Upcoming Film Screenings
15 upcoming film screenings from West Newton Cinema, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All film in Greater Boston →
Sun Oct 25 · 1pm
Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights (2004), from H.G. Bissinger's book, follows the Permian High Panthers of Odessa, Texas, a struggling town that pins its hopes on high school football, and coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) after star tailback Boobie Miles is badly hurt in the first game. A panel follows with WBZ-TV sports director Steve Burton, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy and Newton North football coach Nick Capodilupo.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:30pm
Sara Robin's 2026 documentary, which premiered at SXSW in March, follows a coalition of parents, educators, Gen Z reformers and whistleblowers pushing back against Big Tech as the real-world costs of social media come into focus, and asks whether the tools of the age can be rebuilt to serve people. A panel follows with Robin, writer and editor Jack LeMay and executive producer Joni Siani.
Thu Nov 12 · 6:00pm
Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic follows a sixteenth-century farming village that hires seven masterless samurai to defend its harvest against bandits, with Takashi Shimura as their leader and Toshirô Mifune as the brash would-be samurai Kikuchiyo. Running nearly three and a half hours, it mixes philosophy and action in a story of courage. The screening is part of Ty Burr's Film Club, hosted by the former Boston Globe film critic.
Sun Nov 15 · 1:00pm
Drawn from the surviving pages of an unfinished Lorca play and from Alberto Conejero's La piedra oscura, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's 2026 film tells the linked stories of three gay men in Spain in 1932, 1937 and 2017, with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. It won Best Director at Cannes. Carlos Ramos of Wellesley, Wan Sonya Tang of Boston College and Brandeis's Fernando Rosenberg discuss it afterwards.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:30pm
In 1978 Robb Moss filmed a group of friends, young river guides, on a 35-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, and Riverdogs (1982) is his record of that summer on the Colorado. The Same River Twice (2003) catches up with five of them twenty years later, settled into jobs, marriages and middle age. Moss, who teaches filmmaking at Harvard, attends in person.
Thu Nov 19 · 4:00pm
In a West African village, Collé Ardo invokes moolaadé, the custom of sanctuary, to shelter four girls who have fled the ritual cutting their elders call purification, and her stand sets the village's women against its men and elders. It was the last film by the Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembène; shot in Burkina Faso and spoken in Bambara, it won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2004.
Thu Nov 19 · 6:30pm
William and David Greaves's 2025 documentary records a 1972 evening when William Greaves gathered surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington's townhouse, where artists, writers and intellectuals, many unmet in fifty years, reminisced and argued for four hours. His son David, one of the original camera operators, restored the 16mm footage and finished the film. A panel follows with Tufts's Kendra Field and Khary Jones and Harvard's Jesse McCarthy.
Fri Nov 20 · 6:30pm
Riverdogs (1982), Robb Moss's 32-minute 16mm record of a 1978 Grand Canyon rafting trip with his fellow river guides, is paired with The Bend in the River (2025), which returns to five of them, Barry, Cathy, Danny, Jeff and Jim, now in their seventies. Frances McDormand and Joel Coen executive produced the new film. Moss stays for a conversation with Anne Marie Stein.
Sat Nov 21
George Sidney's 1953 film of the 1948 Broadway show casts Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson as a divorced pair of stage stars reunited when cast opposite each other in a musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. MGM kept Cole Porter's songs, among them “So in Love” and “Too Darn Hot,” with Ann Miller and Bob Fosse in the cast. It is the cinema's November musical matinee.
Thu Dec 17 · 4:00pm
In occupied Rome in 1944, the Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is hunted by the Gestapo and helped by a parish priest, Don Pietro, and by Pina, a widow about to remarry. Rossellini shot the 1945 film there months after the liberation, from a script written with Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini; Anna Magnani plays Pina and Aldo Fabrizi the priest. It shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes festival.
Sat Dec 19
In Michael Curtiz's 1954 musical, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye play two army buddies turned song-and-dance stars who team up with a sister act, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, to stage a show that will rescue the struggling Vermont inn run by their old commanding general. The Irving Berlin score includes the title song, “Sisters” and “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.” It is the cinema's December musical matinee.
Thu Jan 21 · 4:00pm
In Herbert J. Biberman's 1954 film, Mexican-American miners strike a New Mexico zinc mine, and when an injunction bars them from picketing, their wives take over the line. Based on the 1950–51 Empire Zinc strike, it cast mostly miners and their families, with Rosaura Revueltas as Esperanza Quintero. Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten, made it with blacklisted colleagues and the union; it joined the National Film Registry in 1992.
Thu Feb 18 · 4:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is set on 8 May 1945, the day the war in Europe ends, when Maciek Chełmicki (Zbigniew Cybulski), a young Home Army soldier, is ordered to kill an incoming Communist official in a provincial Polish town; over one night in its hotel, and an affair with the barmaid Krystyna, he begins to doubt the job. It completes Wajda's war trilogy after A Generation and Kanał.
Thu Mar 25 · 4:00pm
Three linked stories close in a circle: a young Orthodox monk sworn to silence hides an Albanian girl accused of murder; a London photo editor is torn between her husband and her lover; and that lover, a prize-winning Macedonian war photographer, comes home to a village split by ethnic hatred. Rade Šerbedžija and Katrin Cartlidge star. It shared the Golden Lion at Venice in 1994.
Thu Apr 22 · 4:00pm
In Deniz Gamze Ergüven's 2015 first feature, five orphaned sisters in a village in northern Turkey are seen playing in the sea with boys from school, and the scandal leads their grandmother and uncle to lock them in the house and start arranging their marriages; the youngest, Lale, leads the resistance. It was an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film and won four Césars, including best first film.
