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Silicon Valley Movie Times
Movie times in San Jose, Campbell, Fremont, Los Gatos, Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley cities.
Santa Cruz County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and other Central Coast cities.
Sonoma County / Napa County / Marin County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Rosa, Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Sonoma, Sebastopol, and other North Bay cities.
Transsiberian
A mystery train races across Russia in Brad Anderson's new film
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen warms up in new romantic comedy
Tropic Thunder
Ben Stiller sends up Hollywood egos
Frozen River
A hardscrabble mom turns to smuggling
American Teen
It's not easy surviving to graduation in new documentary
Pineapple Express
Stoner humor keeps Apatow-Rogen fans high
Man on Wire
The true story behind the greatest real-life stunt of them all
The Naked Spur
The Stanford Theatre revives one of Jimmy Stewart's most troubling Westerns
My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin explores the quirky side of Canada
Baghead
Mumblecore comes of age
Ripple Effect
A fashion designer and really bad driver finds redemption in forgiveness
Swing Vote
Kevin Costner plays election-day snafu for laughs
Bottle Shock (PG-13; 110 min.) Helicopter shots of Napa, Glen Ellen and parts of Sonoma County are the highlights of this fictionalized comedy about the 1976 French blind tasting that established California wine as an international force. The feuding father-and-son team of Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his hippiesh son Bo (Chris Pine in a Kurt Cobain wig) punch the hell out of each other in a makeshift boxing ring. Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under is the best chum who is learning to become a winemaker on his own. Meanwhile, an intern from UC-Davis named Sam (Rachael Taylor) causes romantic confusion. To the film's credit, there are some knowing references to the coming money storm that would all but drive the funk out of wine country—a montage in which a group of shade-tree vintners are startled to realize that someone would pay them for tastings. A huge improvement over Randall Miller's last film, Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, it still serves up a relentless snarl of cliches—it's amazing that Miller spared himself and us the line "We will sell no wine before its time." The restaging of a famous scene from It Happened One Night epitomizes the general shamelessness. (The scene is a further irritant if you remember how easy it was to hitchhike in Northern California in the mid-1970s.) Alan Rickman, as the British wine merchant who starts the kerfluffle, does a great deal with his air of sarcastic melancholy, and he gives this film a boost whenever he appears. (Opens Aug 15 at Camera 7 in Campbell.) (RvB)
Henry Poole Is Here (PG; 100 min.) Squishy drama that compacts three terrible genres: the terminal-illness movie, the leap-of-faith movie and the "lost boy" indie movie about a man in pursuit of his inner child. (Luke Wilson, in the title role, has been pursuing that self-same inner child longer and in more movies than the Coyote sought the Road Runner.) His Poole, diagnosed with a fatal but vague disease, has decided to finish himself off with vodka and donuts in a tract house, but then his pesky neighbor Esperanza (Adriana Barraza) discerns a stain on the stucco of Henry's new house that resembles the bleeding image of Our Savior. It becomes a shrine. Despite much evidence of its miraculous power, the film insists on Henry's grounds for skepticism, although the film doesn't give actual skeptics an inch. A cross-cast George Lopez isn't so bad as the local padre; he looks tough enough. Eric Schmidt's widescreen photography and the frozen-in-1975 L.A. suburb of La Mirada arouse some interest, as the girl next door with a mute daughter, Radha Mitchell is wasted. This Catholicism-without-the-thorns New Age schmaltz fest will have its partisans. But avoid it, and especially avoid those partisans. (Plays at selected theaters.) (RvB)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (PG; 98 min.) Based on a story by producer George Lucas, this animated adventure takes place somewhere between Episodes II and III. Whoever rescues Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son gets free passage through the outer rim. But Count Dooku has evil plans afoot, and Anakin has a new, hotheaded girl padawan (apprentice) to deal with. The film copies Lucas' writing style: stiff, expositional speeches and witness banter, and a plot full of holes. (Why is Obi-Wan Kenobi always off negotiating somewhere? How long does it take?) However, the crisp pacing offers a surprising low-key charm, and the characters even look a bit like hand-crafted, hand-painted wood! Christopher Lee, Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Daniels lend their familiar voices, but the rest of the voice cast is new, including Matt Lanter as Anakin. (Opens Aug 15 valleywide.) (JMA)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (PG-13; 117 min.) The pants don't make much of a showing in this new sequel to the 2005 film, but no matter. They're nothing more than a gimmick to draw us into the lives of our four lovable characters, played by Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Amber Tamblyn. Spending another summer apart, the girls have begun to argue, withhold secrets from one another and generally grow apart. Music-video maker Sanaa Hamri copies the successful formula of the first, including lots of fantasy (especially the cartoonish boyfriend characters), slapstick, heavy-handed plot twists, beautiful vacation spots and ridiculously happy endings. Yet even with only a fourth of the running time apiece, each girl still clocks in with her own potent, involving little short film. With Blythe Danner, Rachel Nichols, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Kyle MacLachlan. From Ann Brashares' novel. (Plays valleywide.) (JMA)
The Wackness (R; 110 min.) Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, The Wackness invests a great deal of energy re-creating the summer of 1994 in New York City; when anyone listens to "Ready to Die" by the Notorious B.I.G., they point out, "It's brand new! It just came out!" But after all this window dressing, it's a banal coming-of-age story. A sensitive, insecure drug dealer (Josh Peck) has somehow turned his glamorous job into a daily drudgery (i.e., no cars, guns or girls). He divides his time between the elusive girl of his dreams (Olivia Thirlby) and his dope-smoking shrink (Ben Kingsley, in yet another show-offy performance), and saves money for his parents' back rent. By the end of August, everyone learns a valuable lesson. It's definitely wack. (Opens July 25 at Camera 7 in Campbell and Century 16 in Mountain View.) (JMA)
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
We can't believe they bothered one more time
Brideshead Revisited
Once was enough
Tell No One
The French deliver a paranoid thriller in the Hitchcock groove
The Edge of Heaven
Fatih Akin tells a multifaceted story of reconciliation
Hancock
Will Smith's superhero falls hard only to fly again
Gonzo
A new documentary traces the incandescent life and works of Hunter S. Thompson
WALL-E
New Pixar feature is a blast-off
Savage Grace
Jullianne Moore's mother from hell makes Joan Crawford look like June Cleaver
Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog explores the ice floes of Antarctica in a quirky new documentary
Brick Lane
Life isn't easy when you're Bangladeshi in east London
Broken Blossoms/Only Angels Have Wings (1919/1939) A classic melodrama about the London slums, wherein a Chinese immigrant (Richard Barthelmess) befriends a beaten child-woman (Lillian Gish). Directed by D.W. Griffith. Dennis James at the Stanford's Wurlitzer. BILLED WITH Only Angels Have Wings. In a squalid seaside town in Ecuador, pilots face death daily hauling mail over the Andes. We meet the pilots at their hangout, Dutchman's, and learn of their fierce code through the arrival of a stranger, a visiting showgirl. Jean Arthur's brave, classy heroine facing off against Cary Grant's supposedly disinterested pilot is some people's ideal vision of grace under pressure, in men and women alike. Compare it to the similar but superior Henri-Georges Clouzot film The Wages of Fear, which is smart enough to ask the right questions about what the cargo was, why these lives are so cheap and who sent the men to die in the first place. (Plays Aug 20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
The Commitments (1991) Alan Rudolph's slightly more intimate than usual no-star cast musical about a Motown cover band forming in Dublin. Where was Stephen Frears when they needed him? Based on Roddy Doyle's novel. (Plays Aug 18 at 7pm in Palo Alto's Cubberley Auditorium.) (RvB)
Female/My Man Godfrey (1933/1936) The sly Ruth Chatterton plays Alison Drake, head of Detroit's Drake Motors. Drake uses her male employees for nighttime company and then dumps them in the morning, "like Napoleon dismissing a ballet girl," as her manservant says. Drake recruits a new engineer (George Brent), who is working on that revolutionary automotive breakthrough: the automatic transmission. Good as he is at his job, he's no pushover. A fast and entertaining pre-Code comedy, with innovative direction by Michael Curtiz—lots of rear-projection, fussed-over camera angles and much location work at a time when films were commonly stagebound; it was partially filmed at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in L.A. BILLED WITH My Man Godfrey. Just in time for the New Depression. Carole Lombard was the best of all '30s comediennes: elegant enough for romance and tough enough for slapstick. Here, Lombard plays a rich girl who looks for a "forgotten man" as part of a scavenger hunt. "A scavenger hunt," she explains, "is just like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you find something you want and in a scavenger hunt you find things you don't want and the one who wins gets a prize, only there isn't a prize, it's just the honor of winning, because all the money goes to charity if there's any money left over, but then there never is." (Plays Aug 16-19 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Horse Feathers/Charlie Chaplin at the Opera (1932/1936) Tenured radical Professor Quincy Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) may not be much of an academic, but then, Huxley isn't that much of a school. To win football games, Wagstaff connives with dubious Italian fixer (Chico) and his sidekick, a freelance dogcatcher (Harpo). At this point in history, some of the jokes are becoming arcane. The truth is that the arcanest of them are probably the work of credited screenwriter S.J. Perelman, that lover of odd, old locutions; no one says "waxing wroth" anymore. However, Groucho's refusal to be intimidated by any locutions whatsoever—"I thought my razor was dull until I heard that speech"—is what keeps this movie evergreen. BILLED WITH Charlie Chan at the Opera. Sixty-eight minutes with the master detective, who solves a Phantom of the Opera–like case involving an amnesiac singer (Boris Karloff). (Plays Aug 13-15 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Mary Poppins (1964) The Sherman brothers' bright suite of tunes highlights this Julie Andrews/Dick Van Dyke megahit, dimly if fondly remembered by graybeards. These elders have forgot how frighteningly free of biology Andrews was, and how bad the usually appealing van Dyke's cockney accent was. Still, Andrews chirping "A Spoonful of Sugar" to a robot bluebird is almost steampunk, to use the parlance of our time. (Plays Aug 14 at sunset in Redwood City at Old Courthouse Square; free.) (RvB)
Niles Film Museum Regularly scheduled programs of silent films. Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). As good as the movies get; Keaton as the sissified son of a riverboat bruiser. Filmed at the Sacramento River and highlighted with a tremendous cyclone scene, recently referenced in The Fall. Also: The Dumb-Bells (1922) with Snub Pollard, and Two Tars (1928) with Laurel and Hardy. Greg Pane at the piano. (Plays Aug 16 in Fremont at the Edison Theater, 37417 Niles Blvd.) (RvB)
The Shining (1980) King fans are right; the book is better. A simple haunted house tale is here given a gargantuan widescreen treatment by the ambitious Stanley Kubrick and subverted by a larger-than-life star performance by Jack Nicholson. (Nicholson, halfway nuts to begin with, surprises nobody when he completes the journey.) What one remembers, despite the ridiculously expensive special effects and the at-the-time tony use of the Steadicam, is Shelley Duvall—probably the most elegant scream-queen in 20 years—and Danny Lloyd running for their lives from Daddy. (Plays Aug 20 at sundown in San Jose at San Pedro Square; free.) (RvB)
The Usual Suspects (1995) Less said about this, the better. The theft of some emeralds leads to the realm of the master criminal, Keyser Soze, a modern Moriarty. If you're sharp, you'll be ahead of the film on a few points, but I doubt if anyone could foresee how it resolves, thanks to multiple twists and an untrustworthy witness or two. (Plays Aug 13 at sundown in San Jose at San Pedro Square; free.) (RvB)
West Side Story (1961) Leonard Bernstein's modern updating of Romeo and Juliet, played out in the since demolished slums where Lincoln Center now stands. The show is easily swiped by Rita Moreno, in a supporting role; she gives it some of the Latin fire the film leaches out by hiring the gorgeous but stiff Natalie Wood. (Plays Aug 14 at 7 in San Jose at the California Theatre; also plays Aug 16 at sundown in San Jose at St. James Park.) (RvB)
