The story, shorn of its convoluted frame, is a conventional tragic love triangle. But that frame—with its echoes, parallels—is the true story. The narrator (Lluís Homar), a blind screenwriter, has abandoned his real name, Mateo, and adopted his noirish pen name, Harry Caine, because “Mateo” died years ago. “Harry” is broken and cynical, his only contacts the occasional female pickup; his lovelorn producer, Judit (Blanca Portillo); and her teenage son, Diego (Tamar Novas). When a bitter man who calls himself “Ray X” (Rubén Ochandiano) tries to enlist Harry to co-write “a son’s revenge on his father’s memory,” the film jumps back fourteen years, to when Mateo (not blind) is smitten by Lena (Penélope Cruz), the girlfriend of a rich businessman (and Ray X’s hated father), Martel (José Luís Gómez). Martel agrees to finance Mateo’s film as a vehicle for Lena, then dispatches his son to document its making—but really to spy. In his screening room, Martel watches silent footage of the growing love between Lena and Mateo while a lip-reader provides a shattering soundtrack.

Almodóvar breaks cinema down to its component parts (image, sound, and editing) not to create some postmodern essay on illusion versus reality. All that fracturing and doubling and mediating suggests how Lena and Mateo’s relationship is attacked and splintered from all sides. (That’s the meaning of the movie’s ugly but apt title.) Mateo’s film, Girls and Suitcases, is a comedy modeled on Almodóvar’s deliriously campy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and when the brutal, vindictive Martel mangles it in the editing room, it’s both an artistic crime and a metaphor for the violence visited on the increasingly isolated lovers. Mateo and Lena flee to the barren, volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, which is sublime but redolent of death.

I fear I’ve made Broken Embraces sound difficult, whereas Almodóvar is above all a great entertainer. A director like Atom Egoyan employs self-conscious framing devices to question the medium, whereas Almodóvar uses them to pull you in, to heighten the emotions the way Hitchcock does in Vertigo. His trump card is Cruz. It’s easy to see why he’s so mad about her. She’s gorgeous, she wears clothes like a dream, and when she’s coiffed to resemble Audrey Hepburn, she actually pulls it off! And yet she’s also astoundingly goofy-looking. Her face reads from a mile away, as if her passion had inflated her features to cartoon proportions. There’s nothing cartoonish about her acting, though, which is more mysteriously contained than ever. This movie is utterly irresistible. (David Edelstein, New York Magazine)

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Lucio Fulci’s unofficial follow up to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) is a twisted, scary and fun romp in the zombie genre. After a sailboat shows up in New York harbor with the undead on it, Anne (Tisa Farrow) and Peter (Ian McCulloch) go looking for the boat’s owner. Their journey takes them to Matul Island where a mad man is bringing the dead back to life. Part voodoo and part science, this shocking tale reveals the dangers when one person decides to play God. The film has a realistic nightmare quality to it as if somewhere this might have actually happened. To get anyone to watch the film all you have to say is “Zombie vs. Shark” (check it out on YouTube) and you’re there. (Bob Trate)

Chuck Jones

• What’s Opera Doc?
• One Froggy Evening
• There They Go-Go-Go
• Little Beau Pepe
• Rabbit Seasoning
• No Barking

Foghorn & Friends

• Leghorn Swoggled
• Dog Gone South
• Hen House Henry
• Little Boy Boo
• Each Dawn I Crow
• A Fractured Leghorn

Tickets are $25 and are available with cash, check or credit card at the Colonial Theatre Box Office. Tickets purchased at the Colonial are subject to a $2 per ticket Restoration Fee and a $1 per ticket Service Fee (max. $4 Service Fee).Phone  sales are available by calling Ticketweb at (866) 468-7619 or click here to go to ticketweb.com. Ticketweb’s fees are approximately $4.50 per ticket.The Colonial cannot sell tickets for this show online or over the phone. We apologize for any inconvenience.

ENTRAIN’s rhythms literally overwhelm you as the band incorporates a litany of influences into a freight train of sound! SLO-MO combines lap steel-driven grooves with hip hop poetry and a tight and funky band….one of the hottest bands in Philly. Philly fav BEN ARNOLD rounds out the bill. His rock, folk and R&B influences draw from the likes of John Hiatt and Bruce Springsteen with a voice a bit like Randy Newman!

$2 dollars from every ticket goes to benefit the Music Department of The Crefeld School.

Tickets are $20 advance and $24 at the door.  Tickets are available with cash, check or credit card at the Colonial Theatre Box Office. Tickets purchased at the Colonial are subject to a $2 per ticket Restoration Fee and a $1 per ticket Service Fee (max. $4 Service Fee).Phone  sales are available by calling Ticketweb at (866) 468-7619 or click here to go to ticketweb.com. Ticketweb’s fees are approximately $4.50 per ticket.The Colonial cannot sell tickets for this show online or over the phone. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Marie Dressler stars as Tillie Banks, the ungainly farm girl that city slicker con man Charlie Chaplin woos on his trek to the country to find some easy money. He gets Tillie to take her father’s farm money savings to the city, where at a dancehall Charlie meets his crime partner city girlfriend Mabel (Mabel Normand) and they steal her dough while the tipsy Tillie dances up a storm. When arrested for not paying her tab, the matron gets wind that her uncle is Douglas Banks (Charles Bennett), the millionaire, and she’s released. Tillie gets a waitress job in town to pay back her dad, and when Charlie and Mabel dine there she chases Charlie out. When Charlie reads in the papers her uncle is missing on a mountain climbing expedition and presumed dead and that Tillie will inherit three million dollars, he dumps Mabel and woos Tillie again. They quickly marry, but the uncle turns up alive. At a society party where the guests do the tango, Mabel wants revenge on Charlie and gets a job as a maid at Charlie and Tillie’s new mansion. When Tillie sees them kissing, she starts wildly shooting at them with a pistol. Her uncle gives them all the boot and calls the Keystone Kops. The city guy goes with Mabel, and Tillie pursues them wildly shooting with the Keystone Kops right behind them. When the Kops knock Tillie into the sea, Charlie and Mabel call the water police. Tillie is rescued, and then gives Charlie back his ring as the police drag him away. The ending has the two gals embracing and saying good riddance to Charlie.

In addition to “Tillie”, a surprise comedy short will also be shown. Wayne Zimmerman will accompany the films on the Rodgers Trio Deluxe Theatre Organ.

Benefits the TOSDV Theatre Pipe Organ Restoration Fund. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children 12 years-old  and under.

Those last four words should be sufficient recommendation. Some of Mr. Bridges’s peers may have burned more intensely in their prime, but very few American actors over the past 35 years have flickered and smoldered with such craft and resilience. Neither blandly likable nor operatically emotional, this actor has a sly kind of charisma and a casual intelligence. You suspect that he may be smarter than some of the characters he plays — the lounge musician in The Fabulous Baker Boys, the deadbeat bowler in The Big Lebowski, the egotistical author in The Door in the Floor, to take just a few examples — but also that he knows every corner and shadow of each one’s mind.

Unlike Mr. Bridges, Bad, who is 57, seems to be running on the last fumes of his talent. He drives from one gig to another in a battered truck, playing bowling alleys and bars with local pickup bands and sleeping in less-than-deluxe accommodations. He smokes and drinks as if trying to settle a long-ago bet between his liver and his lungs about which he would destroy first. The chorus to his signature song (one of several written especially for Mr. Bridges) observes that “falling feels like flying, for a little while.” That time has long since passed for Bad, who is scraping the bottom and trying not to complain too much about it (except when he can get his agent on the phone).

Drinking, cheating, love gone wrong — a lot of country music expresses the weary stoicism of self-inflicted defeat. Loss and abjection are two of the chords that define the genre. A third is redemption, which has also been a theme of modest, regionally inflected American independent cinema for quite some time. So even before Maggie Gyllenhaal shows up as Jean, a New Mexico journalist with a cute young son and some disappointments of her own, you can be pretty sure that you’re in for yet another drama of second chances and late-breaking epiphanies.

But no one ever put on a country record in search of novelty or wild surprise. What you seek in those songs is honest feeling and musical skill. Even in decline, Bad has both of those things, and enough professionalism to keep complete self-destruction at bay. Performing in front of a small, appreciative crowd in Colorado, he strikes up an old hit and then hands the song off to the band so he can run offstage and vomit in the parking lot, returning just in time to sing the final chorus and make eye contact with the groupie he’ll wake up with the next morning.

What does Jean see in this wreck? Mr. Bridges, settling into Mr. Cooper’s understated script as if he’d written it himself, makes the answer both obvious and a little enigmatic. There is a playboy’s charm and an old-fashioned Southern courtliness half-hidden behind the weariness, the anger at squandered possibilities, the flabby gut and the unkempt beard. This fellow may be bad, but he’s also dignified.

Bad’s own songs express this tension, as do other selections on the soundtrack (overseen by T Bone Burnett), which help to establish this fictional musician’s place in the actual musical universe. His main connection to the current country scene is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former protégé who has hit the big time and whose support Bad both desperately wants and is sometimes too proud to accept. Tommy is part of a slick new breed that pays respect to the stalwarts of the past (as any good country singer must), but whose smoothness nonetheless gets under the skin of his sandpapery former mentor.

In his first interview with Jean, Bad pays the expected homage to precursors like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, but really he belongs in more recent, somewhat rougher company. Bad’s home — when he’s there — is in Houston, and the voices that accompany his comings and goings are mostly drawn from the outlaws and renegades associated with Texas in the era of his early manhood. You hear songs by Townes van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, and you may also think of Willie Nelson and some others. As for Mr. Bridges: he can’t help it if he looks like Kris Kristofferson and sounds a little like David Allan Coe.

When Robert Duvall (a producer of Crazy Heart) turns up as one of Bad’s old friends, you might also remember Mac Sledge, the Bad Blake figure he played in Bruce Beresford’s 1983 film, Tender Mercies. Mr. Cooper’s movie owes an obvious debt to that one, but there can never be too many songs about drinking, loving and feeling bad, and there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Mr. Bridges. (A.O. Scott, The NY Times)

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