preserving an Art Deco movie theater

You have never seen a movie like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” From the instant it begins — in a garage! — with the mechanics bursting into song, you know you’re in for something magical.

Whether you love musicals or opera, Paris or romance – or even if you’re a curmudgeon…this movie will melt you.

“Simply the most romantic film to come from France in the 1960s,” critics Nick Martin and Marsha Porter said. “Watch this with someone you love.”

This is the film that made Catherine Deneuve a star.

Director Jacques Demy, who would later make the equally wonderful “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” created one of the brightest films of all time, filled with saturated color and cool 1960s fashion. Michelle Legrand, one of the world’s great movie composers, provided a score that will leave you humming in French for days afterwards.

We’ve been getting good crowds for the Cerrito Classics recently but we don’t often show something French – or quite as classic as this. Don’t miss it.

The showing is on Thursday, April 12, at 7pm. All seats are $8. Getting to the theater early is always a good idea–for a choice of seating and to order freshly-made food and drinks. You are strongly advised to buy tickets in advance at the box office or online.

Now that “The Artist” has introduced us to the glories of Silent Movies, it’s time to experience the real thing. Cerrito Classics brings you “Metropolis,” the fully-restored 1927 sci-fi masterpiece by Fritz Lang.  Don’t miss it!

Film critic Peter Bradshaw describes it thus:

One of the biggest, strangest, maddest films in cinema history returns, with missing footage restored: a textual enlargement that of course explains nothing about the film, and just makes it bigger, stranger and madder than ever. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film is a crazed futurist epic, a mythic sprawl with something of Jung and Wagner, and dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble. Metropolis predicts the ideologies of class and race of the 20th century.

The showing is on Thursday, March 8th, at 7pm. All seats are $8. Getting to the theater early is always a good idea–for a choice of seating and to order freshly-made food and drinks. You are strongly advised to buy tickets in advance at the box office or online.

 We open on Philadelphia socialite C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) as he’s being tossed out of his palatial home by his wife, Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn). Adding insult to injury, Tracy breaks one of C.K.’s precious golf clubs. He gallantly responds by knocking her down on her million-dollar keester. A couple of years after the breakup, Tracy is about to marry George Kittridge (John Howard), a wealthy stuffed shirt whose principal recommendation is that he’s not a Philadelphia “mainliner,” as C.K. was. Still holding a torch for Tracy, C.K. is galvanized into action when he learns that Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell), the publisher of Spy Magazine, plans to publish an expose concerning Tracy’s philandering father (John Halliday). To keep Kidd from spilling the beans, C.K. agrees to smuggle Spy reporter Macauley Connor (James Stewart) and photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) into the exclusive Lord-Kittridge wedding ceremony. How could C.K. have foreseen that Connor would fall in love with Tracy, thereby nearly lousing up the nuptials? As it turns out, of course, it is C.K. himself who pulls the “louse-up,” reclaiming Tracy as his bride. A consistently bright, bubbly, witty delight, The Philadelphia Story could just as well have been titled “The Revenge of Katharine Hepburn.” Source: Rialto Cinemas

The showing is on February 9th, at 7pm. All seats are $8. Getting to the theater early is always a good idea–for a choice of seating and to order freshly-made food and drinks. You are strongly advised to buy tickets in advance at the box office or online.