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Silicon Valley Movie Times
Movie times in San Jose, Campbell, Fremont, Los Gatos, Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley cities.
Santa Cruz County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville and other Central Coast cities.
Sonoma County / Napa County / Marin County Movie Times
Movie times in Santa Rosa, Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Sonoma, Sebastopol, and other North Bay cities.
The Right Stuff
Robert Downey Jr. takes off in 'Iron Man'
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
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
That's easy for them to say; if only we could forget this lame comedy
Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden
He's not watching this underwhelming Morgan Spurlock documentary
Baby Mama (PG-13; 96 min.) Tina Fey essentially portrays her character from 30 Rock and those AMEX ads, a successful exec at "Round Earth Foods" (the self-satisfied New Age CEO is a pony-tailed Steve Martin). Kate is without child, so she hires a white-trash surrogate mom, Angie (Amy Poehler). Surrogacy is merely outsourcing, says the head of a surrogate motherhood firm (scene-stealing Sigourney Weaver). Although Fey is more talking head than actress, her Odd Couple interplay with Poehler is often amusing, and the supporting cast is stellar. Baby Mama is not quite a great comedy, but it is a feminine relief from the Judd Apatow juggernaut. (Plays valleywide.) (DH)
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (PG; 90 min.) Ben Stein attempts to convince audiences that a clique of dastardly pointy-headed intellectuals are preventing our schoolchildren from learning the truth about intelligent design. (Opens May 2 at Cinelux Plaza in Campbell.)
Made of Honor (PG-13; 101 min.) This uneasy alliance of overly literal fairy tale—a duke on horseback rescues 30-single Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) on the Scottish moors—and role reversal of My Best Friend's Wedding—caddish Tom (Patrick Dempsey) realizes that he loves his platonic friend Hannah only after she's engaged to the Scottish Duke—blends like Haggis and cake. Tom agrees to be maid of donor at Hannah's wedding and is crudely emasculated by ritual (the vicar thinks he's gay!). Inflation now apparently ravages not just food and fuel but also chick-flick beaus. Hannah chooses between the multimillionaire coffee-sleeve inventor Tom (cue Starbucks scenes) and a dashing Scottish nobleman. But hypertrophied trophy suitors and gorgeous Scottish and NYC scenery can't mask the film's unpleasant mix of rude humor and fantasy-league romance. (Plays valleywide.) (DH)
The Visitor (PG-13; 108 min.) Walter (Richard Jenkins), a numb, grieving academic from Connecticut, visits his pied-à-terre apartment in Manhattan and finds it inhabited by two deserving squatters: a handsome Syrian drummer (Haaz Slieman) and his Senegalese wife (Danai Gurira). He decides to let them stay, but soon the immigration authorities intervene. Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) directs; Jenkins (memorable as the ghost dad in Six Feet Under) simmers away and has a good boil-over at the illegal-immigrants detention center. But what planet has Walter been visiting? (He's a college professor, and he hasn't heard how out of control the I.C.E. is?) Unfortunately, despite the likable acting, this is every guilty white person's favorite fantasy: it's about smiling people of color who will forgive us and lead us into tutorials on the popular arts. The Visitor is a manipulation job, and only the most tenderhearted will succumb. (Plays at CinéArts Palo Alto and Santana Row.) (RvB)
Holly
Ron Livingston is shocked, shocked to learn that there is child prostitution in Cambodia
Forbidden Kingdom
Jet Li and Jackie Chan do their best to revive memories of better Hong Kong martial arts movies
Chapter 27
Jared Leto bulks up to play Lennon's creepy killer
Street Kings
Keanu Reeves tries to survive the mean streets of the LAPD
Run Fat Boy Run
Simon Pegg legs it out for new David Schwimmer comedy
21
The fix is in as Kevin Spacey leads card counters to victory
Smart People
Dennis Quaid plays a professor with a dysfunctional family
Shine a Light
Martin Scorsese's 'Shine a Light' captures the exuberance of a Stones show but doesn't reach greatness
The Duchess of Langeais
Jacques Rivette's 'The Duchess of Langeais' ups the ante on an aristocratic flirtation
Snow Angels
The chill factor freezes young romance in David Gordon Green's new film
Paranoid Park
A skateboard rolls into trouble in Gus Van Sant's latest
Flash Point
The fists and feet fly in a new Hong Kong action film
Funny Games
Naomi Watts and Tim Roth must endure the world's worst uninvited house guests
10,000 B.C.
Ancient history gets rewritten
Bureau of Missing Persons/Fashions of 1934 (1933/1934) Bette Davis has six scenes in Roy Del Ruth's adaptation of a nonfiction book by police captain John H. Ayres; she plays a wife looking for her missing husband. It was not a hit ("The title was appropriate, I guess," Davis said), but it's remembered fondly for the scene where a policeman invents a way to stake out a carrier pigeon. BILLED WITH Fashions of 1934. Lesser-known Busby Berkeley–choreographed comedy. Davis, glazed with makeup and peroxide, plays the secretary/model for an unscrupulous fashion designer (William Powell). The William Dieterle film is a pre-Code buffet of cheesecake, including a Hall of Human Harps, a Web of Dreams, Venus and Her Galley Slaves and a Niagara of marabou feathers. New print. (Plays May 8-9 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Ex-Lady/Fog Over Frisco (1933/1934) "We don't dare tell you how daring it is!" Reputedly a 58-minute pre-Code lingerie fest with Bette Davis in "the titular part," as No. 1 Davis fan Whitney Stine delicately put it; "The Hollywood Reporter review I have never forgotten," Davis moaned later. "It said, 'Why didn't Warners shoot the entire script of Ex-Lady in one bedroom on one bed?'" It is a remake of the Barbara Stanwyck picture Illicit, with Gene Raymond and Frank McHugh as the men in Davis' life. It was Davis' first name-above-the-title role. BILLED WITH Fog Over Frisco Proto-noir: Margaret Lindsay tries to rescue her stepsister (Davis) from scandal after she gets involved with gangsters. "The part in Fog Over Frisco was one I adored," Davis wrote. "It also was a very good script, directed superbly by William Dieterle." "Rarely has 67 minutes of screen time been more resourcefully used"—Clive Hirschhorn, The Warner Brothers Story. (Plays May 10-11 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Niles Film Museum This week: The General (1926). The comedy of war is the theme of Buster Keaton's masterpiece—the gun that misfires and kills the wrong man, the officer's wrongheaded command—all summed up in the sequence in which Buster is chased by a huge, blunt cannon with almost-human malignance. Billed with Billy McGrath on Broadway (1913) and Laurel and Hardy in From Soup to Nuts. Jon Mirsalis at the piano. (Plays May 10 at 7:30 in Fremont at the Niles Film Museum, 37417 Niles Blvd; www.nilesfilmmuseum.org.) (RvB)
Cult Leader
'Diary of the Dead' is a zombie film for the YouTube generation.
DVD review: 'Saved From the Flames'
This Flicker Alley set presents 54 short films made from 1896 to 1944, and they only whet one's appetite for whatever other treasures remain to be rescued.
DVD review: 'Beowulf: Director's Cut'
The extras are more entertaining than the film.
DVD review: 'She's Gotta Have It'
Mars attacks: 'Please baby baby baby please.'
Capsule review: 'Strangers on a Train'/'Rope'
These two Hitchcock flicks star San Jose's own Farley Granger.
