Show Times: Monday, May 5 - Thursday, May 15

The Year My Parents Went On Vacation
May 9-15...........4:30, 7:20 - showing in the Rosebud Cinema

My Blueberry Nights
May 5-8.............4:30, 7:20 - showing in the Rosebud Cinema

Iron Man
May 5-15...........4:00, 7:00 - showing in the Rose Theatre

General Admission: $8 - Seniors: $7 (62 and over) and Students (middle & high school with ASB card or student ID) - Children: $6 (12 and under) - Matinees: $1 less

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
Directed by: Cao Hamburger
Featuring: Michel Joelsas, Daniela Piepszyk, Germano Haiut, Liliana Castro
Not Rated. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 105 min.
View the Trailer: www.imdb.com/title/tt0857355/

This Brazilian coming-of-age drama, co-produced by City of God creator Fernando Meirelles, charms because it rarely spells things out. Its young director, Cao Hamburger, allows us to see world-changing events through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy (Michel Joelsas) who goes along with euphemisms such as "vacation" (for his parents political exile) and "amazingly late" (for someone who never arrives).

The soccer-crazed Mauro doesn't always understand the forces that separate him from his family, and no wonder. The year is 1970, man has landed on the moon but the Cold War is still raging. South America is filling up with dictators and secret police, and Mauro's left-wing parents are obliged to go underground. They can't take their boy along on their "vacation,'" so they drop him off at the Sao Paulo home of his grandfather, not realizing that the old man has just died. His neighbor, Shlomo, who works at a synagogue, reluctantly takes care of Mauro, that it's regarded as a minor scandal within his community that the boy is not Jewish.

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is most seductive when it focuses on the details of daily life in the lower-middle-class São Paulo neighborhood Bom Retiro. The rhythms of commerce, worship and domesticity--the sounds of apartment house courtyards, synagogues and shops--frequently overshadow what turns out to be a fairly conventional and sentimental story.

Mauro’s difficult relationship with Shlomo, his friendship with a smart, rebellious girl named Hanna (Daniela Piepszyk) and his crush on a voluptuous waitress (Liliana Castro) are sweetly and sensitively depicted. The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The film's warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike. (Excerpted from the Seattle Times and the New York Times).

"A Fellini-esque magical summer story"-Time Out New York

"This nuanced drama exudes warmth without getting mired in nostalgia"-Chicago Reader

"This film has the power to reach out to audiences all over the world!"-The Hollywood Reporter

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My Blueberry Nights
Directed by: Wong Kar-Wai
Featuring: Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Norah Jones, David Strathairn, Rachel Weitz
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic materials, including violence, drinking and smoking. 91 min.
View the Trailer: www.myblueberrynightsmove.co.uk

Director Wong Kar-Wai's (In the Mood for Love, 2046) My Blueberry Nights isn't the first movie to use food, or even dessert, as a romantic metaphor, but this one is unquestionably the creation of a filmmaker with the sensibility of a woozy, love-stricken pastry chef. You taste My Blueberry Nights with you retinas. It is a melancholy torch song in three-part harmony. The acclaimed Hong Kong-based director brings before his always-prowling camera three stories about addiction--most of all, addiction to love.

Norah Jones (jazz-pop singer, in her film debut) plays Elizabeth, the main actor in the first segment and then a participant/observer in the next two sections. Virtually the whole first third of the film takes place in a Manhattan greasy spoon run by English ex-patriot Jeremy (Jude Law). An occasional diner customer, Elizabeth is in the throes of a really bad break-up and Jeremy feeds her blueberry pie, a dessert left over after closing because "nobody wants it."

Elizabeth decamps for the open road and finds herself in Memphis. Two jobs waitressing at a diner and bar allow her to witness the irreparably broken marriage of an older cop (David Strathairn) and his younger wife (Rachel Weisz). Another waitress job in a Nevada casino brings her into contact with Leslie (Natalie Portman), an inveterate gambler on a losing streak. The curtain falls with Elizabeth back at Jeremy's diner, a changed woman.

The glue here is Jones, who holds a wispy, wistful film together with a deeply felt, unself-conscious performance that strikes the right notes without ever falling into repetition or banality. She brings her singer's talent of knowing when to go for emotions and when to hold back her acting. It's a remarkably assured work.

It would be easy to say that Wong's lustrous love stories are about nothing so much as sensuous textures and impeccable surfaces, and the play of light across them. It would be also be accurate. Some are mesmerizing, some are bittersweet, some are trifles. But they look delicious. (Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Hollywood Reporter).

"Beautiful, romantic and hopeful"-Paper Magazine

"One of the best movies of the year"-The New York Observer

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Iron Man
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Featuring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub, Faran Shahir
Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of action and violence, some suggestive language. 126 min.
View the Trailer: ironmanmovie.marvel.com

Finally, someone's found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie: Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray. The powerhouse comicbook-inspired actioner Iron Man isn't principally about this fantasy, but it won't hurt audience's enjoyment of this expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza. Having an actor as supercharged as Robert Downey Jr. at the center of the enterprise is a huge plus.

It's refreshing, for a start, that the character suddenly endowed with superpowers isn't a dweeby teen, but rather a pushing-middle-age-genius who is himself entirely responsible for the advanced means he acquires to combat his adversaries; he's self-mad superman. Imperious, sarcastic and arrogant, Tony Stark (Downey) creates the world's most sophisticated weapons for the U.S. Army. A boozer and brash ladies' man, the gazillionaire (originally based to a great extent on Howard Hughes) inherited Stark Industries from his late father and runs the company with his dad's partner Obadiah Stone (Jeff Bridges). Praised as a technological Da Vinci and reviled as "the merchant of death," this is a man who always gets what he wants.

On a demonstration trip to Afganistan, however, Tony is ambushed and kidnapped by swarthy types who take him to a cave, connect him to a bomb and command him to make them his latest and greatest weapon. Despite being closely watched, the devious dude surreptitiously creates a sort of high-tech armor suit that turns him into a "destructive Robbie the Robot" and enables him to thwart his captors and fly off into the desert. Her arrives home a changed man, revealing that during captivity he "realized I have more to offer the world than making things that blow up."

Snapping off lines as crisply as Bugs Bunny might bite into a carrot, the sculpture-bearded Downey invigorates the entire proceedings in a way no other actor ever has in this field. Initially conveying Tony's Matt Helm lifestyle as if it's a second nature, Downey possesses a one-of-a-kind intensity that perfectly serves the character's second-act drive and obstinacy. His Achilles' heel is his heart, at first threatened by shrapnel and later central to his superpower and his submerged romantic relationship with ever-loyal assisstant Pepper Potts, who Gwyneth Paltrow, in an unexpected casting move, endows with smarts and appeal. (Excerpted from Variety).

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*Schedule subject to change.

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