Wednesday, 1/28 In America 6:30 & 8:30
Thursday, 1/29 In America 6:30 & 8:30
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NEW:
The Cooler
Alec Baldwin – Academy Award Nominee, Best Supporting Actor
"It's a pleasure to watch Macy, with customary craft and intelligence, create from the ground up an unlikely, yet plausible romantic lead." – Newsday. "From James Whitaker's seductive camerawork to Mark Isham's lush score, The Cooler places all the smart bets and hits the jackpot. William H. Macy is hilarious…Maria Bello dazzles! Alec Baldwin’s revelatory portrayal is the stuff Oscars are made of." – Rolling Stone. "A surprising, ingenious film." – Washington Post.
103 min. Rated R for strong sexuality, violence, language and some drug use.
Friday at 8:45, Saturday at 1:30PM & 6:15PM, Sunday at 1:00PM & 5:30PM, Monday at 8:30PM, Tuesday at 8:30PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
In America 3 Academy Award Nominations
Samantha Morton – Best Actress, Djimon Hounsou – Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay
“One of the best pictures of the year… wondrous…luminous!”—Newsweek.
"In America is particularly adept at dealing with the immigrant experience, with lives lived on the knife edge of hope, poverty and despair that is in many ways this country's quintessential situation."—Los Angeles Times. "A classic story of losing and finding faith told with heart, humor and emotional heft."—USA Today. "Forceful, funny and impassioned."—Rolling Stone.
“Four Stars!”—Roger Ebert, USA Today, People, New York Post, Premiere.
104 min., Rated PG-13.
Friday at 6:15PM, Saturday at 4PM & 8:45PM, Sunday at 3:15PM & 7:30PM, Monday at 6:30PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
The Cooler
--Alec Baldwin & Maria Bello – Nominated for Golden Globes & Screen Actor’s Guild Awards--
In Vegas, the house always wins--especially when the house has employed Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy), a man whose luck is so bad that it rubs off everyone around him. In the old-school casino Shangri-La, this makes him a valuable staffer as what’s called a cooler. His talent is gracefully displayed in "The Cooler’s" opening scene as the camera weaves fluidly through the casino floor in Bernie’s wake. A simple brush of his hand against the roulette wheel or quiet presence as a spectator at the craps table quickly subdues a run on the house. Bernie’s luck begins the change, though, when he falls in love with cocktail waitress Natalie (Maria Bello) and, however unlikely, she with him. This does not bode well for Bernie, as he has been working off a debt to the owner of the casino, Shelly Kaplow (a menacing Alec Baldwin). Shelly, who handles cheats the old-fashioned way rather than calling in the authorities, is intent on keeping Bernie and his bad luck around. Mixed in as well are subplots involving a movement to modernize the aging Shangri-La, in a storyline critical of the current condition of the Vegas strip, and the sudden appearance of Bernie’s newly married son and his very pregnant wife. Helmer Wayne Kramer glamorizes the pastime, using fast motion at the cards and craps tables and a succession of stills to portray the games. Also vital to the classical atmosphere are a melancholy jazz score and a soundtrack that includes such favorites as "It’s Almost like Being in Love" and "My Funny Valentine." But Macy of course, anchors the film in the titular role, his singular features and consummate talent seemingly designed and destined for this very role. "It's a pleasure to watch Macy, with customary craft and intelligence, create from the ground up an unlikely, yet plausible romantic lead." – Newsday. "From James Whitaker's seductive camerawork to Mark Isham's lush score, The Cooler places all the smart bets and hits the jackpot. William H. Macy is hilarious…Maria Bello dazzles! Alec Baldwin’s revelatory portrayal is the stuff Oscars are made of." – Rolling Stone. "A surprising, ingenious film." – Washington Post. Running time: 103 min. Rated R for strong sexuality, violence, language and some drug use.
In America
Golden Globe Nomination for Best Screenplay – 6 Independent Spirit Awards
Lyrical, life-affirming, lovely. In America is a wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had. What happens onscreen to the characters happens offscreen to the audience: Walls erected to protect vulnerable hearts are taken down in order to make a human connection. Jim Sheridan's film is about an Irish family - father, mother and two young daughters - that tells the authorities it has come to the States on holiday when it is planning to immigrate, legally or otherwise. The year is 1982. The place is Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. The narrator is 11-year-old Christy (Sarah Bolger), who frames the family's unsentimental journey through the viewfinder of her camcorder. (Literalists, please understand that this is a metaphorical 1982, as the classic-rock stations, family-friendly Times Square, and personal camcorder we see are anachronisms in service of a larger emotional truth.) There's something off about Sarah's folks. For when the customs agent at the U.S.-Canada border asks how many children they have, her dad answers "three" and her mom "two." There are two children in the backseat, Christy and Ariel (Emma Bolger, Sarah's sister). But the restless spirit of a third, Frankie, crowds the car and the memories of his kin. Although no longer with them, Frankie has become the family genie, giving Christy three wishes. At critical moments she uses them to ensure her family's safe passage. As directed by Sheridan (My Left Foot), who wrote the semiautobiographical screenplay with his now-grown daughters, In America is a ghost story in which the living are first haunted and ultimately helped by the dead. Both in its story and in its gritty scenery, vividly captured by cinematographer Declan Quinn, the film is a stirring work of magic realism. Soon after their arrival, Christy's father, a struggling actor named Johnny (Paddy Considine), finds a crummy loft in Hell's Kitchen encrusted in pigeon poop and possibility. Her mother, Sarah (that life force Samantha Morton, a melding of the ethereal and the earthy), finds a job in an ice cream parlor. It is a measure of the enormous achievement of In America that the Hell's Kitchen ice cream parlor is called Heaven and no one groans. And that the shaman is an African named Mateo ( Amistad 's Djimon Hounsou in majestic-mystic mode) whom Sheridan permits to create a character far more complex than the noble Negro of standard Hollywood fare. As Morton and Hounsou endow the film with a transcendent, catch-a-falling-star magic, those Bolger girls root it in recognizable reality. For Christy and Ariel, being in this strange land with mysterious climatic conditions such as humidity and secular customs such as Halloween is a magical adventure much like E.T.'s visit to Earth. Although each actor is uniquely powerful, the blessing of Sheridan's movie is seeing them work in ensemble. This is a story that sees the family as a system, attentive to how the pressures on one member cause explosions and implosions among the others. In part, In America is the story of immigrant hopes, of creating a new life from the ashes of the old. But more profoundly it serves as proof that tortured people can go through hell and come out the other side to find heaven in Hell's Kitchen. 104 min., Rated PG-13.