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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.
Mongol
Come on, Genghis Khan wasn't such a bad guy after all
The Mother of Tears
Dario Argento ends his horror trilogy with a blood bath
Get Smart
Steve Carell isn't exactly the second coming of Don Adams
The Happening
Not enough happens in M. Night Shyamalan's horror tale 'The Happening'
Up the Yangtze
Documentary shows the human cost of Three Gorges Dam in China
The Incredible Hulk
The effects are better, but the emotions are deflated
Bigger, Stronger, Faster
A look at the reality of steroids-are they really the devil's work?
Stuck
Stuart Gordon finds the the laughs in an infamous auto accident
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Can an adventure sequel survive a 19-year hiatus?
Mister Lonely
It's not easy being a celebrity impersonator in Harmony Korine's latest
Flight of the Red Balloon
A children's classic soars again in a reimagining by Hou Hsiao Hsien
Iron Man
Robert Downey Jr. takes off
Speed Racer
A summer blockbuster crashes and burns
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
A thousand years have passed, but has anything really changed in Narnia?
Before the Rains
Lust overcomes a sahib in 1937 England
Son of Rambow
Sylvester Stallone's angry vet is funnier when remade by two British kids
Standard Operating Procedure
Errol Morris' documentary tries to understand the outrages at Abu Ghraib
Redbelt
David Mamet unleashes his inner Chuck Norris in a talky jujitsu tale
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
The French super spy is licensed to make audiences laugh
Young@Heart
A new documentary listens to the voices of aging but ageless singers
Then She Found Me
Helen Hunt should have stayed lost in her new feature
The Singing Revolution
How the Estonians sang their way to freedom
Jellyfish
Looking at life in the goldfish bowl of a Tel Aviv apartment building
Life Before Her Eyes
Uma Thurman revisits a traumatic high school shooting
American Graffiti (1973) Appealing nostalgia, based on George Lucas' youth as a cruiser in Modesto in 1962 and filmed in San Rafael and Petaluma. Richard Dreyfuss plays the one who carries a paperback book in his back pocket; Mackenzie Phillips ("Your car is as ugly as I am!") plays the precocious teenage girl. On the radio, we hear the real-life DJ Robert Weston "Wolfman Jack" Smith. A no-budget hit, American Graffiti catalyzed nostalgia for the decade—much to the disgust of some who'd lived through it. The film launched TV's Happy Days, Sha-Na-Na and those restaurants where they sell you a milkshake that costs $6. (Plays Jul 9 in San Jose at sundown at San Pedro Square; free; bring blankets.) (RvB)
City Lights/The Smiling Lieutenant (Both 1931) The Little Tramp finds out about the difference between "to seem" and "to be" in a modern city. He befriends a millionaire, who only recognizes the Tramp when he's drunk; he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill), who mistakes him for a gentleman. More romance than comedy, this masterpiece has a tragic streak. BILLED WITH The Smiling Lieutenant. Ernst Lubitsch's superficially superficial comedy of manners; lieutenant Maurice Chevalier is ordered by his king to romance a plain princess (Miriam Hopkins); problem is he's in love with a violinist (Claudette Colbert). Quite a lovely and civilized double bill, and quite a refuge from the summer movies' gunfire. (Plays Jul 9 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Harold and Maude (1972) Locally shot cult film about a wealthy but morbid young eccentric (Bud Cort) who caps his love affair with death by falling for an elderly bohemian (Ruth Gordon). There was a time when two tickets to this and a marijuana cigarette counted as a date. How well it has aged (along with its Cat Stevens score) may depend on when you first saw it. Unlike many hippie films, it's still remembered fondly, probably because it was well aware of an aura of doom that was already clouding over the flower-people's skies. Probably, it's easier for more people to critique a childhood toy than to evaluate this movie without emotion, but its lasting popularity says it all. (Plays July 16 in San Jose at sundown at San Pedro Square; free; bring blankets.) (RvB)
Strategic Air Command/No Highway in the Sky (1955/1951) Anthony Mann directed this story of pilot James Stewart's missions ferrying atomic bombs to the brink; June Alyson plays the girl he leaves behind. BILLED WITH No Highway in the Sky. The early years of commercial aviation were scary times. Stewart plays a perhaps cracked engineer who scuttles a plane he suspects of being ready to disintegrate through metal fatigue; seemingly his only defender is Marlene Dietrich. (Plays Jul 10-11 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
All This and Heaven Too/Watch on the Rhine (1940/1943) Based on an infamous true-life French murder case of the 1840s, it's the story of a governess (Bette Davis) accused of killing the wife of her titled lover (Charles Boyer). BILLED WITH Watch on the Rhine. Bette Davis as a woman whose husband (Paul Lukas) is involved in what they used to call "premature anti-fascism"; in Washington, D.C., she faces trouble from a Romanian count. (Plays Jul 16-18 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Rocky (1976) Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in this low-key, old-fashioned and popular tale about a no-account Philadelphia boxer who gets a shot at a better time. Hard to resist at the time it came out, it gave some of the pleasures that people went to old movies for. Talia Shire, who played Michael Corleone's battered sister in The Godfather, is touching as a pet-shop girl who gives Rocky the strength to fight. The Bill Conti score, a disco anthem with trumpet fanfares, has been inevitable at sporting events ever since. (Plays Jul 10 at sundown in Redwood City at Old Courthouse Square; free; (www.redwoodcityevents.com.) (RvB)
Waterloo Bridge/Tin Pan Alley (Both 1940) The tragic wartime romance between a ballerina (Vivien Leigh) and a soldier (Robert Taylor) features a terrific twist of fate's knife at the end. BILLED WITH Tin Pan Alley. John Payne and Jack Oakie are a pair of tunesmiths in 1915; Alice Faye and Betty Grable are the showgirls they romance. The undisputed highlight: the fabulous tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers performing to the song "Sheik of Araby." (Plays Jul 12-15 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) A medical student names Damien (Cillian Murphy, excellent) enlists himself in the Irish Civil War as a rebel but soon discovers that there's more pain than he bargained for. Damien's brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), decides to work within the system to try to steer an independent path for Ireland. Using a keen screenplay by Paul Laverty, Ken Loach presents us with a clear but nonpartisan account. This war is hard physical labor, and being a man butcher is worse than being a pig butcher. The island looks like both a place you'd love to bicycle through and hate to stay in. We see some flashes of the famous 40 shades of green. But mostly, we get stones, fog, coarse bushes and poor pubs. Filming in County Cork, Loach catches the Wild West rawness of Ireland in 1920. No wonder the Irish were at home on the American frontier. Our movies usually tell us that war exalts the individual, making us heroes. Loach reminds us that so much of war is being in a situation where everything is out of your hands, including your death. (Plays Jul 14 at 7 in Palo Alto at Stanford University's Cubberly Auditorium; ([ http://www.stanford.edu/group/summertheater ]www.stanford.edu/group/summertheater) (RvB)
