5/6/2023 0 Comments Best movies in theaters nowSome film-house purists will scoff at the Alamo’s in-movie food and beverage service that has staff filling orders throughout most of the show, though many of us appreciate having that fourth gin and tonic arrive without having to leave our seat. But with some developer help the Austin-based hipster theater chain did a spectacular job restoring the New Mission marquee to its full 1930s-era glory, meticulously hand-crafted the tremendous Art Deco ceiling ornamentation, and provided a surviving vestige for the Le Video and Lost Weekend Video collections in the lobby. I desperately wanted to hate the Alamo Drafthouse before it opened in late 2015, as its redesign and renovation coincided with the opening of the bougie-fug Vida apartment complex next door and seemed to signal the turning of the 2500 block of Mission Street into a tech-boom Millionaire’s Row. In other words, this place is likely on borrowed time. Established in 1919 as the La Bonita, the 4-Star narrowly escaped eviction in 2005, but was placed on the market as a possible condo development in 2015, with sellers even trying for a buyer via Craigslist in January. But it is one of the coolest, with multiple screens of what they call "alternative world cinema" but I call badass Eurotrash sex and violence next to earnest indie relationship drama next to first-run Asian films - the only theater in SF to still host the latter, they say. No, the 4-Star is not the poshest theater in town, nor is it the hugest. ![]() In an age when too many of us are glued to a series of small screens throughout the day, there's something to be said for living in a cosmopolitan place where you could see a summer blockbuster with the full digital sound experience designed by Lucasfilm, and a series of documentary shorts about the LGBT experience in Indonesia in a 30-seat theater, all within a couple of hours and a couple of blocks of each other. And I'm not sure that any other city in the country has a movie house as unique as the Castro Theatre, that grand single-screen palace with one of the most diverse arrays of programming from vintage double-features to Moana sing-alongs anywhere. Though we've lost a few of our neighborhood movie houses over the years, SF and the East Bay have held on to an impressive number of these vintage gems because, if nothing else, the Bay Area is good at preserving things and some, like the Roxie, dedicate themselves entirely to indie and documentary programming. More and more it seems going to the movies has become a special-occasion thing for a lot of people, and Hollywood obviously struggles every year to come up with reasons to get us to the theater in terms of large-scale, 3D, CGI spectacles and the umpteenth edition of the Fast & Furious franchise.
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