Fantastic Mr. Fox is fantastic!

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Now Playing at South Lamar
Buy tickets here.

If you haven't seen the latest movie from Wes Anderson, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, what are you waiting for? It's got it all, laughs, action, drama, Clooney. You need to see it.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox is a retro marvel that should delight today's audience." - Lou Lumenick, NY Post

"Wes Anderson's stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox is both a delightful amusement and a distillation of the filmmaker's essential playfulness." - TIME

"Fantastic Mr. Fox is possibly the finest picture about family, community and poultry thievery ever made." - Salon

Angry farmers, tired of sharing their chickens with a sly fox, look to get rid of their opponent Mr. Fox and his family. This stop-motion animal comedy from Anderson features voice work from George Clooney, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson and several more of his best-loved actors. Based on the book by Roald Dahl, who is unanimously considered to be the greatest kids storyteller in the history of our species.

Thanksgiving at The Alamo!

THANKSGIVING DOESN'T GET BETTER THAN THIS!

There's a very special holiday weekend coming up. Where other "special days" revolve around tradition, religion, romance or banks closing, THANKSGIVING is the holiday that most centers on FOOD. And next to movies, food is our favorite thing!

That's why the Alamo is proud to offer a TRUE Thanksgiving experience at our Ritz, South Lamar and Village locations. There's gonna be food a-plenty available to order at all of our Thanksgiving Day screenings. Order the optional “Thanksgiving Feast” ticket and you’ll not only get admission to the show, but also a heaping plate of all these classic hits! Featuring:

Turkey and gravy!
Stuffing!
Cranberry sauce!
Green bean casserole!
Sweet potatoes (yes, the kind with the marshmallows on top!)
Yeast roll!
Then finish it all off with a nice big slice of pumpkin pie!

All this while watching a movie. And if you like, take in some of our exclusive Thanksgiving programming, like...oh, for instance, THE GREATEST THANKSGIVING MOVIE EVER MADE:
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES
Hollywood has provided us with no shortage of classic Christmas films, but there is only ONE great Thanksgiving epic, and it is HERE. No fibbin'...this is the flat-out funniest holiday feature ever made, and deserves to stand tall in the ranks of Perfect Movies! John Candy gives his best-ever performance as shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, a carefree loser who takes uptight businessman Neal Page (Steve Martin) on the misadventure-ride of a lifetime. "Those aren't pillows!!"
(This film plays on Fri & Sat with regular screenings as well. Tix are HERE.)

TEXAS VS. A&M
We've got a traditional homemade Thanksgiving Feast, open lovin' arms and THE big game of THE biggest season in a long Longhorn time on the big big Alamo screen! Watch the UT Longhorns battle their way toward an undefeated season against our friends and rivals to the south, the Texas A&M Aggies!

A $25 ticket reserves you a seat and the Thanksgiving meal. A $5 food and beverage voucher reserves you a seat WITHOUT the turkey dinner but you can then use the $5 voucher against anything else ordered during the game. If there are seats remaining the day of the game, admission will be free at the door. Oh yeah, and Aggie fans are welcome too! After all, Thanksgiving is the day for coming together and celebrating that for which we are thankful... and we are all, as Texans, most thankful for football.

That said, hook 'em.

ANTICHRIST and UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US: The Ritz gets unholy for the holidays!

Stunning black metal documentary UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US opens Friday!
Controversial, beautiful mindwrecker ANTICHRIST opens Friday too!

This weekend, The Alamo Ritz will unveil two of the most masterfully made and potentially disturbing films of the decade!

Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST has already cemented a reputation for crowd-pleasing and stomach-turning from ONE SINGLE SCREENING at Fantastic Fest '09. It is explicit, it is challenging, it is grotesque, it has been called offensive, misogynistic and dangerous...but it has also been called a masterpiece and perhaps the Danish auteur's finest work.

Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won best Actress for the role at Cannes) and Willem Defoe star as an unnamed couple seeking comfort in their country home after the sudden death of their child. While in their forest retreat, as summed up by the unofficial slogan of Fantastic fest '09, "chaos reigns."

ANTICHRIST tickets are HERE!

On the all-too-real side of the coin, UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US is a feature length documentary chronicling the story of black metal. Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-'90s when a rash of suicides, murders and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans worldwide.

To capture this on film, directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway and lived with the musicians for several years, building relationships that allowed them to create a surprisingly intimate portrait of this violent, but ultimately misunderstood, movement. The result is a poignant, moving story that’s as much about the idea that reality is composed of whatever the most people believe, regardless of what’s actually true, as it is about a music scene that blazed a path of murder and arson across the northern sky. Featuring: Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell, Varg Vikernes, Jan Axel "Hellhammer" Blomberg, Kjetil "Frost" Haraldstad, Ivar Bjornson, Abbath and Demonaz Doom Occulta, Kris "Garm" Rygg, Bjarne Melgaard, Harmony Korine and more.

UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US tickets are HERE!

Weird Wednesday Tonight: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA!

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
MIDNIGHT TONIGHT AT THE RITZ ONLY $1
BUY TICKETS HERE

"You two guys are definitely on my shit list" - Warren Oates.

Sometime around the time this film was made, director Sam Peckinpah went completely insane, making this one of the few examples of that fleeting and wonderful thing - a truly psychotic work of art. The great Warren Oates stars as an American pianist wasting away in a Mexican whorehouse bar. When two leisure-suited bounty killers approach him looking for a pimp named Alfredo Garcia who has impregnated the teenage daughter of a powerful man, Benny asks around, finds out that Garcia is already dead and concocts a plan to dig up the corpse, remove the head and collect the reward. Along with his prostitute girlfriend, he hits the road on his doom-laden journey. As you might guess, all hopes are shattered and Oates ends up alone, carrying the rotting head of Alfredo Garcia in a bag across the desert as the killers pursue him. But like Peckinpah, he delivers. The reaction of El Jefe to Oates' delivery of the head is pretty much exactly what the reaction at studio headquarters must have been when Peckinpah delivered this film. '70s existential malaise at its best! (Lars)

Every Wednesday at Midnight, Weird Wednesday brings you the best in cinematic trash and depravity, all on 35mm film, scratches, splices and all. And it's only $1. See the whole schedule here.

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
Opens Friday at the Alamo Ritz!
Advance tickets available here

"Thrillingly alive. The best of the Sundance best!"
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"YOU CAN'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF IT...ONE HELL OF A DATE MOVIE...Ingeniously structured and beautifully acted."
James Greenberg, Film Journal International

Adapted and directed by John Krasinski (Jim Halpert on The Office(!), AWAY WE GO), BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN is a darkly funny and disturbing exploration of men and their complex relationships with women. Based on the book by David Foster Wallace, the film features an all-star cast that includes Timothy Hutton, Ben Shenkman, Christopher Meloni, Ben Gibbard, Will Arnett, Chris Messina, Bobby Cannavale, Will Forte, Dennis O'Hare, Lou Taylor Pucci, Max Minghella, and Julianne Nicholson.

A graduate student (Nicholson) endeavors to explore the male psyche for her thesis by interviewing a cross-section of men. The men's twisted and revealing stories are juxtaposed against the backdrop of her own experience. As she begins to listen closely to the men around her, she must ultimately reconcile herself to the darkness that lies below the surface of human interactions.

Krasinski and his fine cast successfully bring the first-ever David Foster Wallace work to the big screen with a film that audiences will be talking about for a long time.

Get those tickets here!

New York's ANIMATION BLOCK PARTY invades The Ritz tonight and Sunday!

The Best of ANIMATION BLOCK PARTY!

Animation Block Party, NYC's premiere animation festival, won't return to Brooklyn until July 2010, but the Alamo Drafthouse will offer your last chance to get a taste of ABP in 2009. This November, Animation Block Party will be showcasing some of its very best films in the history of the six year festival at the Drafthouse with a program that incorporates classics from the 2004-2009 archives alongside new films that premiered at the ABP festival this past summer. The exclusive Drafthouse program includes a never before seen stop-motion cartoon starting iconic stoner, Chef Barry in his culinary show Cooking 420 with Chef Barry. Other keynotes will include Backwards from Texas native, Aaron Hughes and producer, Lisa LaBracio, Craig T. Squirrel from Mike Hollingsworth, art-school opus MFA Show from Rob Bohn, lovesick tale Replacement Dog from Garrett Koeppicus, cute bunny gone bad blip In the Beginning by Choom, fresh shorts from cartoon duo nockFORCE and much more.

The screenings will be introduced by Animation Block Party's Jonathan Mazer, former theater director at UT Austin. For more information about Animation Block Party, please visit www.animationblock.com

Get them tickets, son!

Escape reality with Weird Wednesday: CONVENTION GIRLS!

Weird Wednesday: CONVENTION GIRLS...only $1!

Since the fall of 2001, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has been hosting a series of exploitation classics, especially curated by our own film guru Lars Nilsen: from cheerleaders gone bad to blaxploitation to killer mutant animals to cheesy 80's slashers to women in prison. Many of these films are so obscure that little is known or has been written about them. Some of them are bad, all of them are enjoyable, and a rare few are mind-blowingly amazing. Weird Wednesdays is the vanguard of cinema exploration in Austin. Join us every Wednesday at midnight!

THIS WEEK!: On the surface this is one of those '70s "group of girls" movies, inspired by the success of New World Pictures' nursesploitation movies. There were tons of films that followed the day to day problems and concerns of a group of shapely nurses, cheerleaders, student teachers etc. Finally the interesting and talented Florida exploitation director Joseph Adler (SCREAM BABY SCREAM) got around to making one about the hookers who populate trade shows and industry functions. That's the starting point, anyway. On a deeper level it's about integrity and the pride of doing a good job. Rather than simply serving as a backdrop for sexploitative highjinks, the toy convention is at the core of the film. The hero of the piece is a dollmaker who refuses to sell out to a dark toy conglomerate, and it's not hard to make the case that he's like a film maker who does the best he can under every circumstance - like Adler himself. The story arcs that illustrate the central conflict of the film are tied together by the prostitutes who attend the convention and weave in and out of the various relationships. It's a really good film, with more similarities to Altman than to the usual flesh pageants of the era.

Don't miss out on our unique exploitation film series! Get your ticket HERE!

START TREKKIN

START TREKKIN
Live Star Trek inspired improv
Tuesday, Nov 10, 7pm at the Alamo South Lamar
Get your advance tickets here!

J.J. Abrams' STAR TREK reboot blasted its way to box office gold earlier this summer. NOW see the show that was inspired by the original show that inspired the movie!

Start Trekkin - Austin, after 5 critically acclaimed years at the Hideout Theatre, brings their completely improvised parody of the classic TV show to the Alamo Drafthouse on Tuesday, November 10th, at 7:00pm.

Based on audience suggestions, the show's comedic cast will boldly create a never-before-seen space epic set in the original Star Trek universe, preceded by a series of interactive improv games and scenes that YOU the audience can be a part of - including live improvised dubbing of classic Star Trek TV clips and 60s era commericals!

You'll be stunned by...
authentic music and sound effects!
fake rocks and cheap-looking sets!
thinly veiled social allegory!

The final frontier will never be the same.

Fun Fun Fun Fest guests MC Chris, Youth Brigade and Mission of Burma stop by The Ritz this weekend!

FUN FUN FUN fest presents
LET THEM KNOW: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records with members of Youth Brigade LIVE!
MC Chris LIVE presenting GREMLINS
NOT A PHOTOGRAPH with members of Mission of Burma LIVE

We're partnering with Austin's incredible, mammoth weekend-long music festival Fun Fun Fun to present THREE special guest screenings at The Ritz!

Saturday, 10:15 PM
LET THEM KNOW: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records with the members of Youth Brigade LIVE
** This show only $5 with a Fun Fun Fun Fest wristband **
- One of the most incredible stories of punk dedication EVER TOLD! By the time the second wave of Los Angeles punk rock began to crest in the early 1980s, most historians had already closed the book. But things were just starting to get interesting. The music got harder and faster. Politics became integral to the scene. Police-on-punk violence and massive riots were de rigueur. The concept of "D.I.Y." transformed from a necessity to a battle cry. And the Better Youth Organization was born. Founded by brothers Shawn and Mark Stern from the influential L.A. punk band Youth Brigade, the BYO was part political movement, part business venture. It was a way to organize punks to take positive action to help sustain their scene and their way of life. The ideals upon which it was founded helped countless bands put on shows, put out records, and otherwise get their music out to the world.

Saturday, Midnight
MC Chris presents GREMLINS
- God-DANG! Nerdcore rapper MC Chris is coming back to the Alamo to introduce and present another of his holy grail movies. You may know him as MC Pee Pants from AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE or you may know him from his jams, like Fett's Vette Now get to know him as the funniest movie host on the planet. This time the almighty Dungeonmaster Of Ceremonies has chosen a film that no card carrying nerd can afford to miss on the big screen. Seeing Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates save the world is one of life's sublime pleasures. And those little furry dudes are pretty cool too, sometimes. MC Chris' movie showings are more like his concerts than standard movie screenings - he sets up an audience participation environment like no other - you'll be laughing like a fool. Don't miss!

Sunday, 10:15 PM
NOT A PHOTOGRAPH with members of Mission of Burma LIVE
- Legendary Boston post-punk band Mission of Burma may not have sold a lot of records in their time, but most everyone who bought one started a band, with such bands as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth citing them as influences. Breaking up in 1983 due to lead guitarist Roger Miller's tinnitus (made worse by the band's notoriously loud shows), Mission of Burma was one of the most important bands of its time, and when they reunited for 2004's ONoffON, documentary filmmakers Jeffrey Iwanicki and David A. Kleiler followed their return, and NOT A PHOTOGRAPH: THE MISSION OF BURMA STORY is the result. When some once-prominent bands come back after several years away, the danger of those bands destroying their legacy with substandard new material often looms large (we're looking at you, Big Star), but NOT A PHOTOGRAPH proves that Mission of Burma's return shows that some bands not only never lose what made them great in the first place, but that they're able to pick it up again after nearly 20 years apart.


...all of these shows will redefine your life as a music and movie fan, and tickets for all are cheap and available HERE!

HEATHERS QUOTE-ALONG

The Action Pack presents the
HEATHERS QUOTE-ALONG
Thursdays, Nov 5, 12 & 19
Advance tix available here!

"Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count."

Before Diablo Cody made talking in a teenage lingo mean dropping in dated Internet references as often as you can, Daniel Waters perfected the art of bitchy high school teen speak dialog in his screenplay for HEATHERS.

"What's your damage?"

"Where's your urge to purge?"

"If you wanna f--- with the eagles, you've gotta learn to fly!"

This is the movie that established the teen black comedy as the ultimate way of viewing high school, and way before Lindsay Lohan learned about a new way to play through the social politics of the clique system in MEAN GIRLS, Christian Slater taught Winona Ryder that there are much more... physical ways of handling queen bees.

This movie may not be as chock full of one-liners as some of the Mel Brooks types of comedies we've done as Quote-Alongs in the past, but the magic of hearing everyone say, "Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up," all in unison should be magical enough. And if that line alone isn't enough, "I love my dead gay son!" will clearly make this show worthy of surviving our adolescence for. And choosing whether or not to kill yourself when you were a teenager was one of the most important decisions you made!

We'll start the show with a lunch time poll, have some puke available should you need to pay anyone back for getting you into a Remington party, and have plenty of CornNuts for everyone! Teenage suicide: don't do it. (Henri Mazza)

Music movie of the decade: ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES at Ritz!

ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES Tues & Wed at The Ritz!

In an out-of-season holiday camp on the coast of England, cult music festival All Tomorrow's Parties serves up a heady combination of alternative music, crazy golf and chalet-living; all curated by a single band or artist. This post-punk DIY bricolage uses material generated by the fans and musicians themselves, on a multitude of formats including Super8, camcorder and mobile phone material, over the history of the festival, to capture the uncompromising spirit of a parallel music universe.

Artists documented include Lightning Bolt, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Belle And Sebastian, Sonic Youth, Portishead, Daniel Johnston, David Cross, Animal Collective, The Boredoms, Les Savy Fav, Mogwai, Octopus Project, Slint, The Dirty Three, The Gossip, GZA, Iggy and the Stooges, Mars Volta, Shellac, Patti Smith and many more. Essential viewing for anyone who's ever liked music. Period.

Get them tickets HERE!

Learn THE MEANING OF LIFE

Monty Python's THE MEANING OF LIFE
Monday & Wednesday @ the Alamo Ritz
Advance tickets available here

It was 40 years ago this month that Terry Jones, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Erik Idle and Terry Gilliam first introduced the world to Monty Python's Flying Circus. It didn't take long for their groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness, often absurd brand of sketch comedy to be recognized as genius, and 40 years later, it still holds together like a fine can of spam. It's rare for anyone to ever earn themselves an "esque", but to this day, in intelligent conversations around the world, inspired-if-inferior jokes, sketches or animations may be referred to as "Pythonesque." They literally redefined the game.

To celebrate, we're having rare screenings of their last film, but certainly not their least. While on the drawing board, it was tentatively called MONTY PYTHON'S FISH MOVIE, and if you've seen it you understand why that sounds like a reasonable title. If you haven't seen, you're in for good old fashioned mind-blowing.

A return to their Flying Circus roots, MEANING OF LIFE loosely weaves together sketches, each concerned with a various stage of human life- abandoning the long-form narrative of the film's two, better-known older brothers, HOLY GRAIL and LIFE OF BRIAN. The result is a wild, vulgar, hysterical, depraved, inspired beast of a film, which effectively dismantles a long history of traditions and values. The places this film goes, no others ever have or will and shouldn't. It's pure Python and a must-see for anyone who enjoys a good time.

Attain enlightenment here