Ella & John, Call Me by Your Name

Upcoming films at the Odeon Cinema include two shows depicting transformational stages in people’s lives.  One dealing with a couple, after 50 years of marriage, who take to the road to discover something new and motivating.  The other portrays two young men discovering love for each other set in an Italian village in the 1980s.  Both films will be screened in English with Italian subtitles.

Ella and John:  The Leisure Seeker.   Thursday, January 25 (9 pm), Friday 26 and Saturday 27 (4, 6:15 and 9 pm), Sunday 28 (3:30 pm), Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 (4 and 6:15 pm) and Wednesday 31 (4:30 and 9 pm). 

Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren star in this film about an octogenarian couple who set out in their dated RV “The Leisure Seeker” to search for a new way of life.  John, a retired English teacher, is afflicted with dementia and Ella, although chatty and seemingly healthy, occasionally bends over with pain.  Escaping from a future filled with medical treatment and end-of-life decisions, they begin an odyssey down US Route 1 from Boston to Key West and the home of Ernest Hemingway. Their terrified adult children worry as their fragile parents embark on this bittersweet sojourn.  A journey filled with surprises, Ella and John summon up their passion for life and their love for each other.

 Call Me by Your Name   Thursday, February 1 through Sunday, February 4 (4, 6:30 and 9 pm)

This romantic drama directed by Luca Guadagnino tells a tender coming-of-age tale of love between a 17-year-old Italian-American boy and an American doctoral researcher.  Set in the boy’s family’s villa in northern Italy in 1983, the romance develops in the sun-drenched splendor of an Italian summer.  The boy’s father is a professor of Greco-Roman culture and his mother is a translator who filled his childhood with high culture and intellectual stimulation. Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet) at 17 is a talented pianist and well read.  Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives for the summer as the professor’s intern and the two form a sort of friendship of youth while skirting around their mutual attraction to each other.  The highly acclaimed film, though filled with lush and sensual scenes, delivers a very subtle story.   (rita kungel)