COMING SOON

Page last updated on July 2, 2009

WHATEVER WORKS

Opens Friday, July 3

(Dir. Woody Allen, USA/France, 2009, PG-13, 92 min)

An eccentric New Yorker played by Larry David abandons his upper class life to lead a more bohemian existence. He meets a young girl from the South and her family and no two people seem to get along in the entanglements that follow. This is a comedy also starring Ed Begley Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Conleth Hill, Michael McKean and Evan Rachel Wood.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated PG-13 for some sexual situations including dialogue, brief nude images and thematic material.

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RUDO Y CURSI

(Dir. Carlos Cuaron, USA/Mexico, 2009, R, 103 min)

Beto (Diego Luna) and Tato (Gael García Bernal) Verdusco are brothers who work at a banana plantation and also play soccer for the village team. Nicknamed “Tough” because of his personality and football style, Beto dreams of becoming a professional soccer player; Tato’s dream is to be a famous singer, and both share the dream of building a house for their mother, Elvira (Dolores Heredia). They have a change in luck when “Batuta,” a soccer talent scout, discovers them accidentally. Tato is the first to move to the big city where he becomes the star goal scorer for the prestigious Deportivo Amaranto (Amaranto Club). His baroque playing style earns him the nickname of “Corny”. Although Beto feels he has been betrayed and left behind, he soon travels to Mexico City to become the goalkeeper for Atlético Nopaleros (Nopaleros Team). At the peak of glory, they forget all animosity, although it does not last long. At the very real possibility of fulfilling all of their dreams, the siblings must face an innate rivalry as well as their own demons and limitations. Beto is a gambler and allows his addiction to drag him down; Tato is unable to recognize his true talents and squanders every opportunity by pursuing a false idea of celebrity and status. The dream seems to slip through their fingers. And it is at their worst moment that the brothers find forgiveness trying to help each other while casting headlong towards their individual destiny.

In Spanish w/Eng. subtitles.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated R for pervasive language.

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TAKING WOODSTOCK

(Dir. Ang Lee, USA, 2009, R, 110 min)

Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) directs this film about the beginnings of the epic and legendary 1969 Woodstock Festival, which took place in Bethel, New York.

Viewer's Guide: Rated R for graphic nudity, some sexual content, drug use and language.

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SERAPHINE

(Dir. Martin Provost, France/Belgium, 2008, NR, 125 min)

Séraphine is the story of Séraphine Louis aka Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau), a simple and profoundly devout housekeeper who in 1905 at age 41, self-taught and with the instigation of her guardian angel began painting brilliantly colorful canvases. In 1912 Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art critic and collector - he was one of the first collectors of Picasso and champion of naïve primitive painter Le Douanier Rousseau - discovered her paintings while she worked for him as a maid in his house in Senlis outside Paris. A moving and unexpected relationship develops between the avant-garde art dealer and the visionary cleaning lady leading to Séraphine’s work being grouped with other naïve painters – the so-called “Sacred Heart Painters” - with acclaimed shows in France, elsewhere in Europe and eventually at New York’s MOMA . Martin Provost’s poignant portrait of this now largely forgotten painter is a testament to the mysteries of creativity and the resilience of one woman’s spirit.

A sleeper hit in France last fall, Séraphine went on to a surprise win of the Best Picture and Best Actress for Yolande Moreau along with five other awards at the Cesars - the French Academy Awards.

In French w/Eng. subtitles.

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O'HORTEN

(Dir. Bent Hamer, Norway, 2007, PG-13, 90 min)

The moment the train leaves the station without engineer Odd Horten (Bard Owe) aboard, he realizes that the path ahead is a journey without printed timetables and well-known stations. Horten has been forced to retire after 40 years of traveling a very stable rail, and the platform does not feel like a safe place anymore. His orderly, solitary existence is about to give way to a future of unlikely adventures and puzzling dilemmas: Will Horten ever travel by plane? Will he finally sell his prized boat? How does Horten end up in a pair of women's red high-heeled shoes? Will he survive a nighttime drive with a blindfolded man at the wheel? Proof positive that there is humor to be found in aging, and we don't have to be elderly Norwegians to identify, laugh and embrace life in all its idiosyncratic splendor. O'Horten is Bent Hamer's wonderfully skewed view of the human condition and gives us that somewhat absurdist vision with great warmth, a little melancholy and universal appeal.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated PG-13 for brief nudity. 

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500 DAYS OF SUMMER

(Dir. Marc Webb, 2009, PG-13, 95 min)

This post modern love story is never what we expect it to be--it's thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn't quite go where we think it will. When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfirend Summer dumps him,he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days "together" to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated PG-13 for sexual material and language.

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MOON

(Dir. Duncan Jones, UK, 2009, R, 97 min)

It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. 

Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang,” the moon base that has been his home for so long, and he will finally have someone to talk to beyond “Gerty,” the base’s well-intentioned, but rather uncomplicated computer.

Suddenly, Sam’s health starts to deteriorate. Painful headaches, hallucinations and a lack of focus lead to an almost fatal accident on a routine drive on the moon in a lunar rover. While recuperating back at the base (with no memory of how he got there), Sam meets a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three year contract Sam started all those years ago.

Confined with what appears to be a clone of his earlier self, and with a “support crew” on its way to help put the base back into productive order, Sam is fighting the clock to discover what’s going on and where he fits into company plans.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated R for language.

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FOOD INC.

(Dir. Robert Kenner, USA, PG, 94 min)

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli -- the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising -- and often shocking truths -- about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated PG for some thematic material and disturbing images.

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GIRL FROM MONACO

(Dir. Anne Fontaine, France, 2008, R, 95 min)

In this dark French comedy, rich lawyer Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) gets more than he bargained for when he travels to Monaco to defend a client in a murder trial. Accompanied by his loyal bodyguard, Christophe (Roschdy Zem), Bertrand meets the young and sexy Audrey (Louise Bourgoin), a weathergirl who may get him into trouble.

Viewer's Guide:  Rated R for some sexual content and language.

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ADORATION

(Dir. Atom Egoyan, Canada, 2009, R, 100 min)

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has spent most of his career exploring themes of identity and perception, and he returns to this territory again in Adoration. Simon (Devon Bostick) is a bright high-school student who lives with his uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman), following the death of his parents, Rachel (Rachel Blanchard) and Sami (Noam Jenkins). When Simon visits Rachel’s dying father, he learns that Sami may have killed himself and Rachel by deliberately crashing their car. In Simon’s high school, his French and drama teacher, Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian), reads a story about a terrorist who tried to blow up an airplane by planting a bomb in his girlfriend’s luggage. Simon claims the story is about his parents, telling the whole school that his father placed a bomb that failed to detonate in his mother’s carry-on. Sabine suddenly becomes close to Simon, while debate about his father’s actions lights up the school, with Egoyan carefully steering his film in several unexpected directions. Egoyan is a master storyteller who knows exactly how to subtly manipulate the timeline of Adoration to keep his audience on their toes. The truth behind the death of Simon’s parents slowly unravels as the film progresses, and the juxtaposition in values between Simon and Tom is thoroughly examined. Egoyan cleverly uses Simon’s obsession with Internet chatrooms to give insight into the escalation of interest in his false declaration about his parents’ past, but he is always painted as a sympathetic character whose fantasy life has toppled over into reality as he struggles to come to terms with a terrible tragedy. Bostick’s performance as Simon is exceptional and thoroughly convincing, and pushes Adoration toward the heady heights of Egoyan’s best work in Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997).

Viewer's Guide: Rated R for language.

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HUMPDAY

(Dir. Lynn Shelton, USA, 2009, R, 94 min)

Sometimes male bonding can go a little too far. When Andrew unexpectedly shows up on Ben's doorstep late one night, the two old college friends immediately fall into their old dynamic of heterosexual one-upmanship. To save Ben from domestication, Andrew invites Ben to a party at a sex-positive commune. Everyone there plans on making erotic art films for the local amateur porn festival and Andrew wants in. They run out of booze and ideas, save for one: Andrew should have sex with Ben, on camera. It's not gay; it's beyond gay. It's not porn; it's an art project. The next day, they find themselves unable to back down from the dare. And there's nothing standing in their way - except Ben's wife Anna, heterosexuality, and certain mechanical questions. Humpday: a bromantic comedy.

Writer/director Lynn Shelton, director of My Effortless Brilliance and recipient of the "Someone to Watch Award" at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards, expertly mines the biggest ironies of the male ego to hilarious effect. Humpday is a buddy movie gone wild. 

Viewer's Guide: Rated R for some strong sexual conduct, pervasive language and a scene of drug use.

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In Brilliant 35mm!

BRIDGE ON THE RIVER

 KWAI

(US, PG, 1957, 161 min)

Sunday, July 19-Thursday, July 23 (5 days only!)

Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m.

Sunday-Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. 

One of the all-time great war films, The Bridge on the River Kwai is yet another classic from the marvelous David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago). The film is an outstanding, psychologically complex adaptation of Pierre Boulle's 1952 novel, a classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans. Although credited to screenwriter Carl Foreman, the script was actually written by blacklisted writer Michael Wilson. The film garnered seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Guinness). The climax is one of the great finales in film history.

Fletcher HallTickets: $8.00  Matinees: $6.25

SUNDAY Matinee at 2:30 p.m.

NIGHTLY (Sun-Thurs) at 7:30 p.m.

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This is a tentative list of movies that are coming soon.  All films listed are subject to change.