halloween sequel which discarded all that came in between, with Michael Myers escaping from apparently being burned alive to menace Jamie Lee Curtis's family again. It's at The Somerville Theatre, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Fenway, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards, the Embassy, Chestnut Hill, and on Peacock.
  
  Boston Common continues having "Thrills & Chills Surprise Screenings" on Fridays and Wednesdays, plus a Saturday night screening of Rocky Horror. They (and the Embassy) also get "musician scraping by" drama Hard Luck Love Song, along with animated film Koati, set in a Latin American rainforest and listed as English-language on IMDB but Spanish-with-subtitles on Fandango.
  
  Arsenal Yards offers matinees of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Friday to Sunday. There are 30th anniversary screenings of The Silence of the Lambs at Fenway, South Bay, and Arsenal Yards on Sunday and Wednesday.
• E. Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin have mostly taken their documentary cameras to high, dizzying mountains, so what they do in The Rescue is a real switch-up, focusing on the recreational cave-divers who lent their extremely specialized skills to a seemingly impossible rescue operation of 12 stranded schoolchildren and their coach in Thailand three years ago. It plays at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (with Vasarhelyi on-hand for live Q&A for two shows on Saturday), Boston Common.
  
  Also opening at the Coolidge is Bergman Island, a fictional film which follows married filmmakers (Vicky Krieps & Tim Roth) to the island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot his films, hoping to find inspiration. Mia Wasikowska is also in it, and she's never less than interesting.
  
  The Coolidge also makes a weekend field trip to Medfield State Hospital, where they will be running a pop-up drive-in and showing the original versions of Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Friday and Saturday. The After Midnite crew will leave a contingent behind, of course, showing Stephen Sommers's The Mummy late Friday night and Young Frankenstein late Saturday. There's a Science on Screen show on Monday, with Harvard astronomer Dr. Avi Loeb introducing a 35mm print of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, plus a "Stage & Screen" presentation of The Witch on Tuesday, plus a Cinema Jukebox presentation of Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free (The Making of Wildflowers) on Wednesday (also at Boston Common/Fenway/Kendall Square, with those locations also having Thursday shows).
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square has Todd Haynes's documentary on The Velvet Underground, as does West Newton. Kendall Square and Boston Common also open Mass, an ensemble film about two couples confronting each other after a tragedy.
• Over at The Brattle Theatre is the primary home for The GlobeDocs Film Festival this weekend, although there are some shows at the Coolidge (only listed on the festival's website, not the theaters) and a number of the films playing both sites plus others also available online. All shows at the Brattle feature Q&A sessions. I can personally vouch for Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America on Friday evening.
  
  On Monday, they have a special benefit screening of Far From Afghanistan, with Tuesday featuring a selection of works by Barbara Hammer presented by Revolutions Per Minute. On Wednesday, the IFFBoston Fall Focus preview series starts with an already-sold-out show of The French Dispatch (don't worry, there's no Q&A and it opens the next Friday), with Sean Baker's Red Rocket playing Thursday and a very full program the next weekend.
  
  The Brattlite continues to feature Taiwanese horror Detention online.
• Telugu-language romantic comedy Most Eligible Bachelor, starring Akhil Akkieni & Pooja Hegde, opens at Apple Fresh Pond and Arsenal Yards, with Fresh Pond also opening Telugu musical Pelli Sandad and action/adventure Maha Samudram, while also continuing Tamil-language Doctor.
  
  Chinese National Day flag-waver My Country, My Parents continues at Boston Common.
• The Boston Women's Film Festival continue their virtual offerings through Sunday.
  
  The Boston Asian-American Film Festival is still all-virtual, kicking off on Wednesday with A Tale of Two Chinatowns, followed by Waikiki and Asian American - Eyz'd: An Immigrant Comedy Special on Thursday. All three feature Q&As after their initial streams, with the latter two available on demand for the length of the festival.
• Bright Lights at Home has End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock for 24 hours starting at 7pm Wednesday. Director Shannon King and activist Pearl Daniel-Means dial in for a Thursday-night Q&A. Slots are free but limited.
• The West Newton Cinema has The Velvet Underground, No Time to Die, The Addams Family 2, The Many Saints of Newark, Dear Evan Hansen (through Wednesday), Cry Macho (through Wednesday), and Shang-Chi. They're also showing Hitchcock's Psycho at 9pm Friday; no indication on their site if that's a one-off, something they're looking to do regularly, or an approaching-Halloween thing.
  
  The Lexington Venue is open through Sunday with No Time to Die and The Card Counter.
• Cinema Salem has Venom 2 and Halloween Kills from Friday to Monday. The Friday "Night Lights" show is Cronenberg's The Brood, and they have extra spooky stuff: Mars Attacks! on Friday; Universal Horrors The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Creature from the Black Lagoon on Saturday and Sunday; Haunt with co-star Damian Maffei and the hosts of The Horror Squad podcast; and their first "Horrorlogical" show, Deathdream with co-star Richard Backus on-hand. The Salem Horror Fest has finished their in-person shows, but will return next week for virtual programming.
  
  The Luna Theater has a very straightforward schedule this week: The Velvet Underground on Friday evening, The Craft on Saturday (with the 2pm show a masked matinee), The Exorcist on Sunday, and free-to-members (with Secret Satellite Society memberships from $5/week to $80-120/year) screenings on "Weirdo Wednesday" plus Thursday.
• The Harvard Film Archive continues the virtual program which complements the Harvard Art Museums' "Devour the Land" exhibit with O'er the Land available from Friday to Monday. There will be some live screenings, but you need a Harvard ID for those.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.

I will probably catch The Last Duel, The Rescue, and maybe Halloween Kills while also trying to pick up a couple things that fell through the cracks while I was on vacation, watching baseball, or on vacation watching baseball - although with the Red Sox deep into bonus time where baseball is concerned (who figured they'd get this far?), it could cut into movie time.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

A kind of weird thing about Marvel movies (mainline or not) is that they seem to turn around sequels much faster than studios had for the past twenty years or so. The pandemic sort of hides that in this case, but Venom 2 was meant to come out last year, just a couple years after the first, when three years had sort of become the traditional sequel turn-around time. I guess that when you're so locked into the idea of a franchise that you've cast the second movie's villain and shot a scene to introduce him at the end of the first, you're getting the wheels moving earlier.

Still, it's kind of weird that the result of Sony wanting a steady stream of Spider-Man-derived movies plus the pandemic has resulted in a spurt that has Regal offering a "see three in four months" deal for Venom 2 (October), Spider-Man: No Way Home (December), and Morbius (January), though I think the original plan would have still been pretty aggressive - 15 months instead of four - although maybe they've finally got some others close enough to ready to roll that it won't be a spurt and then nothing. I'm kind of intrigued by something in the Morbius trailer that ties it pretty definitively to the main Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I'll be kind of annoyed if they're basically putting something from the mid-credit tease into the trailer because, geez, who wants to see a Morbius movie starring Jared Leto otherwise? It's interesting to see the hints that various areas of the Marvel Universe are possibly existing simultaneously but mostly out of each others' way in the way that the mutants, Avengers, Spider-folk, etc., do in the comics. Although…

SPOILERS!

I've spent a few too many brain cycles trying to figure out what the timing on the Venom 2 post-credit scene is. It feels like it should be the snaps, but that doesn't quite line up unless whatever Venom was doing at the time kept them out of the main timeline for a little longer. It could tie into whatever the deal is with timelines jumping the tracks in Loki, or maybe whatever's going to happen multiverse-wise in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it would seem to be too early for that.

!SRELIOPS

Anyway, I can't say I quite liked this as much as the first movie, but I'll probably be keeping an eye open to see if Sony is releasing a combined 3D/4K disc, because this is actually really nice in 3D - Shriek's cell in Ravenloft is clearly built to have layers, while all of the other gothic, creepy places (including the run-down church of the finale) are built to have a lot of depth and foreground/background contrast. Not bad for a conersion job, I say as the Last Person Who Likes 3D.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

The first Venom movie was not, I suspect, what anybody involved wanted it to be; I'd love to know who thought they were making a sort of sci-fi horror movie, who was making a comedy, who wanted straight-ahead superhero action, and who saw a weird queer-ish romance underneath it all and decided to play that up. Somehow, don't ask me how, the movie worked better than it had any right to, even if it was not what one would call above-average. The sequel is clearly the result of Sony trying to reverse-engineer what happened and do it again, and deliberately replicating chaos doesn't come easy.

It's been some time since reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) fused with the intelligent alien symbiote "Venom", and in that time he's once again become respected as a reporter, although he naturally has to keep it hidden, which has meant a split with ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams). Serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will only give Brock his story, which leads to the pair finding where his missing victims are buried, but also to Cletus getting a symbiote of his own. With "Carnage" potentially more powerful than Venom, Cletus will stop at nothing to look for his long-lost and similarly psychopathic reform-school girlfriend Frances "Shriek" Barrison (Naomie Harris), whose mutant(*) sonic powers have had her locked up in a top-secret facility.

(*) I can only imagine what sort of legal wrangling was involved around this character given that Marvel had licenced "mutant" properties to Twentieth Century Fox and the "Spider-Man" characters to Sony, who I believe started work on this film which is not meant to be obviously connected to Spider-Man and which is very careful to use "mutation" rather than "Mutant" before Marvel parent company Disney acquired the former. Imagine being those lawyers.

As the most noteworthy villain in the Venom corner of Marvel's Spider-Man line, Carnage was teased at the end of the first movie, so returning writer Kelly Marcel (a frequent collaborator with star Tom Hardy, who shares story credit) was working from that on the one hand and the way audiences responded to Hardy blowing straight past Eddie and Venom bantering to play them as a strange romance with Venom clearly seeing Anne as potentially the third part of some sort of throuple. Squint, and you can see Cletus/Carnage/Shriek as a sort of twisted reflection of that, but it doesn't quite work; the Venom side is almost all weird breakup jokes and the Carnage side barreling through the plot at full speed. It takes a while for Cletus to get his symbiote with Eddie not having much to do while the audience waits, and despite all the eventual CGI slapstick, murder, and hints of something bigger with this mysterious mutant(*) prison, there's not all that much going on.

It doesn't really help that the cast seems out of sync, and not necessarily in a way where it's fun to watch people who think they're in different movies bump up against each other. Hardy's double act as Eddie and Venom is a little less its own thing and more familiar beats, but he's still entertaining in doing it. Naomie Harris has to work hard to outdo Woody Harrelson in chewing the scenery, but she manages, though Harrelson is doing a fine sort of bloodthirsty creep who thinks his disdain for human life makes him smarter than everybody else. There's a disconnect between Hardy and Harrelson, though; for all that Harrelson's trying to be repulsive as Kasady, Hardy's Brock seems a little too arch and able to interact with him as a normal human being, and it doesn't quite work with how he and Venom are fighting about the latter's desire to eat brains. He should be either a little more principled or uncomfortably hypocritical.

As a result, the movie really doesn't come together until the big climactic fight, when it doesn't have to try to figure out whether all the weird stuff of the first movie is going to be subtext or just right out there, and just has everybody yelling what's got them angry as they distort into grotesque shapes and pound each other. Unlike a lot of these movies, everybody has something to do (well, Williams is kind of stuck with hostage duty, but she at least seems annoyed by it) and can be cartoonishly thrown against a wall and knocked unconscious when they're not needed. Director Andy Serkis obviously knows something about making big motion-captured performances entertaining from the actor's side and is able to bring some of that to bear from the opposite end. The movie develops a little more personality when he and the crew can lean into pulpy creepy-building imagery, and those sequences are maybe half-a-star better when seen in 3D (it's a conversion job, but someone is having fun with depth and layers).

On top of that, the movie is 97 minutes long including credits and the inevitable mid-credit tease, which is something of a relief when so many of these superhero movies routinely stretch forty-five minutes longer out of sheer shagginess. Admittedly, that speed comes from the movie not having a lot to it because Marcel, Serkis, and the rest couldn't find more of whatever happenstance made the first sort of work, but there are many worse ways of being a mediocre movie than not wasting any more of the audience's time than necessary.

Also at eFilmCritic

Fantasia/New York Asian Film Festivals 2021.09: The Asian Angel and Joint

No 2021.08? Well, what can I say, 2021's weird - not much marked as "Day 08" for Fantasia that I caught, and then it was off to the Big Apple!

So, this would have seemed like a bigger deal if I were posting these updates in a timely fashion, what with having gone twice as far since, but even vaccinated for three months in mid-August, I did a lot of hemming and hawing about whether I wanted to get in a metal tube, travel four hours to New York City, and then sit in theaters for a few hours a day before getting into another tube and going home. I don't know as it's actually a lot safer now as I write this in mid-October, but at the very least, I've clearly made my peace with it.

The bulk of the New York Asian Film Festival's activity this year was at the School of Visual Arts Theatre, a nice spot in Manhattan that near as I can tell had its own strict Covid protocols on top of those of New York State/City, so nothing but water allowed in, meaning no reason to take off your mask. For many of the shows, the room was well below capacity, although I didn't get much of a sense of how much that was the venue/festival limiting tickets and how much was the audience not being ready to show up. I don't really know any of the people behind NYAFF now that it's not associated with Subway Cinema, so it could be either.

For all the nervousness at the start, though, it was kind of great. I've mentioned on the blog a few times that I haven't watched nearly as much as I thought I would since getting back from vacation last March, even though I had a bunch of unwatched discs on my shelf and the backlog has only grown over time, but both decision paralysis at the sheer number of options, but by it being just less fun at home than in the theater. Getting back to a theater, with a curated slate and a bunch of people who like the same thing was a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be.

Plus…

Filmmaker Q&As! Friday's late show had director Oudai Kojima, co-star/producer Jin-Cheol Kim, and moderator Karen Severns there for Joint. Kojima grew up in New York but works in Japan, so this was coming home for him. The thing he was most excited about was his star, Ikken Yamamoto, who from what I gather didn't have many professional credits before this, but he was the sort of guy where you could see the charisma immediately and where there's a certain amount of real-life experience that a lot of professional actors don't have. He also talked about how he wasn't really influenced by a lot of yakuza films, and while I didn't necessarily see that as the case at the time - it sure feels like one in structure - I see where he's coming from now. It's a movie about data mining, replacing employees with contractors, and corporate consolidation at its heart. Truth be told, most yakuza movies have an interest in legitimate business, either as a target or a metaphor, and I kind of feel like Joint might have worked better if it did that more explicitly.

It's also pretty darn stylish, especially for a micro-indie-type thing. You can see the places where it's stretched thin, but it kind of transforms into a look and atmosphere, which you can't exactly do on purpose or even necessarily a second time once you get some attention, but it will be interesting to see what this team can do when they've got some more resources behind them.

The Asian Angel

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2021 in SVA Theatre Beatrice (New York Asian Film Festival 2021, DCP)

The Asian Angel is almost, but not quite, two road movies in different languages that got stuck together and tangled up, which occasionally plays into how sometimes people need to get things out even when the idea of people hearing and understanding is awful. That there's a romance involved is unlikely, but the filmmakers fundamentally understand how rickety the whole thing is, and make no apologies for giving the audience the movie they came to see.

It involves widowed novelist Takeshi Aoki (Sosuke Ikematsu) arriving in Seoul with son Manabu (Ryo Sato) in tow despite neither of them speaking Korean and general tension between the countries as bad as they've been in decades, if not since World War II. Takeshi's brother Toru (Joe Odagiri) has been there a while, running a shading import/export business and giving Takeshi the impression that there's work and Japanese-language schools they can afford which may not be the actual case. Nearby, the Choi family has their own tensions; Seol ("Moon" Choi Hee-Seo) is seeing the last vestiges of her hopes to become a pop singer vanish, brother Jung-Woo (Kim Min-Jae) isn't really doing well with the family business that their parents left him, and just-past-teenage sister Po-Mu (Kim Ye-Eun) is bitter that there's not a lot left for her as a result. Their paths have already crossed a couple of times before they're on the same train - the Aokis chasing a deal that might save Toru's business, the Chois visiting their parents' grave - but Manabu's tendency to wander off and an encounter with Seol's agent winds up with the two groups thoroughly intermingled.

Writer/director Yuya Ishii tends to build his movies around lingering wounds, at least as far as the ones that have made the North American festival circuit go (which ironically does not include The Great Passage, his biggest hit, which appears more upbeat), and that's the case here: Whatever modest success Takeshi and Seol may have had at the starts of their careers is thoroughly spent, and their brothers' businesses are both a bad break or two from just not being there any more. These families haven't been broken, but don't necessarily have a lot to say to each other at the moment; everything to be said has been said, and while they need each other, Toru doesn't really know what he's got for Takeshi to do and Jung-Woo can't really articulate to Seol why he thinks visiting their parents' graves will help.

Finding themselves thrown together with the other family doesn't seem like it should work - early scenes of Takeshi and Seol talking past each other smartly play out as her recognizing his good intentions as being somewhat patronizing, and between Ishii and actors Sosuke Ikematsu and Choi Hee-Seo, even the subtitle-reading audience has a clear idea of what they understand and what they don't, and when they later discover that each speaks a little English, there's a bit of relief at finally being able to communicate, but also a need to be clear and put effort into their words. There's a sort of paradox to how these people are communicating - there are a lot of scenes where it's just a relief to get something out without or to listen and sympathize without details, but also care to how having to use a foreign language forces one to consider what they think and feel rather than just lean on expectations.

As introspective as that is, the movie and cast are often lively. Takeshi and Seol make an enjoyable pair because her cynical cool plays well against his haplessness, a shared frustration at things not going as they should uniting them. As the brothers, Joe Odagiri and Kim Min-Jae supply contrasting sorts of easygoing charm; Odagiri's Toru is almost convincing in his amoral detachment until his weakness for Korean girls shows up or he has to stand up for his friends and family but doesn't want to make a big deal out of it, the sort of layered performance that is kind of sneakily good because Ishii doesn't let him usurp Ikematsu as the movie's center, while Kim Min-Jae is kind of familiar in presenting Jung-Woo's working-class bluster while making his pride in Seol's talent the sort of genuine that annoys her but doesn't break into cringe for the audience. Kim Ye-Eun feels like she'd have something really interesting to do if this were just the Chois' story - Po-Mu is often sulky and snarky and she clearly resents being a side character even if she doesn't break the fourth wall about it.

Their stories are all mixed up, and it clearly takes a bit of effort to keep them that way. Ishii doesn't necessarily have to work hard to build things up in order to knock them over - there's something impressively well-calibrated about how he handles the line between "we're poor but stable" and "your car breaking down on a cold night is really dangerous" - but he puts the families into a number of small, disposable tricky situations to keep things moving, with the climax a more urgent one rather than something the others were building to. The angel of the title winds up serving as an odd bit of glue, like Takeshi, Seol, and their families need a little something extra to bind them than just a shared situation.

And yet even without it, the two bickering families have been so thoroughly intertwined by the end that imagining their journeys as merely parallel seems impossible, like this was one story from the start. It's an impressive bit of alchemy, even if it does, maybe, take a little extra time for the combined unit to settle and cool.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Joint

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2021 in SVA Theatre Beatrice (New York Asian Film Festival 2021, DCP)

Joint is the sort of festival movie you grade on a bit of a curve - it's so thoroughly independent that even the middle-aged star is a complete newcomer and the strains on the filmmakers' resources are easy to see, but there's enough that feels new and unique done well enough that one is glad to have seen it. The film's flaws make themselves plain as it goes along, but it's filled with stuff worth giving a bit of attention.

It opens in somewhat familiar fashion, with yakuza associate Takeshi "Take" Ishigami (Ikken Yamamoto) being released from prison after two years. He takes a job doing construction from a reformed friend, but he's living in a motel until his parole is over and he can go back to Tokyo and his old work compiling lists of potential victims for the network's scammers, sourced in part by Korean immigrant Jung-Hi (Kim Jin-Cheol). It's a bit of a different world than when he went in - the crooks are making their cold calls from moving cars, the gangs are outsourcing more, and the investment he makes in a software start-up to launder his earnings may be his most successful job even if he doesn't really understand any of it.

For all that the director protested that this wasn't particularly influenced by other yakuza films, it nevertheless has a similar feel: From Battles without Honor and Humanity forward, at the very least, these movies have always been businesslike and dense with information; where the best-known films of this genre focus on gang leadership, director Oudai Kojima and writer Ham-R tend to cast their gaze a little lower on the totem pole. The film is pointed in examining how that milieu has changed, but then, these movies have been grappling with these gangs eyeing respectability for decades.

In fact, it arguably sticks too close to gangster tropes as it goes on. This genre has always been reflections of the legitimate world, and there's a neat angle here in how Take is effectively a contractor and the yakuza less the sort of loyal institutions that Japanese companies used to be (director Kojima grew up in New York, and I'm somewhat curious to what extent he's drawing from American versus Japanese experiences). The sharpest and most fascinating element may be how these scam artists and frauds are evolving into and merging with Big Data and venture capital, a new brand of hidden powers whose artificially-intelligent apps are direct correlations to Take's knack for pulling the useful items out of a mass of information. It's a parallel that intrigues but which Kojima and Ham-R can't quite make into a story, only lightly touching on what's going on at the software company and falling back on what's going on at the top of the gang during the last act, which isn't really important relative to what Take's up to.

And the audience is invested in Take, in large part because Ikken Yamamoto is a heck of a find. It's his first credited performance, let alone lead, but he walks through the film with a smile that's not just charming but signals that Take is completely at ease with who and what he is, cheerfully confused when his friend tries to get him to go straight and sitting in on business meetings with this perfect blend of ignorance and second-hand menace. There's an easy three-way chemistry between him, Kim Jin-Cheol and Kim Chang-Bak, work friends who split when it becomes clear just how amoral one is. On top of that, what seems like a side effect of indie film production and dicey continuity - Take's hair and the rest of his look changes between scenes as they're filmed weeks apart - becomes sort of meaningful, as his "legitimate" business takes the fore and he becomes a sort of chameleon even though he's clearly the same guy underneath.

The whole package isn't quite the sum of its best parts, but between Yamamoto and the angle Kojima takes in seeing the yakuza as something more specific than just corporate analogs, I'm hoping that someone with some resources sees Joint and decides to find out what this group can do with a budget, whether it's something along the same lines or not.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 October 2021 - 14 October 2021

Is the movie coming out this weekend the most-pandemic-delayed or does it just seem that way because of all the delays it had before all that?

• I speak, of course, of No Time to Die, Daniel Craig's farewell to James Bond and the first time that series has really had a finale (although, to be fair, Casino Royale was its first hard reset). It ties together a lot of threads from previous movies to make for the longest film in the series, a fairly-massive 163 minutes . It is at The Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common (including Imax & Dolby Cinema), Fenway (including 3D), South Bay (including Imax & Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, Assembly Row (including Imax & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), the Embassy, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The Capitol has a one-off screening of coming-of-age drama Runt on Friday night, while Arsenal Yards has "PinkFong & Baby Shark's Space Adventure" for a matinee on Saturday and Sunday. Scream is having 25th anniversary screenings (ahead of a video re-release) at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row on Sunday and Monday. Fenway and South Bay also have a 35th anniversary screening of BMX flick Rad on Thursday.
  
  AMC is apparently doing "Thrills & Chills Surprise Screenings" on Fridays and Wednesdays all month at Boston Common; $5 and you find out what they're showing when . They also give After We Fell a regular booking; I guess those one-offs did all right.
• Most of A24's weird supernatural stuff has seemingly been homegrown, but Lamb is an Icelandic import, but it looks like the same sort of combination between weird and classy that they go for. It features Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason as a childless couple who discover what is either a baby with the head of a sheep or a lamb that walks on two legs and try to raise it as their own. That is at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (including a Sunday Masked Matinee), the Capitol, Kendall Square, and Boston Common.
  
  The Coolidge also offers a few one-offs: Hocus Pocus plays at midnight on Friday on 35mm, Bram Stoker's Dracula is on 35mm film at midnight Saturday, Goethe-Institut offers The German Lesson Sunday afternoon, and Moonrise Kingdom is the Wes World 35mm show on Tuesday
• Over at The Brattle Theatre hosts The Boston Women's Film Festival opening night on Friday with Fanny: The Right to Rock, with director Bobbi Jo Hart and June Millington (the guitarist of the mostly-forgotten all-woman rock group; the rest of the festival will be on-line.
  
  Saturday and Sunday, they bring back Małni – Towards The Ocean, Towards The Shore, which played virtually and as part of The DocYard's virtual series earlier this year. The DocYard's regular Monday presentation is Writing with Fire, a look at independent local journalism in India; a pre-recorded Q&A follows.
  
  The late show on Saturday and Sunday is one of my favorite's from last year's Fantasia Festival, Detention, a Taiwanese horror film about students trapped in their seemingly haunted school during a period when Taiwan was as much a dictatorship as the mainland, meaning the ghosts and monsters aren't all there is to fear (it is also available via their online site, The Brattlite). The rest of the week is a Deborah Kerr Centennial Tribute, with Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus on Tuesday, An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant on Wednesday, and The Innocents on Thursday
• The latest flag-waving anthology to hit Chinese screens for National Day is My Country, My Parents, and I must admit to being kind of curious about this; all four listed directors - Shen Teng, Wu Jing, Xu Zheng, and Zhang Ziyi - are better known as actors, and I think this is Zhang's directorial debut.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond opens Doctor, a Tamil-language action/adventure starring Sivakarthikeyan as a combat medic who finds himself in the middle of a kidnapping and trafficking plot while visiting Chennai. For Telugu speakers (and subtitle readers), there is Konda Polam, "an epic tale of 'becoming'" featuring Panja Vaisshnav Tej as a shepherd in Nallamala who must fight off both tigers and poachers.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square opened Fever Dream, a Peruvian film in which a woman remembers a mystery on her deathbed, this past Wednesday.
• The Regent Theatre hosts The Lonely Seal International Film, Screenplay, and Music Festival, which actually kicked off on Wednesday and runs through Sunday with a program that is mostly short films, some in blocks attached to features, along with seminars and musical performances. Smack in the middle on Saturday night, but not part of the program, is New England Ska Summit, a documentary about the genre in New England with directors Dan & Jack Vitale on-hand for Q&A and a live performance from Rikki Rocksteady.
• The second annual Nightstream virtual fest, co-produced by The Boston Underground Film Festival, adds new entries through Sunday, most of which will be available for a few days after, with the last ones expiring on Wednesday. I can recommend Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, and especially Mad God (though I wasn't quite so taken with King Car, Stanleyville, and We're All Going to the World's Fair), and have Code Name Nagasaki, LandLocked, After Blue, The Taking, Cosmic Dawn, To The Moon, The Greenhouse, and All My Friends Hate Me lined up to watch myself.
• Bright Lights at Home offers United States vs Reality Winner for 24 hours starting at 7pm Wednesday, with director Sonia Kennebeck and producer Ines Hofmann Kanna doing a Thursday-night Q&A via Zoom. Slots are free but limited.
• The West Newton Cinema has a shiny new website, which shows No Time to Die, The Addams Family 2, The Many Saints of Newark, Dear Evan Hansen (Friday/Saturday/Tuesday), Cry Macho (no shows Saturday), Shang-Chi, and Summer of Soul (Monday/Wednesday/Thursday).
  
  The Lexington Venue is open through Monday (a holiday for some) with No Time to Die and The Card Counter.
• Cinema Salem has Venom 2 and Titane from Friday to Monday. The Friday "Night Lights" show is The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and Thursday's "Cinema Sounds" show is Psycho. They continue to host The Salem Horror Fest from Friday to Monday, and the festival also includes virtual events and a Night of the Living Dead marathon, along with other Romero oddities.
  
  The Luna Theater has John Carpenter's Halloween on Friday, Prisoners of the Ghostland twice on Saturday (masks required for the matinee) with Cryptozoo in between and the Teseracte Players later that night (probably doing Rocky Horror. Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street plays four times on Sunday, there's a surprise Weirdo Wednesday show, and Annihilation plays Thursday evening as part of UMass Lowell's Philosophy and Film series (first-come, first-serve, but free).
• The Harvard Film Archive begins a virtual program to go along with the Harvard Art Museums' "Devour the Land" exhibit, with the first selection, The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant, available from Friday to Monday. There will be some live screenings, but you need a Harvard ID for those.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.

I'm looking forward to checking out the upgraded main screen at the Somerville with No Time to Die and then maybe catching up with Venom 2, Titane, and maybe I'm Your Man if I can fit them in around the Nightstream stuff.