The Savoy Theater

THE SAVOY THEATER
26 Main Street
Montpelier, VT 05602

  • Recording:
    802-229-0509
  • VT toll-free recording:
    800-676-0509
  • Savoy office:
    802-229-0598
  • Downstairs Video:
    802-223-0050
  • VT toll-free DV phone:
    800-898-0050
  • Email:
    film@savoytheater.com

Now Playing

  • Friday, May 9 - Thursday, May 15

  • STOP-LOSS and SHINE A LIGHT

  • STOP-LOSS

  • 6:30 every evening

  • 1:30 Saturday, Sunday & Monday

  • Baby-friendly matinees every Monday at 1:30

  • Peter Travers, Rolling Stone (excerpted),
    Here's the first major movie of the new year that touches greatness, and damn if there isn't a curse hanging over it. Stop-Loss, directed with ferocity and feeling by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry), is up against the war raging between audiences and films about Iraq. Box-office casualties last year include Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Redacted, Grace Is Gone and the unfairly scorned In the Valley of Elah.
    Stop-Loss     has the juice to break the jinx. The emotional battlefield on which Peirce paints her canvas strikes a universal chord that transcends politics and preaching. Peirce takes us inside the minds and hearts of soldiers who enlisted after 9/11. Why? "To get the people who had done this," in the words of Peirce. She was struck hard by a story told by her brother about a soldier who'd done his time and been stop-lossed by the Army. The term refers to the involuntary extension of a soldier's enlistment contract. It turns out nearly 81,000 have been sent back into battle multiple times with no recourse — class-action lawsuits routinely fail — except to go AWOL. Using fictional characters, Peirce decided to craft a film about the lives of soldiers and their families living in a ghost world created by questionable government policy.
    Ryan Phillippe stars as Sgt. Brandon King, just returned home to Brazos, Texas, with his childhood buddy Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum). No matter how they try to eradicate the images of ambush that run in their heads, the men find their terror manifested in bar fights and bad dreams. Their friend Tommy Burgess (the superb Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is coming apart without the outlet war gave his violent, alcoholic nature. He opens fire on the gifts he and wife Jeanie (Mamie Gummer) receive at their wedding. Steve is waking up at night to dig a foxhole, much to the distress of his fiancée, Michele (Abbie Cornish). And Brandon, living with supportive parents (Linda Emond and Ciarán Hinds), loses it when he's ordered back to Iraq. His decision to desert stuns Steve, as does Michele's decision to aid Brandon in his escape to Canada. The scenes of AWOL soldiers and their families living in an underground that extends across the country are the soul of the film.
    Female roles are usually marginal in war movies, but Cornish — working in tandem with Peirce — makes Michele a compassionate warrior who may be torn between two lovers but holds no doubt about the moral ground on which she stands. There's not an ounce of Hollywood fakery in Cornish — she's the real deal. So's the movie. And so is Peirce. It's been nine years since she debuted with Boys Don't Cry, but her empathy with society's outsiders is undiminished and fills every frame of Stop-Loss. Rated R; 113 minutes.

  • SHINE A LIGHT

  • 8:40 every evening

  • Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (excerpted),
    Martin Scorsese's "Shine a Light" may be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock 'n' roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage. Working with cinematographer Robert Richardson, Scorsese deployed a team of nine other cinematographers, all of them Oscar winners or nominees, to blanket a live September 2006 Rolling Stones concert at the smallish Beacon Theatre in New York. The result is startling immediacy, a merging of image and music, edited in step with the performance.
    It helped, too, that the Stones' songs had been absorbed by Scorsese into his very being. "Let me put it this way," he said in a revealing August 2007 interview with Craig McLean of the London Observer. "Between '63 and '70, those seven years, the music that they made I found myself gravitating to. I would listen to it a great deal. And ultimately, that fueled movies like 'Mean Streets' and later pictures of mine, 'Raging Bull' to a certain extent and certainly 'GoodFellas' and 'Casino' and other pictures over the years."
    Mick Jagger has never used the mechanical moves employed by many lead singers; he is a dancer and an acrobat, and a conductor, too, who uses his body to conduct the audience. In counterpoint, Keith Richards and Ron Wood are loose-limbed, angular, like way-cool backup dancers.
    The unmistakable fact is that the Stones love performing. Watch Ron lean an arm on Keith's shoulder during one shared riff. Watch the droll hints of irony, pleasure, quizzical reaction shots, which so subtly move across their seemingly passive faces. And then see it all brought together and tied tight in the remarkably acrobatic choreography of Jagger's performance.
    And the music? What do I have to say about the music? What is there left to say about the music? In that interview, Scorsese said, "'Sympathy for the Devil' became this score for our lives. It was everywhere at that time, it was being played on the radio. When 'Satisfaction' starts, the authority of the guitar riff that begins it is something that became anthemic.'" Rated PG; 120 minutes.