The weekend's best movie -- well, certainly the most interesting -- is "The Tree of Life," but you'll have to drive to New York to see it, since it doesn't come to Boston until next Friday. Still, how often do we get a new Terrence Malick film? Make the trip.
If Hollywood had its way, of course, everyone would go see "The Hangover Part II." And maybe everyone will, in the same way that everyone gets sunburned the first weekend of summer. The movie's pretty bad -- ugly and smug and predictable -- but it's pre-sold and it will make many millions. You do not have to participate to be a functioning member of the culture.
There's not much overlap on the Venn diagram between "Hangover II" and the other new sequel, "Kung Fu Panda 2". Janice Page's review nicely points out that, if you're an adopted kid, the scene at the end where Po's birth father vows to find his son will probably screw you up for life.
And there's a new Woody Allen movie in town. One of the good ones, too, although at this point in the director's career the phrase "good one" means "light, charming, not actively painful to the senses." "Midnight in Paris" is in fact quite lovely until you start thinking about it. So I would suggest you not think about it.
For the truly adventurous and/or heat-afflicted, there's a dandy weekend-long series devoted to the "Masterworks of Kaneto Shindo" at the Harvard Film Archive, so if you want to get your black-and-white Japanese anti-war art-horror freak on (that's a still from "Kuroneko" above), you know where to go.
