Tickets

Gold Circle: $33.50
Orchestra: $27.50
Front Balcony: $27.50
Rear Balcony: $20
Reserved seating. Ticket prices do not include the $2 per ticket Restoration Fee or the $1.50 per ticket Service Fee. These fees will be calculated at check out. Tickets available with cash, check or credit card at the Colonial Theatre Box Office, or online. Just click on the “Buy Tickets” link at the upper right of any page of our website to buy your tickets online. Please note that the seats in the rear balcony have limited leg room.

Those moments are the result of a 30-month investigation by Errol Morris, one of America’s strangest and most brilliant documentary filmmakers, who sometimes jokes that he is not a “producer-director” but a “detective-director.” Morris originally went to Texas to do a documentary on Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist nicknamed “Doctor Death” because in countless capital murder cases over 15 years he has invariably predicted that the defendants deserved the death penalty because they were sociopaths who would certainly kill again.

While researching Grigson, Morris interviewed Adams, a young man who had no criminal record until the Wood case.

“Adams told me he was innocent,” Morris remembered recently at the Toronto Film Festival, “but everybody in prison tells you they are innocent. It was only after I met David Harris that I began to suspect that the wrong man had been convicted of murder.” Although “The Thin Blue Line” assembles an almost inassailable case for Adams and against Harris, it is not a conventional documentary – not a feature-length version of one of those “60 Minutes” segments in which innocent men are rescued from Death Row.

Although he makes documentaries, Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves. He is fascinated by strange people, by odd word choices and manners of speech, by the way that certain symbols or beliefs can become fetishes with the power to rule human lives.

Morris’ first film was “Gates of Heaven” (1978), which I believe is one of the greatest films ever made. Ostensibly a documentary about two pet cemeteries in Northern California and the people who owned them, it is in fact one of the most profound, and funniest, films ever made about such subjects as life and death, success and failure, dreams and disappointments, and the role that pets play in our loneliness. Although “Gates of Heaven” has never failed to fascinate the approximately 50 audiences I have seen it with, it has never reached large numbers of people because of its subject matter; people think they don’t want to see a movie about pet cemeteries, and only enthusiastic word-of-mouth has kept the movie alive (it is only recently available on home video).

Morris’ next film, about the strange and wonderful people who can be found in and around a small southern town, was called “Vernon, Florida.” It played on PBS in 1981. In the years since, although he has worked on several projects, there has been no new Morris film until “The Thin Blue Line.” For a time in the early 1980s, he supported himself as a private detective. Then the case of Adams began to obsess him, and the result is a film that takes its viewers back to the events on the night when Wood was shot dead.

Morris has assembled many of the key witnesses in the case, including Adams, who seems passive and defeated about the fate that deposited him in a life sentence for murder, and Harris, who talks wonderingly about the fact that a person’s whole life can be changed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Is Randall Adams an innocent man?” Morris asks Harris.

“I’m sure he is.” “How can you be sure?” “Because I’m the one that knows.” Morris’ visual style in “The Thin Blue Line” is unlike any conventional documentary approach. Although his interviews are shot straight on, head and shoulders, there is a way his camera has of framing his subjects so that we look at them very carefully, learning as much by what we see as by what we hear.

In addition to the interviews, Morris uses staged reconstructions of the murder of Wood – the car without headlights, the pursuit by the police vehicle, the approach of Wood, the behavior of his fellow officer, even the lazy slow-motion whirl of a drive-in milkshake that flies through the air and falls to earth soon after Wood’s bullet-ridden body.

Morris also uses other kinds of images. There are scenes from “Swinging Cheerleaders,” the film that Adams and Harris saw together in a drive-in before the murder. (Harris said they saw the last show.

Morris has discovered there was no late show on the night in question.) There are also closeups of physical evidence, of places, of clocks visualizing the impossible chronology of some of the testimony. We see family photographs that reconstruct moments in Harris’ troubled childhood. We see guns, empty streets, newspaper headlines, all-night food stores.

The use of this footage is repetitive and rhythmic, and underlined by the cold, frightening original music score by Philip Glass. The result is a movie that is documentary and drama, investigation and reverie, a meditation on the fact that Adams was plucked from the center of his life and locked up forever for a crime that no reasonable person could seriously believe he committed.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)

Then there’s the film’s premise, which is so unabashed in its everyday darkness that at first it seems a bit…challenging. Before the credits, we see a woman standing, smiling in the sun, on a motorboat. It’s Matt’s wife, who, as we soon learn, was thrown from that boat and now lies in a hospital bed seriously injured. As the film begins, she’s in a coma, and the news may be even worse than that. The Descendants isn’t a when is she going to wake up? movie. It’s something with a much more dire tug: An oh my God she may die and if she does what are we gonna do? movie.

The “we,” in this case, is Matt and his two daughters. Ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) is a happy-go-lucky brat, and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, about whom you’re going to be hearing a lot) is such an unhappy brat that she’s been sent off to boarding school, where she favors drunken nights on the beach. The more we learn about this family, the more impossibly messed-up we can see they are. Yet Matt, who’s sitting on a trust that he’s too conservative, and maybe too stingy, to use (the family owns the last spectacular virgin beach land in Hawaii), isn’t just thrown into the abyss by his wife’s coma. He’s slapped in the face and woken up.

The Descendants has been made with the deceptively simple flow of an improvised adventure. And though some of what happens sounds conventional, and is, the situations keep twisting, whether it’s the comical hunting down of an adulterous lover or Matt’s attempt to sell off that trust and make a killing for both himself and a clan of breezy, greedy cousins. All the acting is freshly minted. Robert Forster plays Matt’s father-in-law, who’s so cantankerous that it takes you a few minutes to realize that everything he says is true. Matthew Lillard, goofy and beaming yet with a gentle desperation of his own, is the man who becomes Matt’s slightly absurd romantic rival, and Beau Bridges is the mellow-on-the-outside hard-ass cousin. As for Woodley, she makes the teenage Alexandra such a sharp, beguiling presence that she seems to wash away the residue of a thousand bogus movie adolescents.

It’s George Clooney, though, who carries The Descendants on his noble and weary shoulders. He’s still a rascal, but with the gleam in his eye now heightened (shockingly) by traces of fear. I wouldn’t say that he’s better here than he was in Up in the Air, but that was the movie that taught us that we weren’t being suckered if we felt George Clooney’s pain. In The Descendants, he draws upon that trust. He gives a pitch-perfect performance as a man awakened, for the first time in years, by the immensity of his loss. His big hospital scene near the end will be hailed as a classic Oscar-bait moment, and it surely is — but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a great moment, too. It turns sentimentality into something like grace.” (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly)

Access more reviews at metacritic.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDwUH02DDWU

ANIMATED (79 min.)

Sunday/Dimanche
10 min – English – Patrick Doyon
Every Sunday, it’s the same old routine! The train clatters through the village and almost shakes the pictures off the wall. In the church, Dad dreams about his toolbox. And of course later Grandma will get a visit and the animals will meet their fate.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
15 min – No Dialogue – William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg
Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) award winning author/illustrator William Joyce and co-director Brandon Oldenburg present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM Technicolor musicals. Morris Lessmore is old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.

La Luna
7 min – English – Enrico Casaroasa
A fable of a young boy who is coming of age in the most peculiar of circumstances. Tonight is the very first time his Papa and Grandpa are taking him to work. In an old wooden boat they row far out to sea, and with no land in sight, they stop and wait. A big surprise awaits the little boy as he discovers his family’s most unusual line of work.

A Morning Stroll
7 min – No Dialogue – Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe
When a New Yorker walks past a chicken on his morning stroll, we’re left to wonder which one is the real city slicker.

Wild Life
13 min – English – Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
Calgary, 1909: an Englishman moves to the Canadian frontier, but is singularly unsuited to it. His letters home are much sunnier than the reality. Intertitles compare his fate to that of a comet.

Bonus animated films to be announced.

LIVE ACTION (107 min.)

Pentecost
11 min – English – Peter McDonald and Eimear O’Kane
When Damian is forced to serve as an altar boy at an important mass in his local parish, he faces a difficult choice: conform to the status quo, or serve an extended ban from his life’s passion – football.

Raju
24 min – English/German – Max Zähle and Stefan Gieren
Director Max Zaehle, together with his Director of Photography Sin Huh, and wonderful actors Wotan Wilke Möhring and Julia Richter, succeed at making the moral dilemma faced by couples wishing to adopt emotionally palpable.

The Shore
31 min – English/Gaelic – Terry George and Oorlagh George
After 25 years in exile, Jim Mahon (Ciaran Hinds) returns to Ireland to show his American daughter Patty (Kerry Condon) his Belfast roots. But things don’t go as planned when she learns of a secret love triangle and a long lost best friend, Paddy (Conleth Hill). Their reconciliation leads to hilarious confusion. Directed by two time Oscar nominee Terry George, The Shore won Best Director and Best Actor at the Rhode Island Film Festival, and is nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award.

Time Freak
11 min – English – Andrew Bowler and Gigi Causey
A neurotic inventor creates a time machine, only to get caught up travelling around yesterday.

Tuba Atlantic
25 min – Norwegian – Hallvar Witzř
Everybody is going to die one day. Oskar, 70, is going to die in 6 days. He is now ready to forgive his brother for a disagreement years ago. Will he reach his brother, who he believes live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, before it’s too late?

Former secretary of defense McNamara was involved in the firebombing of Japan in 1945 during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the escalation of the Vietnam War into the cleaving tragedy it became. Yet in his 80s, with commanding access to facts and dates, the old technocrat once reviled for hawkishness and arrogance speaks with an affecting plainness, one man going eyeball-to-eyeball with the media age. And his answers to questions about war and peace build, via Morris’ compositional artistry, to an exquisite peak of ambiguity and remorse.

McNamara always retained the look of a gray company man. But the filmmaker interweaves talking-head footage of his subject (his knobby fingers ticking off bloodless stats about lives lost in Japanese cities and lives saved by car seat belts) with graceful images, including dominoes falling and reels spinning over chilling audiotaped conversation between McNamara, who wanted to get out of Vietnam early on, and Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to get deeper in. Backed by musical semaphore from composer Philip Glass, the film is a warning beacon about fog conditions that never subside but only shift to American military involvement in other parts of the world.” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly)

Access more reviews at metacritic.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgA98V1Ubk8

This is a silent movie in black-and-white, and if it were only that, it would be a pleasant novelty. But The Artist isn’t a nostalgia trip, nor is it a scolding admonishment to honor the past. Instead, it’s a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way — by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.

The picture opens in 1927, just as silent-film star George Valentin — played by Jean Dujardin, a genuine movie star in France, though his allure is intercontinental — is riding high. As the movie opens, he’s watching himself in his latest picture from behind the movie screen; his character is a suave masked bandit in an evening suit, accompanied by an efficient Jack Russell who’s also his partner in crime in real life. (He’s played by a fetching actor dog named Uggie.) At home, George’s life is less glamorous and more troubled. His wife, played by a platinum-haired Penelope Ann Miller, is bored and unhappy and lets him know it, particularly when she sees a newspaper photograph in which he’s chastely kissing a comely young woman who wandered into the spotlight at his movie’s premiere. The woman in the newspaper snapshot is an aspiring starlet herself, and she uses her temporary fame — as well as her killer gams — to get a walk-on part in the movie George is filming. This salty-sweet ingenue wants the world to know who she is: “The name’s Peppy — Peppy Miller!” she announces to everyone and no one in particular. (She’s played by Argentina-born French actress Bčrčnice Bejo, an expressive beauty with bobbed hair and incandescent eyes.)

Even before George knows Peppy’s name, sparks fly between them on the set: We see it in a marvelous sequence constructed of numerous discarded takes, each one messed up by George’s flummoxed response to this pretty young extra. But George, a married man, resists. (This is a Hollywood movie we’re talking about, not the actual Hollywood.) And so Peppy reluctantly leaves him behind, but not before he gives her a priceless tip about how to make it in the business. Two years later, with the advent of talkies, George will end up broke and forgotten — though not completely forgotten: Peppy, whose star ascended just as George’s sank, remembers the break he gave her when she was just a pretty face and a great set of stems hoping to break into motion pictures.

The Artist — which Hazanavicius also wrote — harbors shades of Singin’ in the Rain and A Star Is Born, but in the end it’s its own distinctive creature. It’s also an extraordinarily disciplined picture:

Shot by Guillame Schiffman, it throws off a satiny moonlight glow — this is one of the most gorgeous-looking movies I’ve seen all year. Ludovic Bource’s jaunty, champagne-bubble score is period-perfect. And Hazanavicius — best known for the French-made OSS spoof movies — keeps a sure grip on the picture’s tone. The Artist dips into areas of darkness you don’t expect, though Hazanavicius has a light touch as he guides us through the story’s subtle gradations. He also dots the movie with clever touches that are never overworked or arch: George, after hearing that sound pictures are the wave of the future and laughing the news off heartily, lifts a glass from his dressing table and lets it down with a surprise thud — the first, though not the last, sound heard in the picture.

It’s not giving too much away to tell you that The Artist ends with a dance sequence, and at that point I felt as if Hazanavicius had responded to the furtive prayers I’ve been offering to the movie gods for years: He renders that dance in long, glorious takes. No crazy cutting to make the steps look more exciting; no close-ups of the feet to show us how fast they’re moving. I had pretty much given up hope that filmmakers knew how to do that sort of thing anymore.

Hazanavicius and his actors (which also include John Goodman as a growly-bear studio boss and Missi Pyle as a spoiled, brassy megastar) seem to be in tune with a lot of things that other filmmakers and performers have forgotten — or perhaps have been forced to forget, given what sells in Hollywood movies these days. (The Artist, incidentally, was itself shot in Hollywood.) Smart, quiet movies — let alone smart, silent ones — are hardly the order of the day. Many young people I know laugh at silent movies and silent acting, viewing them as something ancient and foreign, written in a code they can’t possibly understand. As the writer Eileen Whitfield observed in her wonderful biography of Mary Pickford, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, modern audiences often view silent movies as if they’re trying to be talkies and failing, whereas they’re really much closer to dance, a symbolic re-enactment.

In that sense, silents are stories told in purely visual terms — there are no handy voice-overs to accentuate what we’re seeing on-screen, no hefty chunks of expository dialogue. They may look strange and overdone to audiences who aren’t used to them, but they’re not extreme at all — they’re actually extremely economical. In Bejo and Dujardin, Hazanavicius has found actors who understand that intuitively. Bejo is radiant, but there’s also something solemn and grounded about her. And while Dujardin is almost criminally good-looking, as well as being a superb physical actor — he’s a little Douglas Fairbanks, a little Gene Kelly — he understands that his role demands as much gravity as anti-gravity. The Artist is deeply enjoyable, brioche-light in all the right ways, but it’s also focused and intense — even its joyousness is intense. It begins as a novelty and ends as so much more: In The Artist, the present greets the past like a long-lost friend. This is a movie in which the pleasure of watching is its own glorious sound.” (Stephanie Zacharek, Movieline)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8K9AZcSQJE