The Searchers.” One of the greatest films by director John Ford, which means one of the greatest films ever, “The Searchers” (1959) tells a harrowing tale about obsession and racial hatred. The villain-hero is John Wayne, working for the director who best used his talents. His co-star is a young Natalie Wood, whose fate is in his hands. “Wayne is fascinating for his sheer hardness,” the New York Times wrote of this film. “There’s no kindness in his nature – he is crafty and arrogant and his eyes are cold as ice.” John Ford is a superb film technician, focusing on each shot, each angle, each camera movement. But what make his films so moving is their emotional honesty and the integrity of his storytelling. “The Searchers” is as much melodrama as western. If Ford had shot it in Los Angeles instead of Monument Valley it would be a classic of film noir.

The showing is on Thursday, May 10, 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

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.