Movies at Midway offers full marquee

The Rehoboth-based Movies at Midway, closed due to the COVID-19 crisis, is offering virtual screenings of many movies. Each purchase will help support the theater during its closure. To view the offerings, go to moviesatmidway.com and follow the prompts for each film. The theater is adding the following new films to its existing lineup.

• Up from the Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music: A film looking at the culture of New Orleans thru the lens of music. Hosted by Oscar nominee and six-time Grammy winner Terence Blanchard, the film tells the story of how music and culture intersected to create a distinct form of expression.
For every ticket sold, $2 will be donated to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation COVID-19 relief fund for musicians.

Join Movies at Midway at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 16, for a live Q & A session with “Up From The Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music” Executive Producer Terence Blanchard and Producer/Director Michael Murphy, who will join on video to discuss the music and culture of New Orleans and answer questions about the film. Cost is $12.

• The Bellmen: Steve (Adam Ray) is the bell captain at a swanky resort in Tucson, Ariz. He decides the only way to attract the attention of Kelly (Kelen Coleman), the chief concierge, is to lie about being promoted to management. While Steve attempts to keep up the fib and avoid Alan (Willie Garson), the rooms division manager intent on busting him, things get complicated when a spiritual guru named Gunther Gochamonet (Thomas Lennon) has a plan to buy the hotel from the owner, Sid Whitman (Richard Kind), through devious means. Although his bumbling costs him his job, Steve elects to band together the bellmen and do whatever it takes to save the hotel. Cost is $8.99.

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Based on the international bestseller by rock-star economist Thomas Piketty (which sold over 3 million copies worldwide and landed Piketty on Time's list of most influential people), this captivating documentary is an eye-opening journey through wealth and power, a film that breaks the popular assumption that the accumulation of capital runs hand in hand with social progress, and shines a new light on today’s growing inequalities.

Traveling through time, the film assembles accessible pop-culture references coupled with interviews of some of the world’s most influential experts delivering an insightful and empowering journey through the past and into our future.

• Crescendo: When world-famous conductor Eduard Sporck (Peter Simonischek, Toni Erdmann) accepts the job to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he is quickly drawn into a tempest of unsolvable problems. Having grown up in a state of war, suppression or constant risk of terrorist attacks, the young musicians from both sides are far from able to form a team. Lined up behind the two best violinists – the emancipated Palestinian Layla and the handsome Israeli Ron – they form two parties who deeply mistrust each other, on- and off-stage alike. Will Sporck succeed and make the young people forget their hatred, at least for the three weeks until the concert? With the first glimmer of hope, however, the political opponents of the orchestra show them how strong they are. Cost is $12.

• The Cordillera of Dreams: Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's "The Cordillera of Dreams" completes his trilogy (with "Nostalgia for the Light" and "The Pearl Button") investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run along the country’s eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état. 

Along the way, Guzmán interviews artists, writers, and documentarians, drawing out their conflicted feelings toward the Cordillera, and its relationship to Chilean national identity and history. Among the interviewees are Vincente Gajardo and Francisco Gazitúa, sculptors who draw from the raw materials of the Cordillera to produce their artwork. Jorge Baradoit, a writer of history and fiction, discusses the continuation of Pinochet’s project in the social and economic structure of contemporary Chile. Musician Javiera Parra remembers the violence she witnessed as a child. The film’s prominent moral voice is Pablo Salas, a filmmaker and archivist who has worked since the 1980s to document acts of political resistance and state violence. Cost is $12.

• A White, White Day: In a remote Icelandic town, an off-duty police chief (a chilling Ingvar Sigurdsson, who received Cannes’ Critics’ Week Award for Best Actor for his performance) begins to suspect a local man of having had an affair with his late wife, who died in a tragic accident two years earlier. Gradually his obsession for finding out the truth takes over his life and inevitably begins to endanger him and his loved ones. Cost is $12.

For more information, including movie trailers, go to moviesatmidway.com.