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Silicon Valley Movie Times
Movie times in San Jose, Campbell, Fremont, Los Gatos, Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley cities.
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Movie times in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and other Central Coast cities.
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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
Beat the Devil/Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1953/1955) Beat the Devil suggests a remake of director John Huston's own Maltese Falcon written by Joe Orton. The lounging adventurer Billy Dannreuther (Bogart), stuck in a podunk Italian beach town, has a tip on some uranium fields in Africa; he's waiting with several fellow adventurers for transport there. His partners include Robert Morley, subbing for Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Dannreuther's wife, Maria (Gina Lollobrigida), takes a liking to an upper-class Englishman named Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown). Fortunately for Dannreuther, Chelm has a neglected wife: Jennifer Jones, looking better in cat's-eye sunglasses than anyone has ever looked since. The adventure of a few shady men trying to rip off Kenya holds up a cracked mirror to imperial pretensions. Supposedly, Bogart loathed the picture ("Only phonies like it"). Too bad Bogart was blind to its merits; his is a warm but acrid sunset performance. If Beat the Devil doesn't make a lot of logical sense, forgive it: as Jones sighs, "Charm and dependability so seldom go in the same package." BILLED WITH Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. Interracial love, of a sort, in Hong Kong, where a newspaper correspondent (William Holden) falls for a half-Chinese doctor (Jennifer Jones) as her relatives fret over the impropriety and the hit theme song plays. (Plays Jun 18-20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Dark Victory/The Little Foxes (1939/1941) Beautiful and doomed Long Island society woman Bette Davis faces the end, with the help of her warm-blooded Irish horse trainer (Humphrey Bogart) and her surgeon (George Brent). Rarely is this tear-jerking material handled so tastefully—rarer still does an actress handle it with the dignity of a Bette Davis. According to Bogart's biographer Jeffrey Meyers, producer Hal Wallis tried to hire Sigmund Freud himself as a technical adviser on this drama. Ronald Reagan has a small part as a worthless drunk playboy. BILLED WITH The Little Foxes. Regina Giddens: "a rapacious bitch, cruel and callous, a frightened opportunist who stopped at nothing to further her prestige and fortune." That's Tallulah Bankhead describing a part she originated on Broadway. Davis takes a less florid and more icy approach to the lead role of the icy Giddens in William Wyler's version of Lillian Hellman's hit play. Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright and Dan Duryea (debuting) co-star; photographed by Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane). (Plays Jun 21-24 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Grease (1978) Take John Travolta out of this supposed classic musical set in a fake-1950s high school, and all that would remain are some good moments with Stockard Channing and the interestingly tense theme song. Grease's romantic lead is Olivia Newton-John, a toothy teen idol for those repelled by the sinfulness of Marie Osmond. Channing, as bad girl Rizzo, describes Newton-John well as "that goody-two-shoes makes me want to barf." The two-shoes in question actually learns to surrender to her black-leather-jacketed boyfriend Travolta. The sex positivity of the '70s is also seen in a confessional song by Channing that goes against the grain of the current effort to sell youth on celibacy; the lyrics to "That's the Worst Thing I Could Do" number as these worst things "To take cold showers every day/ And throw my life away." (Plays Jun 19 at sunset in Redwood City at Courthouse Square; free; bring blankets and chairs; www.redwoodcityevents.com.) (RvB)
Niles Film Museum Regularly scheduled programs of silent films. This week: 1917's One Touch of Nature, starring John Drew Bennett. It makes the whole world kin, claims Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. A Yale slugger falls for a showgirl, much to the chagrin of his pork-millionaire dad, but then he gets drafted into the New York Giants and things go better. Giants manager John McGraw plays himself. Billed with The Young Millionaire (1912) with Tom Moore. Judy Rosenberg at the piano. (Plays Jun 21 at 7:30pm in Fremont at the Edison Theater, 37417 Niles Blvd; www.nilesfilmmuseum.org.) (RvB)
Psychotronic Film Festival Room 5015 at Foothill College gets ready for renovation; the Psychotrons assemble for a last time in a room that'll need a fresh coat of funk when it reopens. Me, I say Room 5015 is but a room, and that the spirit of the weird will always defeat the spirit of the commonplace. If this is old school, I'm still an alumnus. I declare that even if a $5 bill will barely buy a gallon of gas, it'll still get you some mind-roasting celluloid from the days when Dinah Shore ruled the earth. Robert Emmet of KFJC presides, repping the only station in the valley with the guts to play Blind Willie Johnson and Buell Kazee. Snax, door-prizes, guys in suits, tin robots and the most Lovecraftian horror of all: the campus police ticketing people who forgot to bring in $2 for the meters. Beware: last showing, some people who came late found a sold-out crowd. Blinded by tears, they wandered into the Foothill College bamboo grove where they were swiftly devoured by He Who Walks Between the Rows, as seen in Children of the Corms, M. Night Shlomo's incredibly horrifying tale of people walking around aimlessly in a field until something stupid happens. (Plays Jun 21 at 7pm in Los Altos Hills at Room 5015 at the Foothill College Campus.) (RvB)
The Son of the Sheik/The Road to Morocco (1926/1942) Posthumously released sequel to one of Rudolph Valentino's biggest hits has the nostril-flaring star as a sheik's son almost overcome with love. Dennis James at the Wurlitzer. BILLED WITH The Road to Morocco. Bob Hope and his reliable foil Bing Crosby are shipwrecked in a vaguely Arab landscape and threatened like the infidel dogs they are. Flying carpets, talking camels, Anthony Quinn making with the poetic Arabesque insults and swishing around a scimitar, while Dorothy Lamour—the Heather Graham of her day—swans about in a harem outfit. (Plays Jun 25 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
