Fewer Nicolas Cage movies than I thought have actually done the thing where local theaters play the trailer an awful lot but don't actually book the film of late, because the movies that got the most of that sort of exposure last year - The Kill Room and The Baker - don't actually have Cage (The Baker stars Ron Perlman as a retired assassin, and Perlman figures prominently in at least the trailer ..read more

Kind of wish I had a work holiday on Monday to fit an extra movie or two in, to be honest. The week's big new release is Civil War, the new one from Alex Garland starring Kirsten Dunst as an American photojournalist who has covered war zones all over the world now covering the disintegration of her own country. It appears to be more about war than the actual things dividing America at the ..read more

I rather liked the previous two films by writer/director Han Yan which made it to Boston without quite realizing that they were kind of unrepresentative of his work. Consider: First Time (2012) - A girl with neuromuscular disease dreams of being a ballet dancer, meets a boy who wants to sing rock & roll Go Away Mr. Tumor (2015) - A woman gets a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, has flights ..read more

Marvel and DC basically taking the year off, but somehow two superhero-esque things (or at least titles) this week! Is Universal releasing Monkey Man this weekend to have it in theaters for Eid? It's Mumbai-set but English-language, with writer/director Dev Patel as an anonymous vigilante looking to clean up the underworld. It's at Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema ..read more

Just me for Back Home last night, which isn't necessarily surprising, as it came out in Hong Kong last September, and even if you presume that streaming services and people no longer having machines to play bootleg DVDs has diminished piracy to the point where it's not a major concern, this is way past the point where you'll be seeing much about it in any media you follow. Presuming that exists ..read more

If you don't have plans for Easter, the local independent theaters are each offering a lot of movie for just one ticket. But if you want a more conventional sort of big… ... there's Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, with Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Godzilla, and King Kong reuniting with Godzilla vs Kong director Adam Wingard (whose longtime collaborator Simon Barrett co-writes) to ..read more

Like I said in this week's Next Week, the Underground Film Festival was this weekend, and would normally eat all of my time - well, not all my time; I'll usually skip the music video package and sleep in during the Saturday Morning cartoons when that was a thing (I guess Ms. Janisse is busy with other things these days), scaping back a little time to write or do the weekend grocery shopping or ..read more

Not only is it BUFF weekend, but there's some good BUFF-adjacent The Boston Underground Film Festival continues through Sunday at The Brattle Theatre, with local film package "The Dunwich Horrors", Off Ramp, Sleep, and the "Trigger Warning" shorts on Friday; music video package "Sound + Vision", Tiger Stripes, "Friendship Is Magic" shorts, The Becomers, In a Violent Nature, and Infested on ..read more

Understand, I'm not complaining that an underground film festival isn't somehow chaotic, but the first day of BUFF this year was oddly frictionless: I purchased my pass and reserved my movies via the Brattle's website on the first days they were available, so there was no "go into the crowded Brattle lobby to pick up your physical pass, back in line for the box office to get tickets for the ..read more

Last of the big Chinese New Year movies, possibly the biggest to release over there, although I kind of lost track of how they were doing at the box office after a while, because, heck, I don't read stories about American box office these days, instead going with a loose "how long has it hung around?" metric. I guess it did well in China dn it's doing well in Americas, as it's on its second week ..read more