Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

Veteran stars worth the ride in entertaining 'Stand Up Guys' 

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and why should you, when the old tricks work as well as they do in Stand Up Guys? The pleasure of watching three veteran actors do what they do best is its own reward in this wistful crime comedy from director Fisher Stevens. Plotwise, it may look like nothing special, but the combined one-two-three punch of co-stars Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin turn it into an entertaining, funny, and surprisingly moving morality play on aging, friendship, and what it means to do the right thing.

Iconic stars, fearless performances, in brave aging drama ‘Amour'

You don't go to a Michael Haneke film to find comfort and joy. His is a chilly, clear-eyed worldview of human nature and consequences that turns an apparent genre thriller like Cache into a study of moral imperatives, or a historical drama like The White Ribbon into a haunted horror movie of deep-seated psychoses. As usual, Haneke's excellent new film, Amour, is not for the faint-hearted; it may look like a domestic drama about a long-married couple rattling around their tiny Paris apartment, but it packs a wallop as Haneke confronts his most ferocious and devastating themes to date—the inevitability of aging, and the nature of commitment.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

Wounded souls navigate life, each other, in dynamic ‘Rust and Bone’

French-born filmmaker Jacques Audiard is best known for his stylish thrillers. His last film was the Oscar nominee A Prophet, a jazzy, yet often brutal crime melodrama about a young Muslim man coming of age inside a French prison. But Audiard’s engrossing new film, Rust and Bone, is a departure. While it percolates with suspense, even dread, it’s not exactly a thriller, and the love story that slowly wends its way to the surface avoids the trappings of conventional romance for something darker, deeper, and ultimately more satisfying.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

Cowboy mentality mars intense military procedural 'Zero Dark Thirty'

How much torture should we, the people, condone by our government in pursuit of political ends? That's the implicit question at the core of Kathryn Bigelow's highly-touted Zero Dark Thirty, an exhaustive drama about the CIA's 10-year hunt for al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. But a more pertinent question might by how much torture should we, the audience, endure onscreen in the name of entertainment?

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

‘The Impossible’ an intense drama of tsunami survival

If you’ve ever had a hankering to find out what it’s like to be swept up in a tsunami—without, you know, the life-threatening peril—look no further than The Impossible. Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona’s intense drama is based on a true story of survival in the wake of the ferocious Asian Pacific tsunami of December 2004; it plunges the viewer smack into the middle of utter chaos when a rogue wall of water rises up and devastates everything in its path for miles around in a matter of minutes.