FILM

Price: $7.50 single tickets / $5 Starlight Cinema members (at the door) Memberships: $12 - receive member price for a year / $100 - all screenings for a year.

Lebovic Centre for Arts & Entertainment - Nineteen on the Park
19 Civic Avenue
Whitchurch-Stouffville

The opening night film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's unapologetic love letter to the City of Light. In his first feature shot entirely in France, Owen Wilson (The Darjeeling Limited, Marley and Me) plays a frustrated American writer who longs for the Paris of old and gets what he wants each night at midnight, when he is magically whisked away for encounters with some of the great artists and thinkers of the 20th century.

Gil (Wilson) is on holiday in Paris with his prickly fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams (Morning Glory, The Time Traveler's Wife) and her vulgar, moneyed parents, who are grudgingly in the city for her father to secure a business deal. A successful and self-deprecating screenwriter who considers himself a hack, Gil yearns to write a great literary novel, preferably in Paris. Inez, however, is less than enthused with the city - preferring instead to shop for furniture for the house she imagines they'll own in Malibu. Out for a midnight stroll one night, Gil suddenly finds himself picked up by mysterious revelers in a vintage automobile and is magically whisked back to the Paris of the 1920s. Here, he finds himself hanging out with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, not to mention Hemingway, Picasso, TS Eliot and many, many more.

From then on, Gil uses the excuse of late night Parisian walks to re-enter this wonderful world populated with his favourite literary and cultural figures. His wide-eyed enthusiasm soon entrances Picasso's beautiful mistress Adriana (a luminous Marion Cotillard, Little White Lies, Inception), but she is just as discontented with her time period as Gil is with his.

A lush and charming fantasy, Midnight in Paris is very much about romantic attachments to different era - and how the past always seems much more exciting than the present one lives in. Filled with romance, humour and culture, and anchored by Wilson's perfectly-pitched performance, this is a memorable trip to the City of Light you could never imagine.

STARLIGHT CINEMA - part of the Toronto International Film Festival's film circuit. Sponsored by the Stouffville Free Press.

(Romantic Comedy - PG, 100 minutes)

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