Anita

How big a star was Anita Mui Yim-Fong in Hong Kong? There are three statues at the end of the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Sha Tsui. One is cartoon piglet McDull, for the kids. One is Bruce Lee. The other is this:

(Aside: Just looking through my photos from my trip to Hong Kong from March 2019, I am reminded that, one, it was an amazing experience, and two, it seems like forever ago between the news out of the SAR and spending so much of the past year and a half stuck in my apartment)

I'm not sure we saw that much of this Anita Mui in the biopic that bears her name which opened worldwide (including AMC Boston Common) this past weekend - aside from actress Louise Wong being a very conventionally pretty model compared to the woman occasionally described as "The Ugly Queen of Pop", this lady is defiant and in your face while the character in the movie is mostly a hard working performer and a good collaborator. I've got no doubt Anita Mui was that, too, but in that case there should have been some contrast between those personae. Instead, she's kind of reduced to a generic, if very successful, pop star, with the fact that she had songs like "Bad Girl" banned from the radio for being too sexy just a thing that happened.

That doesn't make it a bad movie, realy, but it does mean that the review winds up doing a really bad job of talking about the movie you've seen rather than the one you haven't; as you see below, there are a lot of places where I feel like Longmand Leung and company could have dug in and made a story about Anita Mui that brought out what made her special and how she was such a vital and important part of Hong Kong even if most people outside of the colony/region mostly knew her as Jackie Chan's co-star in Rumble in the Bronx. This really isn't the definitive Anita Mui story, even if it's probably the only one that can get made in Hong Kong today. It's a great-looking one that's solidly produced, though - it highlights why she's beloved beyond just being a pop star and its eerily familiar last act (the 2003 SARS epidemic was a major backdrop to the last year of her life) gives it one heck of an entry point for the younger generation to connect with it. It works for what it is.

Something that kind of shocked me was just how little with her in it that I had on my shelves - just Moon Warriors and Drunken Master II; I somehow don't even have Rumble in the Bronx! I'd meant to watch a couple films the night before just to get a feel for her rather than comparing Louise Wong's performance to a dim memory, but the options were pretty thin, even when you included US streaming services. I'll probably try and correct that with my next DDDHouse order, but it's slim pickings there (no The Heroic Trio, for instance). Hopefully Panorama or someone gets a few discs out the door to coincide with this hitting video in a few months, because I am ready for them.

Also, it was a pretty good crowd for a Cantonese-language film, which always seems to do less well than the Mandarin-language ones at Boston Common. Part of that may be that it's only getting one or two shows a day rather than the three or four a new release usually gets in its first week of release, but it was nice to see this with an audience that had some investment. It probably won't get more than a week there - the app doesn't even show screenings on Thursday the 18th - so if you want to catch this one, do it this week (although CMC does seem to get their releases to US streams fairly quickly).

Anita

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2021 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)

Anita is a perfectly fine musician biography for someone who seemingly should have something a lot grander. Anita Mui was a huge star in Hong Kong - commercially successful at a level few if any have been since and envelope-pushing on top of that - and this movie could almost be about any pop star who died young. It's a glossy, enjoyable movie of that type, and seems to be going over well in its native territory, but outsiders won't necessarily get a sense of what a big deal she was.

After a brief glimpse at Mui preparing for her farewell concert, the film makes a stop in 1969, with 5-year-old Mui Yim-Fong and her big sister Oi-Fong singing at Hong Kong's Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park, before skipping forward to 1982, when the pair are already a veteran nightclub sister act, to the point where Yim-Fong develops calluses on her vocal chords. Oi-Fong (Fish Liew Chi-Yu) encourages Yim-Fong (Louise Wong Lo-Yiu) to join her in applying to a TV talent show whose winner will receive a recording contract, applying with the English names "Ann" and "Anita". Ann is rejected, but Anita eventually wins the deal, soon meeting a number of people who would be close friends and collaborators throughout her life: Label executive So Hau-Leung (Lam Ka-Tung), costumer Eddie Lau Pui-Kei (Louis Koo Tin-Lok), and fellow entertainer Leslie Cheung (Terrance Lau Chun-Him).

Anita Mui seldom had a down period after that, spending the rest of the 1980s firmly atop the Cantopop charts while also doing two or three movies a year, and continuing to release albums even after she stopped doing live concerts in the 1990s. That sort of success creates a bit of a dilemma for director Longmond Leung Lok-Man and co-writer Jack Ng Wai-Lun, especially when one considers that she apparently wasn't a songwriter (and if she is closely associated with any, the film does not give them any screen time). They wind up trying to build a story out of her personal life - her romance with Japanese pop star Godo Yuki (Ayumu Nakajima) is given some time, and an argument with a gangster while in a later relationship with gang-adjacent beau "Ben" (Yo Yang) leads to a self-imposed Thai exile - but they never find the hook that sets Anita apart from anyone else who wins a talent show and exploded to such a degree.

The frustrating thing is, looking at the movie and reading a little bit about her life suggests that there is actually a ton of great material that they chose not to use, for one reason or another: What if they took the comment that she never knew her father and thus the likes of Mr. So and Eddie became father figures, and crossed that with how she's been working since the age of four to support her family - does this help explain the burn-out that led her to leave live performance? You'd think from watching the movie that Ann left show business when she was rejected from the talent competition in 1982, but she had a modest music and film career of her own, and there could be a story there (her life also intersects and parallels that of fellow icon Leslie Cheung's). Heck, she arguably parallels Hong Kong itself, starting out poor and grimy and transmuting that into glamor before being one of the celebrities that stayed during the handover and never made a bid for success in Hollywood or Beijing. Bits of all these things come through, and one suspects that the heavy hands of both China and the entertainment industry inspire dancing around some subjects, but as with many biographies, trying to cover the entirety of even a relatively short life often means that none of the facets that made that life interesting get much time in the forefront

The film is handsomely mounted and fun to wallow in, at least; Longmond Leung teamed with Luk Kim-Ching to make a trio of slick thrillers before taking on this project, and Anita is even more polished. There's a gloss to even the disreputable spaces and a knack for capturing different facets of the city, a shininess makes it a fine nostalgia trip, paralleling Hong Kong's rise and indulging its local audience's fond memories of the time. Leung and his team seldom dawdle over any particular moment but don't particularly seem to rush. The occasional cut to actual footage of Anita's concerts and appearances emphasizes just what an impressive recreation this can be, even if it hints at a rawness and vitality the film can't always match.

That's not a dig at Louise Wong; the relative newcomer playing Anita isn't given a whole lot to do because of how stardom often seems to just happen to her, but when she gets a chance to show that there's something defiant about this woman - there's an annoyed look folks may recognize from Mui's comedic roles - she manages, but that doesn't happen nearly often enough. She and Fish Liew play well off each other as sisters, enough so to pique one's interest in the version of this story that focuses on their relationship; the same goes for Terrance Lau, who captures both the exuberance of young Leslie Cheung and the self-doubt that will eventually eat it alive. Louis Koo has a featured role as Eddie and he's a little more theatrical in his combination of playfulness and gravitas, not above making a meal of the sort of mentor role that's got to be big enough to inspire an all-time great.

As someone only a little familiar with Anita Mui - the sort that has seen her in the likes of Drunken Master II and The Heroic Trio and who has noticed the reverence with which other Hong Kong legends speak of her - I wanted more from this movie, for it to make a case for her greatness and show how she achieved it. Instead, it's a reminder, and a chance for folks who were there to relive it in sharp digital clarity rather than on grainy VHS, and from its apparent popularity in Hong Kong, it manages that fairly well.

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Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 November 2021 - 18 November 2021

I used to say that it was astounded that Marvel had built an empire based on Iron Man, of all characters. Now it's reached the point where other studios clear the way after a movie based on The Eternals, whom even lifelong comic fans occasionally have trouble remembering.

• The big release this week is Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's semi-autobiographical film about growing up in the title city in the late 1960s, when The Troubles were intensifying and the father of Branagh's alter ego is considering a move to the UK for safety and stability. It's at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (including a Sunday Masked Matinee), The Capitol, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Assembly Row.
  
  The Coolidge has the director's cut of True Romance at midnight on Friday and a 35mm print of The Last Boy Scout at the same time Saturday as part of their Noirvember festivities. Sunday afternoon, Goethe-Institut presents Copilot, the new film from Anne Zohra Berrached which follows a young woman faced with traditional parents, a lover they would disapprove of, and her own desires. Monday's Big Screen Classic is Clue, Tuesday's Noirvember feature is Laura (on 35mm film).
  
  Jane Campion's latest opens at the Coolidge and Kendall Square on Wednesday, with The Power of the Dog featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as a rancher making life miserable for his brother (Jesse Plemons) and his new family (Kirsten Dunst & Kodi Smit-McPhee).
• The Brattle Theatre opens Suzanna Andler, the new film from Benoit Jacquot, featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a woman who finds herself at a turning point as she visits a potential vacation home. They also have a new restoration of Possession for the late show, with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as a couple whose marriage is disintegrating in fairly impressive fashion. They also show No Ordinary Man on Tuesday and Thursday as part of Transgender Awareness Week, which is also available for 24 hours starting at 7pm as part of Bright Lights at Home, with filmmakers Aisling Chin-Yee & Chase Joynt phoning in Thursday evening. The Brattle also has an Archival Screening Night Roadshow program on Thursday.
  
  The DocYard selection All About My Sisters comes to The Brattlite virtual screening room, joining Detention.
• Surely one of the biggest movies in Hong Kong this fall is Anita, with Louise Wong Lo-Yiu playing Anita Mui, a legendary Cantopop singer who may be best known in the USA for two movies where she co-starred with Jackie Chan. She's the equivalent of Madonna there and one of Hong Kong's biggest stars ever (for reference, she and Bruce Lee have the two large statues in the city's walk of fame). Longman Leung Lok-Man directs; he's half of the team that made Helios and the Cold War films and his team apparently did an incredible job of recreating 1990s Hong Kong.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond has more from India, including Kurup, with Dulquer Salmaan as the title character, one of the nation's most notorious criminals; Telugu action flick Raja Vikramarka; and Telugu comedy Pushpaka Vimanam, plus Bangla-language drama Binisutoy: Without Strings playing Saturday and Sunday. Fresh Pond continues Diwali openings Sooryavanshi (as does Boston Common) and Annaatthe.
  
  My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission continues with subtitled and English-dubbed showtimes at Boston Common (dubbed), South Bay (subbed/dubbed), and Assembly Row (dubbed).
• French thriller Only the Animals makes its way to Landmark Theatres Kendall Square, though for limited shows, despite it being a crime film from Dominik Moll, maybe best known for With a Friend Like Harry. They also have documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road on Wednesday evening.
  
  Meanwhile, you have to go to Waltham and the Embassy Theater for Tick, Tick… Boom!, playing there (through Monday and on Thursday) before it hits Netflix next week; it's Lin-Manuel Miranda's directorial debut, with Andrew Garfield starring in Jonathan Larson's musical about his time on the way to writing Rent, making me wonder if that guy does anything but write musicals about people in the musical-making business.
• Clifford the Big Red Dog opened on Wednesday and continues this week. It plays The Capitol Theatre, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, Chestnut Hill, and Paramount+. American Sniper continues its Veterans' Day run at Boston Common, as does TV Movie CS Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert.
  
  AMC Boston Common teams with Disney+ for surprise screenings from various imprints Friday through Sunday (no titles are listed, but running times are). The Ghibli fest returns to Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row with Castle in the Sky dubbed on Sunday/Thursday and subtitled on Monday. Another notable animation studio, Laika, has screens on Tuesday with Paranorman playing at Fenway and Assembly Row. Boston Common also has their weekly Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday. Fenway, South Bay, and Arsenal Yards have the anniversary screening of High Society on Sunday.
• The Boston Jewish Film continues its virtual program, with an animation workshop on Friday, and live Q&As to go with Who Will Remain? (Sunday), The Adventures of Saul Bellow (Sunday), Quarantine Shorts (Tuesday), and Shtetlers (Thursday).
• The ICA has two more screenings of the Sundance Film Festival Short FIlm Tour program on Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
• The West Newton Cinema has Belfast, Eternals, The French Dispatch, and No Time to Die. The Lexington Venue has Spencer and The French Dispatch Friday through Sunday, still apparently down to one screen.
• The Museum of Science has Friday/Saturday night screenings of Dune in the Mugar Omni Theater Dome through the end of November, with Thanksgiving weekend the only one still showing tickets available.
• Cinema Salem has Spencer, Eternals, and The French Dispatch (all of which have open-caption shows Monday afternoon), a Night Light screening of Repo Man on Friday, plus Noirvember screenings of Kiss Me Deadly on Sunday and Thursday.
  
  The Luna Theater continues "A24 Month", with Heredity on Friday, plus a masked matinee of 20th Century Women, Lady Bird, The Florida Project, and It Comes at Night on Saturday. Spike Lee Sunday is Do the Right Thing. There's a free-to-members shows on "Weirdo Wednesday", and Thursday, when they're showing Zola.
• More virtual "Devour the Land" show streaming from The Harvard Film Archive this week is 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 (apparently they skipped a week last week).
• 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 planning to hit Belfast and already have my ticket for Anita, plus I'm sure that this is going to be the time that Possession really clicks for me. I'll probably finally get around to The French Dispatch this week, too.

The Spine of Night

Yikes, I just noticed that this played one of the festivals where I've got a many-film backlog of reviews to write. Maybe I should get off my butt and get to that. In the meantime…

A Q&A, with Ned and co-director Philip Gelatt, who is apparently fairly local (the film was produced ni Providence) and joined forces with Morgan Galen King, who had previously made an animated short that served as the film's basis. They shot it in a warehouse that didn't even bother with a green screen, since they weren't going to be compositing the images rather than drawing over them. Which means that, no, nobody was naked except for one very enthusiastic extra, and few of the people in the voice cast actually provided the motion - just, I believe, Betty Gabriel, who has gone on to do notable work in Get Out and other projects, though she was a more or less complete unknown when they started working in 2013.

It sounds like a genuine labor of love, at least; Gelatt noted that this sort of rotoscoped animation was pretty much a dead art form, which meant that there was a fairly steep learning curve for the crew, although many would take the skills they developed here and go work for Undone at Amazon. It also sounded like a surreal experience writing to various people's agents to see who would be interested in doing voice work for what I imagine was a relative pittance. Patton Oswalt, Joe Manganiello, and a few others jumped in as genre fans; Lucy Lawless wasn't so much a fan but knows what she's good at and where she can grab an audience, and Richard E. Grant joining up was apparently sort of surreal, as he's a guy that will take a job but doesn't necessarily love some of this stuff. For instance, "I loved Hudson Hawk" might not be the best way to get him to sign on.

Anyway, one more late show at the Brattle tonight, and on various VOD services as well. It's not my thing, really - I'm not big enough on swords and sorcery or gore-as-draw to really go for it absent much else "stuff I'd see at Fantasia" playing theaters, but I kind of get the appeal, and for the folks that go for this, it's pretty impressively put together.

The Spine of Night

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 November 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)

The Spine of Night wears its influences proudly, to the extent that one may wonder what it is besides those influences, particularly if bloody fantasy is not particularly one's cup of tea. It's an impressively-mounted example of that particular genre, especially considering how far back its inspirations are, but not for everyone. If one isn't into nudity, bloody violence, and power fantasies for their own sake, they probably won't get a whole lot else out of the movie.

It opens with a naked witch (voice of Lucy Lawless) making her way up a snowy mountain to confront the guardian of a strange Bloom (voice of Richard E. Grant), and while he is used to fighting those who approach, he finds her more sympathetic than most. She has a Bloom of her own, and tells him of how she came to be there - her capture by a mercenary (voice of Joe Manganiello) working for the local lord (voice of Patton Oswalt) and later encounter with scholar Ghal-Sur (voice of Jordan Douglas Smith) and his own use of the Bloom's power.

There is an idea or two in play here - folk knowledge being twisted by scholars who don't have the same sort of respect, power corrupting and eventually doing nothing but perpetuating itself, that sort of thing - but filmmakers Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt are somewhat scattershot in terms of introspection and metaphor, more intent on stuff closer to the surface. Their world building is on a grand scale that spans millennia from the battles of gods to the last resistance against an immortal tyrant, although often more comfortable in the muck, down among the people getting crushed beneath the heels of monsters who seem to have ambition but no goals. Like many of the 1980s animated fantasies that inspired it, King and Gelatt (adapting and expanding King's short film "Exordium") split the film into several smaller segments, and though they are fair short stories, they don't often feel as though the segments are built from each other. They're part of a continuity, but mostly just things that happened in a certain order, not a greater arc.

For instance, a pivotal story is framed around an adventurer (voice of Betty Gabriel) seemingly developing doubts about her work as the archive she serves does little to actually apply the knowledge she discovers for any good purpose, and though it's a theme that recurs a bit (the story the Guardian tells the witch has a similar theme of withholding information), but it winds up feeling cast aside, an idea briefly pondered but not explored on the way to the next fight. There's a deliciously nasty against-type vocal performance by Patton Oswalt as a callow prince that winds up rushed on the way to the next, nastier villain. The climax is a fine action sequence that probably would have cost millions of dollars as a traditional live-action/CGI hybrid but which plays out as tough-guy posturing rather than a desperate final strike.

But, if one enjoys that posture - the sheer appeal to the id that the folks who commission pulp novels with nearly-naked warriors hacking through grotesque monsters - The Spine of Night delivers. King and Gelatt shot the action in a Rhode Island warehouse and then spent the next few years animating over it, and while the distinction between the more simply drawn and colored foreground characters and the painted backgrounds is probably wider than it ever was with the digital tools at their disposal, they nevertheless avoid different sorts of uncanny valley issues that have plagued similar rotoscoped animation and their motion-captured descendants: The action is smooth and well-choreographed but feels of a piece with its medium, seldom stiff or feeling too beholden to the merely human level of expression underneath the paint. And if you like blood and guts, the film has plenty, reveling in slashing people up, burning them alive, and planting a garden in the skull of a vanquished god, equally at ease with horrific magic and nasty swordplay, the participants often clad in as little leather is necessary to carry their stuff. It's power applied in the service of horror and release, and the filmmakers don't pretend that they're above that ugliness.

It is, quite honestly, not my thing, although I never exactly checked out of the movie, instead spending more mental energy on what it's all about or how everything fits together than the film can support. There's always been an audience for this sort of bloody sword and sorcery even if most producers are too squeamish to admit it, and The Spine of Night caters to them in fine fashion.

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Sam Raimi's Spider-Movies in 4K

When I did the 4K upgrade, I said I wasn't going to be rebuying many things that I already had on Blu-ray because those still look quite good and both the new TV and player do a good job of upscaling, so how much will new discs really get me? Anyway, I think you can guess how well that went after the first time I picked up a disc of something made on film and saw that, yeah, there's a difference. Amazon puts these movies on sale for $30 for the entire Sam Raimi Spider-Man series in 4K, and I'm all over that.

Anyway, the discs look great; movies were still being shot on film at this point and even if they were being edited and composited off a digital intermediate, Raimi is clearly a guy with strong ideas of how his movies should look, and he's not particularly worried about them having to exist alongside anything else, so there are bold colors and contrasts which absolutely benefit from an UltraHD/HDR presentation. It's a terrific upgrade.

It was also a real pleasure to just watch these movies again for the first time in years, because they're pretty terrific as a set and even the weakest of them feels interesting. A thing that really surprised me is how much my impressions of the first two movies have been a bit reversed from reality; I thought of Spider-Man 2 as the one that Raimi assert his personality and style more, in large part due to the memorable operating room massacre, but it's actually the one that nudges things closer to the mainstream after diving into the first like a guy who might never get a chance to do this again. By the time that the third comes out, it's not quite a movie that could have been made by anyone, but you can sort of see the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming. I enjoy the heck out of those movies, but there's no denying that for all that Marvel will give their filmmakers some room, there are clear boundaries and a sort of gravity that draws them back toward being able to all fit in an Avengers crossover without looking out of place. Sam Raimi and Ang Lee weren't really thinking along those lines, and it's kind of left their movies striking and memorable but also the last gasps before "counting" mattered in films the same way it does in comics.

Anyway, I was just going to log them on Letterboxd and move on, but, well, I went long enough to want these on my space as well.

Spider-Man

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2021 Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

Coming back to this for the first time in a while, with two decades of other Marvel stuff since, it's amazing just how much Sam Raimi is in it. There are the same sorts of comic-inspired framings and transitions that he used in Darkman, crazy montage, and cameras that zoom in to make sure that the audience can't miss something important in the scene as he gleefully leans into what you can do with a movie when everyone knows and acknowledges that it's a movie rather than trying to make the audience a generic observer. The action owes a ton to Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness as he leans into how a fight between superheroes is going to have a bunch of slapstick to it. It's an approach that not many others have gone for, opting instead for grim intensity and rocket-powered smashing through walls, but just look at the way these things are staged as characters get thrown around like ragdolls and look bewildered while absorbing punishment that would kill a normal person: They're superhuman but they react in ways we understand without grounding the action too much. It's absurd and entertaining but always right near the line where someone could get hurt in a way that wouldn't be funny at all. All of that makes for a sincere embrace of the pulpy comic book roots. Back then, it seemed like Sam holding back a bit, making the comics more in line with the mainstream films he'd been working on, but compare it to what Marvel's doing now, and it's clear that he's doing much more to drag movies toward what comics do than drag comics to what people expect from film. It's not quite one guy with a vision going for broke, but it's probably closer to that than I thought at the time, so excited to see my favorite director put in charge of a blockbuster meant for everyone.

From the very start of this one, Raimi, writer David Koepp, the cast, Danny Elfman, and everyone else are going big but also filling in all sorts of great details. From the opening shots where the camera seems to be just checking out Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood, it feels specifically like New York, for instance, and the different family dynamics of the Parkers, Watsons, and Osborns all feel true. Some of the turn-of-the-century digital effects aren't perfect, but it's okay because of how Raimi isn't exactly gonig for realism anyway. They mesh with the style and tone so that it all fits.

The amount of dead-solid perfect casting is kind of amazing, too - aside from how Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire are just right as teens/young adults figuring themselves out (something Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben lays out as a theme beautifully), there's James Franco making Harry Osborn just the right sort of tragic figure and Willem Defoe so perfectly on Raimi's wavelength that it's kind of surprising they haven't done more together. Dunst is probably the unsung hero of this trilogy, even though I've seen people hate her Mary Jane Watson for one reason or another that often boils down to MJ not just being Peter's conscience but valuing herself. The movie is filled with people who have ambitions beyond being Spiday's supporting cast, and it helps make Peter a believable underdog as he's a little intimidated and finally ready to push back.

It's a great little movie. That the folks involved would (for many) top themselves a couple years later is its own sort of amazing.

Spider-Man 2

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

As much as this is considered the best of the series, I may like the first one more, having watched them in the past week. This one is striking more of a balance between the Raimi-ness of the first and something that feels a little more comfortably mainstream. Maybe that's what makes it strike such a chord - the movie lays what it's doing right out there with utter sincerity in a way that feels familiar, yet there's still enough style that you're definitely not just watching TV.

Which isn't to say that there's any single thing in this movie that doesn't work. It's more or less the same great cast with added Alfred Molina, for example, and while Molina has a little trouble making the leap from Otto Octavius being a mentor to him being a madman, he gets past it, and the confusion and difficulty works. This film's the most convincing and matter-of-fact go at playing Spidey as the hard-luck hero on the big screen - one always believes that the things which would make all his gifts snap into place rather than work against each other are just out of reach rather than playing as contrivances, even when they come in the form of cartoony Daily Bugle scenes.

And, of course, the centerpiece action sequences are terrific, especially the nightmarish bit with Ock's arms that seems tailor made for Raimi, not just because of the chainsaw but because those tentacles with cameras on the end are able to actually make the Sam-Ram-a-Cam part of the movie's text. The really surprising thing is that there aren't actually that many of them - the story has the confidence in itself to let the movie breathe between them. The most memorable part of the big hero moment is its aftermath, the big-city "just because we're all crammed together doesn't mean we're gonna get in your business" moment after Peter's lost his mask stopping a train from derailing.

It's a refinement of a bit at the end of the first, polished and presented to the audience rather than tossed off as one of a dozen things going on at once. There's still a lot of Raimi here, but he's playing to the bigger audience in a way that's tremendously effective if not quite his in the way that the first film was.

What I wrote back in '04

Spider-Man 3

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

Arriving just a year before Iron Man, Spider-Man 3 almost feels like a test run for the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the 137-minute runtime isn't quite so compact as Raimi's previous films, Stan Lee shows up to say hi rather than being someone you spot in the crowd, there's more conscious attention to the film as part of an ongoing series, and Sam Raimi's personal signature is less prominent. It's common knowledge that Raimi was given less of a free hand on this movie than before (and it's interesting to watch a scene where J. Jonah Jameson is pitched new slogans for the Bugle and reminded to take his heart medications in the most stressful way possible in that light); watching it after the other two, you've got to wonder why so many people were trying to act like they knew this stuff better than Sam.

There is too much stuffed into this movie, but the thing is, there's so much that's good. After playing Peter as the hard-luck hero in #2, there's something very true in how this movie plays with him not actually handling success and popularity very well - he's not so much a bad person underneath, but staying humble and dealing with attention is a skill that he hasn't developed. Venom was by all accounts imposed on Raimi, but he and brother/co-writer Ivan do their level best to make him a metaphor for all the worst aspects of Peter coming out and scaring him; there's just not room in this story for the whole arc that includes Eddie Brock Jr. (one can mock the Tom Hardy Venom movies for avoiding Spider-Man, but it's a step something this size doesn't have the time for). That's especially true with the time given to Thomas Haden Church's Sandman, but I appreciated parts of his story more this time around - the origin sequence is beautiful, for instance, and while I scoffed at him roaring like a dumb kaiju when I originally saw the film, I get the guy literally trying to keep himself and his humanity together through sheer force of will a bit better now. Church has a lead character's arc crammed into a supporting role that's getting cut back itself.

At the time, I thought Raimi would do another despite the disappointment - there was more to do with the folks played by Dylan Baker, James Cromwell, and Bryce Dallas Howard, darn it! - but now I kind of think that he said his piece here. Spider-Man 3 is a movie about people trying to be their best selves, failing, and then trying again, and on and on, whether they're Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Flint Marko, or Harry Osborn (Brock just doesn't have it in him and becomes a monster for it). Anything else he does with the character is going to seem smaller. It's a shame that the movie is such a mess in so many ways, never able to juggle all of its pieces, feeling like maybe it should have been a limited series in structure, and never quite having enough of the Sam Raimi style to match the over-the-top action with heightened emotional stakes. It's got all the pieces to be a great cap on the trilogy, but seldom puts it together well enough to be truly satisfying.

What I wrote back in '07

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.