We’re baaaaaack!

After a whirlwind spring and summer packed with some pretty amazing movie stuff, including welcoming new Village Theatre operator Julie Bravo and her fabulous team at UltraStar Cinemas to Coronado, we are happy to report that we’re back on track and that our beloved theatre is safe and well and in excellent hands!

We’re delighted to bring back something we’ve all sorely missed these past few months: the Coronado Island Film Festival Classic Film Series. We have some great oldies but goodies in store for you!

On Wednesday, August 26, CIFF will bring one of our all-time favorites to Village Theatre’s big screen, Woody Allen’s absolute beauty of a movie, “Midnight in Paris.” (Note New Time): Doors will open at 6:15 p.m. for a welcome reception sponsored by Little Frenchie restaurant, with champagne donated by Jim Runner and Banu Buriyeva; followed by the feature at 6:45.

Written and directed by Woody Allen and released in 2011, the film received immediate critical acclaim and was nominated for four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Screenplay), ultimately winning the Screenplay Oscar for Allen. It stars Owen Wilson as Gil Pender, a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter who really wants to finish his novel, and Rachel McAdams as Inez, his less-than-supportive fiancée, who travels to Paris with Inez’s wealthy, insufferably snooty parents.

The stellar cast includes Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, and Marion Cotillard, who, at the stroke of midnight, take us in a vintage car on a magical time-travel fantasy journey back to Paris’s Golden Age of the 1920s, where we meet such legendary icons as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Salvador Dali.

But the real star of this film is Paris itself, beginning with a breathtaking opening montage of Paris in both sunshine and rain, set to vintage jazz and bathed in the warm light of traditional 35mm celluloid film, which Allen preferred, resisting for decades the industry’s transition to digital. If ever a city can become a living, breathing leading character in a movie, this is it. Tickets are $15 and are available now at coronadofilm.com.

So break out your berets, and we’ll see you at the movies!

VOL. 116, NO. 33 – Aug. 19, 2026