Showing Sat. 9/6/08

Nearly thirty years after the premiere of the acclaimed BBC mini-series adaptation, Evelyn Waugh's portrait of the British aristocracy is resurrected in this handsomely mounted adaptation. Charles Ryder, an unworldly aspiring artist, becomes entranced with the mystique of the aristocratic Marchmain family when he visits their misfit son Sebastian at the luxurious estate, Brideshead. His remove dissolves as he falls into painfully protracted affairs with the dandyish Sebastian and obedient daughter Julia, finding himself in the thick of the family's desperate decadence. Co-starring Emma Thompson as the cold Lady Marchmain. "It's a great piece of work that deserves to be seen even if you swear undying allegiance to the mini-series" (Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor).

In American Teen, Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) follows four John Hughes archetypes — the beauty queen, the band nerd, the popular jock, and the lovable basket case — through a senior year at a Midwestern high school. Over the course of nine months, the young adults cope with standard high school drama — depressing break-ups, broken alliances, private-turned-public pin-ups — and reveal their inner troubles. Though each character belongs to a completely different caste, under Burstein's honest lens, all of them display an understandable angst — their futures are terrifyingly unwritten. American Teen's glossy visual style has drawn comparisons to MTV reality shows, but but beneath the surface seethes the complicated culture of contemporary youth. "Never has a film captured the spirit of being a teenager better" (Zack Haddad, Film Threat).

A spicy comedy with Scarlett Johannsson and Rebecca Hall playing Vicky and Cristina, two young American women who've installed themselves for a European summer in a lush Barcelona home where they meet Javier Bardem, a lothario who invites the pair to share his private plane and bed on a weekend trip to Oviedo. Cristina ends up living with Juan with both of them enjoying a loving Bohemian life, until his tempestuous ex-wife Maria Elena, played with an amusing mania by Penelope Cruz, comes back on the scene and ends up shacking up with the pair of them and initiating a welcome screwball flavour to the proceedings. These lightly melodramatic sexual shenanigans are played for laughs, and Barcelona's ochre beauty is on full display. "Vicky Cristina Barcelona has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters" (David Denby, The New Yorker).