sunday monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday

June - July 2009
Student Union Building, UVic
Admission Prices
University of Victoria Students’ Society, conceived
as an inexpensive alternative for students, the
University community and the public. The
theatre is in the Student Union Building at
UVic. The following buses come to UVic: 4, 7, 11,
14, 26, 39, 51.
(GST included)
The university charges a flat fee of $2.00 for parking
on campus after 6pm and all day on Saturdays. There
is no charge for parking on Sundays and holidays.
Tickets and memberships go on sale 40
minutes before showtime. Please arrive early
to avoid disappointment.
where noted. Films are 35mm prints unless otherwise indicated.
UVSS Students
Seniors, Children (12 & under)
Other Students
Cinemagic Members
$4.75
$4.75
$5.75
$5.75
and guests (1 only) of above
Non-members
$5.75
$6.75
Our matinees return in September!
24-hour Info Line: 250-721-8365
Cinecenta Office: 250-721-8364
Manager: Michael Ryan
TEN FILM DISCOUNT PASS
Programmer: Michael Hoppe
$40.00
Students, Seniors
$50.00
Design: Joey MacDonald
(Unavailable to non-members.)
DAILY SHOW INFO: 250-721-8365
www.cinecenta.com
sunday
monday
tuesday
wednesday
thursday
friday
JUNE 5 & 6 (7:00 & 9:10)
MAY 31 & JUNE 1 (7:00 only)
JUNE 3 & 4 (7:00 & 9:00)
Fellini’s LA
HUNGER
TWO LOVERS
Steve McQueen (Ireland/UK, 2008,
97 minutes; 14A)
WINNER! BEST FIRST FEATURE!
–Cannes Film Festival, 2008
“AN ACT OF GREAT ART.” –Washington Post
“A SUPERBLY BALANCED PIECE OF WORK!”
–The Village Voice
“A mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema,
one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking
debuts of recent years.” –Salon
####! Hunger — the disturbing, provocative,
brilliant feature debut from British director
Steve McQueen — centers on the death by
self-imposed starvation of IRA activist Bobby
Sands. It forces us to take a long, hard look at
a martyr’s moment in history, but with the polite iconography completely stripped away, revealing the dirt
beneath the fingernails, the filth on the walls, the anguish of the punished and the punishers, the blood shed
and the blood spilled. All our senses are alive to the inevitability of a death that some will see as redemptive,
others as wasteful, still others as perfectly just. And so the moment casts its lingering shadow, stretching from
yesterday’s Northern Ireland to the Iraq, the Darfur, the Guantanamo of today. –The Globe and Mail #####!
The absence of moral judgment is one of the most thrilling things about director McQueen’s astonishing debut
feature... - well, that and the bravura central sequence in which Sands (the terrific Michael Fassbender)
debates the value of suicidal resistance with a priest (Liam Cunningham). –Now Magazine
James Gray
(USA, 2009, 110 mins; PG)
Cast: J oaqui n P hoe nix, Gwy net h Palt r o w,
Vinessa Shaw, I sabella Rossellini
STRADA
Directed by Federico Fellini
(Italy, 1954, 107 minutes; Italian with Eng subtitles)
Cast: Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart.
Special Showing from Janus Films!
35mm print in Canada for a limited time!
Giulietta Masina gives one of cinema’s most memorable
performances in Fellini’s international breakthrough and
his first unquestioned masterpiece. The film won a Silver
Lion at Venice and the first of Fellini’s four Academy
Awards for Best Foreign Film. Masina (Fellini’s wife) is
Gelsomina, a simple-minded peasant girl who is sold to
a brutal circus strongman (played by Anthony Quinn) for
a plate of pasta. Richard Basehart co-stars as the Fool, a
gentle tightrope-walker who befriends the beleaguered
heroine. Although ostensibly neorealist in form, La
Strada’s highly allegorical, profoundly spiritual quality
marked a departure from the strict tenets of neorealism.
–Pacific Cinematheque “A haunting, lyrical masterpiece that will remain with you long after the credits have disappeared.”—BBCi
Sponsored by UVic’s Department of Hispanic and Italian
Studies.
JUNE 7 – 13
STONE OF DESTINY
Charles Martin Smith (Canada/UK, 2008,
97 minutes; PG)
Cast: Charlie Cox, Kate Mara, Robert Carlyle,
Billy Boyd, Stephen McCole, Ciaron Kelly
WINNER! AUDIENCE FAVOURITE AWARD
— VICTORIA FILM FESTIVAL!
A skirl of the bagpipes and a sweeping view of rugged
countryside set the tone for this lively comedy caper.
Stone of Destiny will stir the heart as a group of students liberate the ancient Stone of Scone – a beloved
symbol of Scottish independence – from Westminster
Abbey. –Victoria Film Festival
(7:10 & 9:00)
ACT
OF
GOD
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
(Canada, 2009, 75 minutes; rat ed G)
Preceded by the delightful, Academy-Award-winning
animated short THE DANISH POET (National Film
Board, 2006, 14 mins), directed by Torill Kove and
narrated by Liv Ullman.
#####!
JUNE 2 (7:00 & 9:00)
Back by popular demand!
You and your friends get hit by a ball of lightning.
The person standing right next to you dies, but you don’t. You just
get knocked off your feet.
What would you think about that?
How would you think about that?
Was it chance? Dumb luck? A trick of science? Divine intervention?
“SPECTACULAR! ‘ACT OF GOD’ HITS THE MARK!” - The Globe and Mail
That all depends upon who you ask, according to Act of God,
a brilliant new documentary from Jennifer Baichwal that
examines the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning. Baichwal’s movie ventures into the places where science
and religion get all smushed together, where the math of probability and the facts of electrical differential meet the human
need to find a deeper meaning behind the apparently random
and destructive.
Act of God has a terrific cast of characters. Baichwal interviews people whose lives have been changed forever by lightning, including the playwright James O’Reilly, who has written
about the strike he survived almost 30 years ago, and who
acts out, in chilling (and frankly riveting) detail, the events as
he recalls them. Some of the people involved want to talk
about God and heaven, but O’Reilly is having none of that.
Then there’s the American writer Paul Auster, whose experiences as an adolescent at camp include the death of a fellow
camper via lightning strike. Both O’Reilly and Auster say they
waited many years before writing specifically about their
experiences, but the events seem to have found a way into
their writing long before that.
Baichwal interviews the religious family members of people
who were killed by lightning in Mexico (as they were visiting a
shrine), films the energetic festival and parade dedicated to
Shango, God of lightning, and talks to a French lightning aficionado about storms and the soul. She also has a sequence
with guitar improv hero Fred Frith, who talks about electricity
and the brain, and how the act of creation takes place some-
saturday
“A tender and terrific film with one of Joaquin
Phoenix’s best performances. Gwyneth
Paltrow is a luminous fusion of grace and
grit.” –Rolling Stone
#####! As Two Lovers’ shut-in Leonard, a thir“#
tyish sad sack living with his parents and getting
over a devastating breakup with a long-gone
fiancée, Joaquin Phoenix excels like never before.
Leonard evolves before our eyes (a tribute to a
beautifully modulated script): suicidal, goofy, hard
working, certainly not childish. The movie is set at
the moment when he finally begins to love again
and, as these things sometimes happen, he meets
two worthy candidates at once. There’s upstairsneighbor Michelle (Paltrow, balancing shiksa goddess with vulnerability), already involved with a
married man, and grounded Sandra (Shaw), whom
Leonard’s doting parents obviously prefer.... So
much of life’s momentousness is accidental; nothing in Two Lovers is. Finally, the year’s first serious
American movie. –Time Out New York
where between meaning and chance.
Act of God is the coolest movie. It’s also
visually magnificent. Baichwal manages to
convey all the power and majesty — and
menace — of lightning with just the sort of
gobsmacking footage that keeps you glued
to the screen. Act of God fearlessly
approaches the natural and the supernatural,
and the result is visceral, intellectual, heartbreaking, delightful and instructive, all at
once. –Sun Media
“I love unanswerable questions; questions
like ‘Is there such a thing as destiny’, and
‘what does it all mean?’ Is the only response
to randomness ultimately nihilism? Or you
can go the other way, where everything is
deterministic, which is equally stifling. The
fact that those two extremes can meet, and
the fact that lightning is the perfect metaphor
for that relationship, made this a very philosophical film.” –Jennifer Baichwal
Jennifer Baichwal grew up in Victoria,
BC. Her feature documentaries are
Manufactured Landscapes, Let It Come
Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, The
Holier It Gets and The True Meaning of
Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia.
sunday
monday
tuesday
JUNE 16 (6:45 & 9:15)
back by popular demand!
JUNE 14 & 15 (7:00 only)
NIGHTWATCHING
wednesday
If it came from a more commercial filmmaker,
Nightwatching could be marketed as a cross
between Shakespeare in Love and The Da Vinci
Code, combining a lusty portrait of a great artist
and a secret meaning behind a famous painting.
But Peter Greenaway, the English director of such
lush and strange films as The Cook, the Thief,
His Wife and Her Lover, and The Pillow Book,
is nobody’s idea of a commercial director. His fans
will appreciate this eccentric exercise in hypothetical art history. Nightwatching is about the history of Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch, completed in 1642. Replete with beautifully lit theatrical tableaux, the production design and
Wlodzimierz Pawlik’s baroque-sounding score feel
like the real stars of the film, as they bring the
painter’s world to the screen. English comic actor
Martin Freeman (The Office) plays a sort of rumpled Cockney version of Rembrandt...—The Globe and Mail
#####! It succeeds in the daunting task of turning a historical icon into flesh and blood.
—Sun Media
Laurent Cantet (France, 2008, 130 minutes;
French with English subtitles; rated PG)
Starring François Bégaudeau
“RIVETING!” –The Globe and Mail
“UNMISSABLE!” –Rolling Stone
“THIS MOVIE WILL NAIL YOU TO YOUR SEAT.”
–Slate
#####! The Class
won the Palme d’Or at
last year’s Cannes Film
Festival, and no surprise. It’s a razor-sharp
look at one year in the
life of a French high
school class. It’s a terrific, cohesive work
that makes the intellectual challenges of educating today’s youth
seem thrilling rather than hopeless. —Now Magazine
JUNE 19 & 20 (7:10 & 9:15)
I LOVE YOU, MAN
observed. –Entertainment Weekly
What gives the animal-heavy Tulpan its
real kick—and also elevates it beyond
similar fare such as The Story of the
Weeping
Camel—is
the
way
Dvortsevoy integrates nonfictional elements into a developed plotline. The
strategy comes to a head with the filmic
moment of the year, perhaps the greatest on-camera animal birth in the history of cinema.” —Vancouver International
Film Festival
### ##! Sergei Dvortsevoy’s funny,
fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film
Tulpan is ethnographic filmmaking without the preaching. On the surface, it’s an
absurd domestic comedy. Bubbling
underneath is an intimate portrait of a
receding way of life, and the relationship
between land, people and animals in a
remote part of central Asia. –The Globe
and Mail
“THE REAL STAR IS THE GORGEOUS,
NEVER-ENDING LANDSCAPE—” –New
York Post
Sergei Dvortsevoy
(Kazakhstan/Russia/Germany, 2008,
Kazakh & Russian with Eng subtitles; 104
mins; PG)
17 AGAIN
Burr Steers (USA, 2009, 102 mins; PG) Cast: Zac
Ef ro n, Le sl ie Mann, Tho mas Le nnon, M ic hel le
Trachtenberg, and Matthew Perr y
A washed-up former athlete on the brink of divorce
(Matthew Perry) gets his wish to start over again when he’s
magically transformed into his teenage self (Zac Efron of
High School Musical). This amiable fantasy-comedy features the appealing Leslie Mann (Knocked Up) as the
hero’s wife and Thomas Lennon (Reno 911) as the billionaire best friend who helps Efron get back into school to
correct his past mistakes. The ancient body-switching
premise is animated by a breezy script that briefly addresses some of its darker implications before returning to a celebration of adolescence. Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down)
directed. –Chicago Reader
JUNE 28 & 29 (7:00 only)
MONSTERS VS. ALIENS
–Montreal Gazette
GOMORRAH
Matteo Garrone
“TRIUMPHANT!” -Metro Canada
“A CHARMING ROAD TRIP,
FILLED WITH QUINTESSENTIAL CANADIANA.” --Robert Moyes,
Monday Magazine
When a young man is confronted with his mortality, he
takes a cross-country road trip on a vintage motorcycle.
ONE WEEK tells the story of Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson),
in his mid-twenties, who flees from the confines of his
life—an impending marriage, a job he’s not entirely happy
with and a recent diagnosis—in order to attempt to live
more fully. What starts off as an ill-defined venture soon
morphs into a quest for the West Coast.
—Mongrel Media ####! –Now Magazine
GRAND PRIZE WINNER! –Cannes Film Festival
(Italy, 2008, 137 minutes; Italian with Eng subtitles; 14A)
WINNER OF 5 EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS including BEST PICTURE!
####! Mob stories told American-style tend to
come with a sizable degree of glamour. But in
Matteo Garrone’s masterful Gomorrah, money is
what it is: dirty and cold. It comes in thick wads
like the one carried around by soft-spoken middleman Don Ciro, who peels off a few bills to pay
the families of imprisoned gang members during
his rounds in a housing project in Naples.
Gomorrah is five loosely connected, interweaving
stories of foot soldiers of Italy’s most famous and
powerful crime syndicate. The film is an adaptation of Italian writer Roberto Saviano’s bestselling
2006 novel. Saviano paid for his undercover
research (he now has a permanent police escort).
Gomorrah slices into this dangerous terrain with
appropriately raw, in-your-face, almost documentary-style cinematography. But if this is challenging, it’s also a thrilling cinematic experience. —
The Globe and Mail
“A funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece.” –The Onion
“UPLIFITING! Offers numerous pleasures and one of the most satisfying and resonant conclusions in
recent cinema.” –The Hollywood Reporter
####! A miraculous, American-made Hindi film that is every bit as tranquil as the bluegreen reservoir that serves as its abiding metaphor. The film follows Venkatesh, an 18-yearold janitor mopping (and moping) away the hours in a no-star hotel outside Panjim. The one
highlight of Venkatesh’s day comes when he disappears into the suburbs and climbs a
mango tree; a perch with a clear view of an unruffled turquoise pool. What would it feel like
to escape the day’s drudgery, floating without a care? Battling shyness, Venkatesh presents
himself to the pool’s wealthy owner, Nana Patekar, and volunteers to help prune his estate’s
tangled garden. He also hangs around with Nana’s angry teenage daughter, Ayesha.
Eventually, the wealthy landowner offers his protégé a scholarship to a local school. Once
he receives a proper education, Venkatesh can come and live with him, Nana promises. In
the meantime, the teenager is given access to the pool. “But be careful,” the older man
warns. “My son drowned there.” And so Venkatesh learns that his newfound Garden of
Eden is more tangled than is immediately apparent....We should always welcome films like
The Pool: an artful, unresolved mystery that lingers in the mind long after we leave the theatre. —The Globe and Mail
Beautifully naturalistic... a story both specific and profoundly global. –Entertainment Weekly
Adam Del Deo & James D. Stern (USA, 2009, 93 mins; PG)
(USA, 2008, 92 minutes; 14A)
A slight sense of deja vu
hangs over this offbeat
comedy: like Little Miss
Sunshine, it takes place in
a cockeyed, can-do version
of the southwest, features
Alan Arkin as a cantankerous old fart, and combines
morbid humor with cheery
emotionalism. It’s a solid
indie effort with plenty of
nice character strokes and
razor-sharp performances
by Amy Adams and Emily
Blunt. They play sisters
who, sick of their menial
jobs, launch a business
cleaning up gory crime scenes; Arkin is their father, who’s attracted to stupid get-rich-quick schemes,
and there are fine supporting turns by Steve Zahn as a cop, Mary Lynn Rajskub as a suicide victim’s
daughter, and Clifton Collins Jr. as the shy, one-armed shopkeeper.– Chicago Reader A smartly done
morality tale that couldn’t be more in sync with these troubled times. –Los Angeles Times
JULY 17 & 18 (7:15 & 9:00)
SHALL WE KISS?
ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL
Emmanuel Mouret
(France, 2007, 101 mins;
French with English subtitles; PG)
“STORYTELLING AS ART.” –The Wall Street Journal
“UPSCALE ENTERTAINMENT AT ITS BEST.” –Variety
Impossibly charming, Shall We Kiss? is a comic
romance full of rueful musings about fidelity and true
love. Written, directed by and starring Emmanuel
Mouret - whose onscreen persona is shaggy and
shambling - the film follows a man and woman who
are closest of friends, but whose friendship turns to
sexual desire and then knock-down-the-house obsession. So what’s the problem? Well, she, Judith (the elegant Virginie Ledoyen), is already married to the nice,
funny, caring Claudio (Stefano Accorsi). She doesn’t
have the heart to hurt her spouse, even as her relationship with Nicolas (Mouret) has changed from intimately platonic to just plain intimate. Shall We Kiss? may
not be deep, but it’s deeply delightful. —Philadelphia
Inquirer
JULY 19 & 20 (7:00 only)
THE SOLOIST
“A BITTERSWEET JOY.” –Baltimore Sun
“INFINITELY CHARMING.” –The New Yorker
Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid And The
Whale) stars as a deep thinker in a superficial ’80s world where artsy pretensions
don’t survive long working at a secondrate amusement park. Eisenberg’s innocence is nicely matched by the coltishness of Twilight breakout star Kristen
Stewart. Eisenberg is a virginal college
graduate who gets a shitty job at an
amusement park as a way of passing time
before his real life begins. At work,
Eisenberg falls helplessly in love with a
co-worker (Stewart), a brooding, intense
young woman stuck in a go-nowhere affair
with married man Ryan Reynolds.
Adventureland captures with humor and
heart the way workplaces can become encapsulated universes with elaborate traditions and loose hierarchies. It’s a poignant, very funny Graduate-like immersion in post-collegiate angst. —The Onion
JULY 15 & 16 (7:00 & 9:00)
Un baiser s’il vous plaît
“INSPIRED!” –The New York Times
“SENSATIONAL!” –Miami Herald
“IT’S A BIG ICE-CREAM SUNDAE!” –Chicago Tribune
“A THRILLING COMBINATION OF DOCUMENTARY AND MUSICAL DAZZLER!”
–Rolling Stone
“HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE A MOVIE LEFT YOU LITERALLY SPEECHLESS?”
–The Wall Street Journal
A Chorus Line, as everyone knows, is the sublime Broadway musical (first
staged in 1975) in which a bunch of eager, nervous dancers audition for a
Broadway musical. So what does that make Every Little Step? It's a documentary, pegged to the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line, that asks you to share
the joy, vulnerability, heartbreak, and love of a bunch of dancers trying out for
a musical about a bunch of dancers trying out for a musical. It is, in other
words, a movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.
Every Little Step salutes Michael Bennett's creation of the first reality musical
by turning the run-up to the revival into a fierce backstage reality pageant of its
own. It's fascinating to compare the performers who almost have that ineffable
''it'' to those who land the roles because they inhabit them....It's partly because
of A Chorus Line that we now live in a different world. –Entertainment Weekly
Greg Mottola (USA, 2009, 107 minutes; 14A)
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Ryan Reynolds,
Kristen Stewart, M artin Starr, Paige Howard, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader.
Christine Jeffs
(USA, 2007, 94 minutes; English & Hindi with subtitles; PG)
EVERY LITTLE STEP
“SPARKLES WITH WIT.” –Charlotte Observer
“SMART, DROLL AND DAZZLING TO LOOK AT AND LISTEN
TO.” —Variety
“AN ENORMOUSLY ENJOYABLE ROMANTIC COMEDY SET
AT THE CENTER OF A CAPER MOVIE.” –The New Yorker
“Duplicity”: the title suggests something with two
sides, but the film itself, the second (after
“Michael Clayton”) written and directed by Tony
Gilroy, has many more layers and facets. Its
densely coiled plot and splintered chronology
reveal a cascade of familiar genres and styles. It’s
a caper movie, a love story — with Clive Owen
and Julia Roberts, no less — an extra-dry corporate satire. However you describe it, “Duplicity” is
superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very
long time. —The New York Times
SUNSHINE CLEANING
THE POOL
JULY 12, 13, 14 (7:00 only)
Tony Gilroy
(USA, 2008, 126 minutes; PG)
Starring Julia R ober t s, Cli ve Owen, To m
Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti,
JULY 10 & 11 (7:10 & 9:00)
JULY 7, 8, 9 (7:00 & 9:00)
Chris Smith
DUPLICITY
ADVENTURELAND
“FIENDISHLY FUNNY!” –The
Guardian The biggest boxoffice smash in French history shows the French in the
mood to laugh at themselves. This is a hicks-inthe-sticks tale about a post
office manager (Kad Merad)
who ends up banished to a
rainy town in the north. The
townspeople
speak
a
dialect which to Philippe's ears is little more than
gibberish... Dany Boon's deeply charming comedy
might dispel the notion that the French cannot
laugh at themselves. The director's own turn as a
dim-witted mailman is also a piece of terrific comedy. –-Vancouver International Film Festival
Cast: With Joshua Jackson, Liane Balaban, Campbell
Scott
JUNE 26 & 27 (7:00 & 9:25)
JULY 3 & 4 (7:10 & 9:15)
Dany Boon (France, 2008, 107 minutes; PG)
Cast: Dany Boon, Kad Merad, Zoe Felix, Anne
Marivin, Philippe Duquesne.
(Canada, 2008, 94 minutes; PG)
(USA, 2009, 105 min; 14A)
Starring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida
Jones, Andy Samberg,
“HILARIOUS!” –San Francisco Chronicle
Paul Rudd plays a clueless realtor engaged to
Rashida Jones. He gets along fine with
women, but lacks a male friend to be his best
man. He stumbles upon Jason Segel, who
plays a best friend a lot of guys would like to
have — thoroughly comfortable within his own
skin, an unapologetic hedonist uses his intelligence as a comic weapon. A very funny
movie. –Roger Ebert Paul Rudd’s timing has
always been good, but in I Love You, Man he
gives the finest performance of his career...It’s
as if he’s invented a new comedy dialect. —
Salon
back by popular demand!
BIENVENUE CHEZ LES CH'TIS
ONE WEEK
Michael McGowan
John Hamburg
JULY 2 (7:00 & 9:10)
WELCOME TO THE STICKS
JUNE 30 & JULY 1 (7:00 & 9:00)
Back by popular demand!
“PURE, LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT. They were the
stuff of ‘50s sci-fi legend: a scientist transformed
into a man-insect, a prehistoric ape-fish, a gelatinous blob capable of absorbing anything in its
path, a gigantoid moth and an ordinary woman
enlarged to 50-foot height. They made movie
characters scream and run and moviegoers
squirm in their seats. But if you imagine what they
would really amount to in the real world, well, they
sound pretty silly. Suppose, though, they really
existed. Surely the government would contain
them in some secret facility and deploy them only
for the most acute emergency — an alien invasion, say. This is the setup of Monsters vs.
Aliens, a brisk and peppy animated comedy
about just this very situation.
–Portland
Oregonian
JULY 5 & 6 (7:00 only)
WINNER! UN CERTAIN REGARD AWARD
– Cannes Film Festival
WINNER! BEST FEATURE FILM
–Montreal Festival of New Cinema
If you see only one comic love story from
Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey. Tulpan is the saga of Asa, a shy
young man who searches for a wife under
extreme conditions: He’s a nomadic shepherd,
the Kazakh steppe he calls home is vast and
empty beyond imagining, and the only eligible
young lady for miles around rejects him
because of his big ears. There’s no room for
mush in Sergey Dvortsevoy’s triumphant, intimate drama, not when the necessities of daily
life are so elemental, and so tenderly
“ONE GREAT CANADIAN MOVIE.”
Conrad Vernon & Rob Letterman (USA, 2009,
95 minutes; rated G - violence)
Animation
voiced by Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen,
Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sut herland,
Stephen Colbert, Renée Zellweger, and Rainn
Wilson
new 35mm restoration!
Special Showing from Janus Films!
35mm print in Canada for a limited time!
“MASSIVELY ENJOYABLE! An eye-popping restoration!”
–Salon.com
If ever there was a movie made entirely out of nostalgia
and joy, by a filmmaker at the heedless height of his
powers, that movie is Federico Fellini’s Amarcord. The
title means “I remember”, but these are memories of
memories, transformed by affection and fantasy. At the
center is the son of a large, loud family, who is dizzied
by the life churning all around him — the girls he idealizes, the tarts he lusts for, the rituals of the village year,
the practical jokes he likes to play, the meals that
always end in drama, the church’s thrilling opportunities
for sin and redemption, and the vaudeville of Italy itself
— the transient glories of grand hotels and great ocean liners, the play-acting of Mussolini’s fascist costume
party...Amarcord is Fellini’s final great film. The other masterpieces are La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La
Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Juliet of the Spirits. –Roger Ebert
Sponsored by UVic’s Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies.
TULPAN
saturday
“HILARIOUS!” –
Italian with subtitles)
JUNE 23, 24, 25 (7:10 & 9:15)
JUNE 21 & 22 (7:00 only)
friday
Premiere
JUNE 17 & 18 (7:00 & 9:25)
Fellini’s AMARCORD
THE CLASS / ENTRE LES MURS Federico
Fellini (Italy/France, 1973, 125 mins;
Peter Greenaway
(Netherlands/UK/Canada,
2008, 140 minutes; in English; 18A)
thursday
JULY 21, 22, 23 (7:00 & 9:00)
FIERCE LIGHT: WHEN SPIRIT MEETS ACTION
Joe Wright (USA, 2009, 117 mins; PG)
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine
Keener.
Directed by Velcrow Ripper
If you’ve seen the trailer for The Soloist — in which
Robert Downey Jr. plays a journalist who tries to help
a schizophrenic and homeless man played by Jamie
Foxx — you probably think the movie is one of those
uplifting friendship stories. Movie advertising is never
about nuance, but movies often are. Actually, The
Soloist is a triumphant movie about failure, and the
best things about it can’t be captured in a trailer. The
picture is based on a true story...but the redemption
is the thorny kind, the sort that means acknowledging limitations instead of blithely believing you can
break through them. The Soloist is less about a
friendship between a journalist and a down-and-out,
mentally ill musician than it is about the process of
really seeing what — or who — is in front of you.
—Salon.com
The Soloist is about the grace notes, the kind that
stay with you. –Rolling Stone
Acclaimed filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred) takes an insightful and inspirational look at change motivated by love. Called “soul force” by Gandhi and “love in
action” by Martin Luther King, spiritual activism’s historical roots are examined and
illustrated by interviews with spiritual luminaries Thich Nhat Hahn and Desmond Tutu,
and with activists including Alice Walker and bell hooks. We join Ripper as he contemplates his place in the universe, his drive to make the world a better place, and the
ways in which the two connect.
Ripper takes us on an international and historical journey that explores the reaches of
spiritual activism. In Oaxaca, friend and fellow journalist Brad Will is shot by paramilitaries. In Quebec City, people gather to protest the Free Trade Agreement. In South
Central L.A., a peaceful occupation takes place to save North America’s largest urban
garden (where a vacant lot was transformed into a vibrant oasis by Latino families a
decade earlier). When developers threaten the garden, the call for help results in support from hundreds of protesters (including Danny Glover, Ralph Nader and Joan
Baez).
Fierce Light is a visually powerful and incredibly moving documentary, a spiritual
experience in itself, about the impact and the necessity of spiritual action in today’s
world. —Vancouver International Film Festival
(Canada, 2008, 97 minutes; PG)
"A SPIRITUAL KALEIDOSCOPE OF HOPE AND JOY.
UPLIFTING!" ~ Green Muze
Sacha Gervasi
(USA, 2009, 81 minutes; 14A)
#####!” –Time Out New York
#####!” –Empire “#
“#
“A MASTERPIECE!” –BBC
“A VERY FUNNY DOCUMENTARY!” –San Francisco Chronicle
“HILARIOUS, TOUCHING AND INSPIRING!” –Portland Oregonian
It’s become a rock cliché to say that heavy metal stars are
acting like something out of ‘’a real-life Spinal Tap.’‘ So let’s
get this out of the way: Anvil! really is the real-life Spinal
Tap. It’s a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary
about the greatest metal band you’ve probably never heard
of —a crew of Canadian headbangers who came up in the
demon-thrash ‘80s. We see the band in footage from 1984
and yes, the lead singer, Steve ‘’Lips’‘ Kudlow, screamsnarls, and the whole band rockets forward with the kind of
hell-bent thunder-god virility. And then? Then they went
nowhere. The film catches up with Lips and his drummer as
they go about their cruddy day jobs 25 years later in
Toronto. Anvil! traces the band’s attempt at a comeback
that turns into a series of farcical disasters... —
Entertainment Weekly
SPONSORED BY CFUV 101.9 FM
JULY 24 & 25 (7:10 & 9:10)
ADORATION
Atom Egoyan
(Canada, 2008, 101 mins; PG)
ECUMENICAL JURY PRIZE WINNER!
—Cannes Film Festival, 2008
Each new Atom Egoyan film invites reflection, but
Adoration provokes new debates, furthering the
themes of his nearly twenty-five-year body of work.
Urgent, elegant and simmering with ideas, this is a
fugue for our age of terror and shifting identities.
When his high-school French class is asked to
translate a news article about a terrorist, Simon
(Devon Bostick) starts digging into his own family’s
murky past. His resulting claims about the deaths of
his father and mother stir up a storm that splashes
over the edges of his own life and into communities
both local and virtual. Bringing full teenaged confusion and self-righteousness to the crisis he helped
create, Simon lives with his well-meaning, struggling uncle (Scott Speedman), but increasingly shuts
him out, opening up instead to his mysterious French teacher (Arsinée Khanjian)...Years after Family
Viewing, Speaking Parts and The Sweet Hereafter, this Canadian master has returned to explore the
fractured ground of human communication and self-presentation, but with a cinematic language that
has grown even richer. It stands among his very best work. —Toronto International Film Festival