Melissa McCarthy and Bill Murray are neighbors thrown together by necessity in ST. VINCENT, one of the free movies screening in July at Middletown Library.
The free Movie Mondays (and select Fridays) series of screenings continues through July in the climate controlled Community Room at Middletown Township Public Library — a summertime slate that focuses once again on some features of very recent vintage; nearly all of which saw release within the past twelve months.
The Monday matinees resume at 2:30 pm today, July 6 with Melissa McCarthy as a single mom who’s forced to enlist her drinking, gambling, entirely disagreeable next door neighbor (Bill Murray) as adult caregiver to her son — thereby initiating a scenario of illicit kicks and heartwarming bonding — in St. Vincent. The week is bookended with the latest in a recently established series of New Film Fridays, with Jennifer Lawrence and all-star supporting cast in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 — penultimate installment in the four-part “trilogy” adapted from Suzanne Collins’ phenom sci-fi series (and prelude to Part 2, scheduled for release this November).
Picking up the Oscar-winning thread that ran through June’s offerings at MTPL, The Theory of Everything presents Eddie Redmayne in his Best Actor turn as Dr. Stephen Hawking, in this portrait of the astrophysicist’s college career, courtship and struggles with the onset of motor neuron disease. It screens at 2:30 pm on Monday, July 13.
Another fact-based feature unspools on July 20 with Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz in Big Eyes, director Tim Burton’s biodrama of wildly popular painter (of somewhat unsettling big-eyed portraits) Margaret Keane, and her battles with the controlling husband who took credit for her signature work.
The monthly series wraps on July 27 with a relatively overlooked release from spring 2014, The Rewrite. Hugh Grant — remember him? — stars as a washed-up onetime Oscar winning screenwriter, whose current cash gig teaching at a small college puts him in contact with onetime Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, here reprising her single-mom specialty role that she brought vividly to life in such prior films as The Wrestler, Cyrus and Alfie.
