All films are shown at the Nerja Cultural Centre on Calle Granada
Sunday 1 April 5 pm Debbie Reynolds’ Birthday
Singin’ in the Rain
(USA 1952) 103 min. Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds. Dir:Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly.
Hollywood, 1927: the silent-film romantic team of Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) is the toast of Tinseltown. While Lockwood and Lamont personify smoldering passions onscreen, in real life the down-to-earth Lockwood can’t stand the egotistical, brainless Lina. He prefers the company of aspiring actress Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), whom he met while escaping his screaming fans. Watching these intrigues from the sidelines is Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), Don’s best pal and on-set pianist. Cosmo is promoted to musical director of Monumental Pictures by studio head R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) when the talking-picture revolution commences. That’s all right for Cosmo, but how will talkies affect the upcoming Lockwood-Lamont vehicle “The Dueling Cavalier”? Don, an accomplished song-and-dance man, should have no trouble adapting to the microphone. Lina, however, is another matter; put as charitably as possible, she has a voice that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. On the strength of the plot alone, concocted by the matchless writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green,Singin’ in the Rain is a delight. But with the addition of MGM’s catalog of Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown songs – “You Were Meant for Me,” “The Broadway Melody,” and of course the title song – the film becomes one of the greatest Hollywood musicals ever made.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Sunday, 8 April 5 pm
The Adventures of Tin Tin
(USA 2011) 107 min. Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig. Dir. Steven Spielberg.
From Academy Award-winning filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson comes the epic adventures of Tintin.The film follows the exciting exploits of a young reporter, his dog, a sea captain with a drinking problem, and a couple of bumbling Interpol detectives as they travel from Europe to the Sahara and Morocco in pursuit of a pickpocket, model-ship collectors, and long-lost treasure. Steven Spielberg’s and Peter Jackson’s long-awaited full-length film, based on the original “Tintin” comics by Hergé, combines the stories “The Secret of the Unicorn,” “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” and “The Crab with the Golden Claws”. As in the comics themselves, the characters are highly stylized and instantly recognizable. Devoted fans will revel in the abundance of small details that reference the comics and suggest a true love for “Tintin” on the filmmakers’ parts, but even viewers who don’t know a thing about the comics will thoroughly enjoy this exciting adventure.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Wednesday 11 April 7 pm
J Edgar
(USA 2011) 137 min. Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Armie Hammer. Dir. Clint Eastwood.
For decades J. Edgar Hoover ruled the FBI with such influence that some said he wielded more authority in Washington than whoever happened to be President of the United States at any given moment. Hoover was feared, admired, reviled and revered, a man who could distort the truth as easily as he upheld it. His methods were at once ruthless and heroic, with the admiration of the world his most coveted prize. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his image, his career and his life. Leonardo DiCaprio, in another of his top-to-bottom transformations, plays Hoover from youth to old age, from slim eager beaver to portly power broker. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s Hoover is such a strange man that we don’t go through any stage of affection for the character; he’s an autocrat who bends his own strict rules to his purposes, who remains devoted to his mother (he lived with her into his 40s), and who can’t quite define his decades-long relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, from The Social Network). Hoover’s muddled sexual orientation is seen as just another aspect of his mania for secrecy, and this is where Eastwood is most successful at sketching the man: the way some people derive power from the holding of secrets.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Sunday 15 April 5 pm 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic (1912)
A Night to Remember
(UK 1958) 109 min Kenneth More, Ronald Allen, Robert Ayres. Dir. Roy Ward Baker.
The story of the Titanic has been visited, to differing degrees, on the small and big screen many times. But there’s a strong and compelling argument that 1958’s A Night To Remember, based on Walter Lord’s novel, is the best of the lot. What most sets A Night To Remember apart is the sheer humanity of it. Approached in a documentary style, and with the story told mainly from the perspective of Kenneth More’s Charles Lightoller, it’s less epic in physical scale than, for instance, 1997’s Oscar-magnet Titanic. Yet there’s a core of authenticity here that’s never been beaten, on big screen or small. The climactic sinking of the vessel is re-created with painstaking accuracy; filmed in “real time,” it is a mere 37 minutes shorter than the actual tragedy.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Wednesday 18 April 7 pm
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(UK 2011) 127 min Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy. Dir. Tomas Alfredson.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is all sleek, stealthy elegance. Based on the classic novel of the same name, the international thriller is set at the height of the Cold War years of the mid-20th Century. High-ranking intelligence officer George Smiley (Gary Oldman) was forced out of service when a mission in Hungary went very wrong, but rumors of a Soviet mole hidden within the agency bring him back into play. If the theory of the former head, Control (John Hurt), is to be believed, the mole is at the very top. With the help of a lower-ranking agent with a few secrets of his own (Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock) and a field agent who may be a source of disinformation (Tom Hardy,Inception), Smiley slowly draws out the clues he needs to lay a trap for the mole. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy moves gracefully, with brief but unhurried scenes that give a hint of information here, a dollop of implication there, until the larger picture (painted in a cinematic chiaroscuro of grays, blues, and browns) comes tantalizingly into focus. Oldman plays Smiley as uncannily opaque and, on the surface, harmless – but his eyes hold a deep bitterness that can turn sorrowful or cruel. The masterful cast glides through the film, their subterfuges and machinations orchestrated like a dance by director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In).
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Sunday 22 April 5 pm Shakespeare’s Birthday (23 April)
Anonymous
(UK 2011) 130 min. Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson. Dir. Roland Emmerich.
Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England,Anonymous speculates on an issue that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Sigmund Freud, namely: who actually created the body of work credited to William Shakespeare? Experts have debated, books have been written, and scholars have devoted their lives to protecting or debunking theories surrounding the authorship of the most renowned works in English literature. Anonymousposes one possible answer, focusing on a time when scandalous political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles lusting for the power of the throne were brought to light in the most unlikely of places: the London stage.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Tuesday 24 April 7 pm
The Descendants
(USA 2011) 115 min. George Clooney, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer.
Dir. Alexander Payne. Only Oscar-winning writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways) would think to cast the famously handsome George Clooney as a disheveled dad in his outstanding adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s tragicomic novel. Clooney dials down the glamour to play Matt King, a Hawaii real-estate attorney with a propensity for unflattering shirts and ill-fitting trousers. When Matt’s wife, Elizabeth, ends up in a coma after a water-skiing accident, Matt must learn to balance the parenting of his resentful daughters, Scottie (Amara Miller) and Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), with the sale of a pristine plot of Kauai land that stands to make the King cousins a fortune. The Descendants was released to widespread acclaim from critics and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as two Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture (Drama) and Best Actor (Drama) for Clooney.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Saturday 28 April 5 pm Deutshes Cine
The Princess and the Warrior
(Germany 2000) 135 min.Franka Potente,Benno Fürmann. Dir.Tom Tykwer.
Two damaged people – a sweet-tempered nurse (Franka Potente) who lives and works in a psychiatric ward and a surly tough guy (Benno Fürmann) mysteriously waylaid by sadness – are drawn together, seemingly by fate. But isn’t fate just another name for an overlapping pattern of need and desire? Writer-director Tom Tykwer, who earlier made Run Lola Run,varies the tempo ofThe Princess and the Warrior: there are meditative passages punctuated by abrupt outbreaks of emotion – a mesmerizing new style that draws us into mysteries in an intuitive rather than explicit way. A strange, accomplished, and, finally, touching romantic drama.
Original Version (German) with English subtitles.
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