Category: Featured Content

Tell your story

Everyone has a story to tell. As a doctor, people share their stories with me related to their health and their lives — often about sickness, suffering and loss, and also about celebration and wonderful things. I’m a receiver of stories — and it’s an incredible honor to be entrusted with such a privilege.

Lots of people are now telling their stories on social media platforms, sharing to larger and larger audiences, where stories are often rewarded with “likes” and going “viral.” Thanks to Covid-19, we have been living through historic times that will be remembered like the Black Death of 1350 or the Spanish Flu of 1918 — “history” in the making!

A new storytelling initiative in New Hampshire offers an opportunity for all of us to tell our own stories from this unprecedented time we’re living through. Our Story: Reflections from the Pandemic and Beyond (ourstorynh.com) is a forum to create, share and collect stories across New Hampshire via multiple media and from multiple sectors of life, experience, feelings, hopes and thoughts of life during and before the pandemic and in anticipation of a post-pandemic reality.

Storytelling is transformational. Research has revealed that storytelling benefits both the person sharing and the listener. In fact, listening to other people’s stories has been shown to activate parts of the brain as though we were experiencing the events ourselves, creating a powerful connection to both the narrative and the storyteller. Stories can inspire and motivate and be uniquely memorable as they engage both head and heart. Perhaps this is why storytelling has existed in every culture across time.

What most inspired me to volunteer to help bring the Our Story NH project to fruition is its grounding in an ethical framework that intentionally centers equity. The primary goal is to create a space for self-expression, healing and an opportunity to be heard where participants tell their own stories on their own terms and where the storytellers completely own their stories. There is a therapeutic dimension to telling our stories via whatever medium we choose. Our Story NH will offer a number of ways to capture people’s experiences and personal histories including listening stations around the state as well as digital storytelling workshops. And a community council to inform and guide the project is in development — perhaps you might be interested?

For now, I invite you to share your story via the website (ourstorynh.com) — in text, audio, video, photo or artwork form. We all have stories to tell. Won’t you join us in telling yours?

Driven

Yngwie Malmsteen hits Tupelo

When he’s not revving his Fender Stratocaster at impossible speeds, shredding with a fury that other guitarists aspire to, Yngwie Malmsteen likes to drive Ferraris — he owns five, all of them red. During the pandemic Malmsteen had a lot of time for both endeavors. What resulted was a tour de force album, Parabellum.

Like his fiery playing and his fast cars, Malmsteen’s mind moves at a frenetic pace. A year in the studio, something he hadn’t experienced in decades, was a unique challenge.

“I learned a long time ago to be careful with having too much time,” he said from his home in Miami. “I had 80, 90, 100 ideas; I only took the most inspired things and refined them.”

Malmsteen pointed to Van Halen’s early albums as a source of inspiration.

“They were done very spontaneously in the beginning,” he said. “I keep that spontaneity. … Every time I come up with something new I record it right away, and usually I keep that take.”

Malmsteen played every instrument on Parabellum and sang on the non-instrumental tracks. He once hired guest singers but stopped using them a few records ago.

“That’s definitely a thing of the past,” he said.

When Malmsteen’s first tour since early 2020 begins, a band he calls “a good group of guys” is expected to learn the new songs, and expect surprises.

“We go through the songs at soundcheck; that’s all they get,” he said. “Here’s another thing I do — half an hour before show time, I call them in and we put a setlist together. Then we go on stage and I play different songs anyway! They just gotta know it.”

Malmsteen has long sneered at the idea of collaborating with other musicians, and his history helps explain why. Swedish-born, he grew up in a musical family.

“Everybody was very artistic, which was unusual there in the ’70s, because it was a socialist country [that] didn’t allow that. God bless America, man,” he said.

Classically trained from the age of 5, Malmsteen discovered rock music when he saw a clip of Jimi Hendrix smashing his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival that accompanied a news report of his death in 1970. Later came blues from John Mayall, and hard rock via Deep Purple.

As soon as he could, Malmsteen headed to the United States.

“I took my guitar, my toothbrush, and I got on the plane,” he said. “I had a plan — my plan was to not live in a socialist welfare Marxist bull—- country.”

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, he joined Steeler, a rising glam rock band. His first gig with them attracted a small crowd, but the following week at L.A.’s Troubadour, Malmsteen looked from his dressing room and saw a line stretched around the block.

“I said to someone working there, ‘Who’s playing tonight?’ He points at me and says, ‘You are.’ It was pretty crazy,” he said. “I was 18 years old, and all of a sudden people were digging it.”

He was in Steeler long enough to appear on their lone album, then joined another metal band, Alcatrazz. His stint there lasted less than a year, an exit hastened by onstage clashes with singer Graham Bonnet after Malmsteen received a solo offer while the group was on tour in Japan.

A reunion is, emphatically, not in the cards.

“When I left, they fell into obscurity, but I kept on going, kind of like rising up, I never stopped,” he said. “These guys … they’re selling car insurance; I don’t know what they’re doing. They asked me so many times to join, and I’m, ‘No, I didn’t sit on my ass for 40 years.’”

Malmsteen insists, “I don’t have a chip on my shoulder; the only person I feel have to prove something to is myself,” and on one of Parabellum’s standout cuts, “Eternal Bliss,” he expresses gratitude for his continued success and life’s blessings.

“I have the most beautiful wife in the world, I have a great son, nice house, I’ve played music I want to play and I never compromise,” he said, citing two reasons for his longevity. “One, I find it exciting and challenging, and only because I improvise all the time. If I were to play the same thing over and over that wouldn’t do it. Also, to quote Paganini … one must feel strongly to make others feel strongly.”

Yngwie Malmsteen w/ Images of Eden and Sunlord

When: Friday, Nov. 26, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $45 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Yngwie Malmsteen. Photo by Austin Hargraves.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (PG-13)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (PG-13)

Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace and the spirit of the late Harold Ramis star in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a distant sequel to the 1980s Ghostbusters movies.

Ramis was Egon Spengler in those movies, the most nerd-minded of the Ghostbusters. Here, the movie opens with Egon, seen in shadowy profile and from behind, running from some supernatural thing and holding a clearly full ghost trap. He meets some kind of end at the claws of a spooky something — but his adult daughter, Callie (Carrie Coon), believes he has died of a heart attack.

Callie is not super broken up about her father’s death; he abandoned her family as a child, she says. But as she is being evicted from her apartment, she decides to take her two children —15-year-old Trevor (Wolfhard) and 12-year-old Phoebe (Grace) — to the rickety farmhouse where Egon had been living. In the middle of Oklahoma, the town would seem to be unremarkable except for a mine (that secretly houses an ancient temple) and loads of scientifically inexplicable earthquakes.

Trevor doesn’t care about any of that but he is quickly interested in the local drive-up restaurant and roller-skate-wearing server Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe is interested in the strange seismic activity and in the odd devices she finds lying around her grandfather’s home. She finds a science buddy in Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), her summer school teacher who keeps his class busy with VHS movies like Cujo so he can spend his time monitoring the town’s earthquakes on his geological equipment. Together with Podcast (Logan Kim), a fellow student of Phoebe’s who is always working on getting audio for his show, Grooberson and Phoebe investigate old equipment Phoebe finds, with Grooberson explaining its 1980s origins.

Along the way, Phoebe finds herself communicating — first via a chessboard and then through the movement of items throughout the home — with the grandfather she never knew but quickly feels a lot of commonality with.

This movie has moments of charm, most of them related to nostalgia and good will toward Harold Ramis, but it’s not nearly as charming as it thinks it is. Without getting into the whole thing of the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters (where the Ghostbusters were ladies and I thoroughly enjoyed it), this movie shows more reverence to the source material — too much reverence, in my opinion. In my review of 2016 Ghostbusters, I compared it to the joyful Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This movie feels more like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, where the canon of the previous movies doesn’t get out of the way enough to have fun in the present. This movie is at its best when it boils down to the oddball foursome of the confident Lucky, the tries-to-be-cool Trevor, the self-assuredly nerdy Phoebe and the podcast-star-wannabe Podcast realizing they have to actually fight supernatural beings to save the town and possibly the world. These personalities are maybe not actually big enough to carry the whole film, but they are at least sort of organic together. When a bunch of original Ghostbusters stuff is layered on top of this, we just get what feels like “nostalgia product,” like we’re watching the movie version of one of those reissued 1980s toys you sometimes see at Target.

A bigger problem is that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is short on a sense of fun. The original movies and the 2016 reboot realized the inherent goofiness of the movie’s premise and its non-horror-film approach to the whole ghosts thing. Here, the zaniest energy is coming from Paul Rudd, who is an entertaining character but isn’t central enough to carry the energy of the movie on his own. I almost felt like this movie — which is rated PG-13 and very much feels like a movie for teens and up — maybe should have skewed younger if it was going to play things this straight and gone for more of a tween-friendly/whole-older-family film. Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels like it has a good premise and some interesting ideas but it needed to be smarter or sillier to really stand on its own. C+

Rated PG-13 for supernatural action and some suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jason Reitman with a screenplay by Gil Keenan & Jason Reitman, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is two hours and four minutes long and is distributed by Columbia Pictures in theaters.

King Richard (PG-13)

Richard Williams is a man with a 78-page plan for turning his daughters Venus and Serena into tennis superstars in King Richard, a middle-of-the-road biopic with a solid Will Smith performance.

Richard Williams (Smith) will tell anybody who listens about his big and detailed plans for his two young daughters. He and wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) work long hours at their jobs and then spend their off hours pushing Oracene’s three older daughters at schoolwork and Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) at schoolwork and on the tennis courts, even if those courts are in a rundown Compton, California, park. But Richard spends his time at his job going through tennis magazines to find coaches, later traveling to pitch each one with homemade brochures about his daughters. His ask is big: for these famous (and expensive) coaches to take on his daughters for free. But the exchange is a piece of their future earnings, which Richard confidently believes will be astronomical.

Eventually the undeniable talent of the girls is able to get them coaches, first Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), who only coaches Venus much to Serena’s disappointment, and then Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), who brings both girls — and their sisters and parents — out to Florida to live and train. What the coaches may not realize at first is that in taking the Williams girls they are also taking on Richard, who is nearly as confident in his own abilities to coach and manage the girls’ careers as he is in their greatness.

While Venus and Serena are the big names, Richard, as the title implies, is the movie’s focus. But though the movie is a biopic, I’m not sure how thoroughly we know him by the end of the movie. We see how he pushes his daughters but we don’t ultimately feel like we know the man himself outside the tennis context. Is he a self-promoter, is a question the movie asks but doesn’t really answer. The movie drops in biographical information — his upbringing in a racist southern town and a father who was absent as he got older; Richard and Oracene having both been athletes in their youth; Richard’s other children, whom Oracene mentions during a fight. But it both seems to be more interested in the personality of the man than a Wikipedia-like recounting of facts and feels more slight on that interior stuff than I was expecting. (And the movie still goes through a lot of timeline, resulting in a more than two-hour runtime.) The result is a totally fine performance by Will Smith, one that I can completely see in the mix for awards-season discussion but that didn’t have me thinking “role of a lifetime!” either.

I can see why in this story about two very young athletes you’d pick the adult to make the movie about. But everything we see of the girls and the pressures they’re under (the movie gives us quite a few scenes of other tennis children berating themselves when they lose), especially in this moment of wider cultural conversation about top-level sports and mental health, makes their situations seem like the more interesting story. This movie only really covers the earliest stages of Venus’s career and I ended the movie wishing I knew how they felt about Richard’s plan and the course of their careers.

King Richard seems like a perfectly adequate prestige fourth-quarter film but for a movie about such dynamic and culturally significant athletes it is lacking a certain bit of sparkle. B

Rated PG-13 for some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green with a screenplay by Zach Baylin, King Richard is two hours and 18 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Bros. in theaters and on HBO Max through Dec. 19.

FILM

Venues

AMC Londonderry
16 Orchard View Dr., Londonderry
amctheatres.com

Bank of NH Stage in Concord
16 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, banknhstage.com

Capitol Center for the Arts
44 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, ccanh.com

Cinemark Rockingham Park 12
15 Mall Road, Salem

Chunky’s Cinema Pub
707 Huse Road, Manchester; 151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua; 150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com

Dana Center
Saint Anselm College
100 Saint Anselm Dr., Manchester, anselm.edu

Fathom Events
Fathomevents.com

The Flying Monkey
39 Main St., Plymouth
536-2551, flyingmonkeynh.com

LaBelle Winery
345 Route 101, Amherst
672-9898, labellewinery.com

The Music Hall
28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth
436-2400, themusichall.org

O’neil Cinemas
24 Calef Hwy., Epping
679-3529, oneilcinemas.com

Red River Theatres
11 S. Main St., Concord
224-4600, redrivertheatres.org

Regal Fox Run Stadium 15
45 Gosling Road, Newington
regmovies.com

Rex Theatre
23 Amherst St., Manchester
668-5588, palacetheatre.org

The Strand
20 Third St., Dover
343-1899, thestranddover.com

Wilton Town Hall Theatre
40 Main St., Wilton
wiltontownhalltheatre.com, 654-3456

Shows

• House of Gucci (R, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord on Tuesday, Nov. 23, at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, Nov. 24, and Thursday, Nov. 25, at 3:30 & 7 p.m.; Friday, Nov. 26, through Sunday, Nov. 28, at noon, 3:30 & 7 p.m.

• National Theatre Live No Man’s Land A broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage on Sunday, Nov. 21, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• Paths to Paradise (1925) and Hands Up! (1926) Silent film with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, on Sunday, Nov. 28, at 2 p.m. at Wilton Town Hall Theatre. Admission is free; $10 donation suggested.

• The Metropolitan Opera Live — Eurydice Saturday, Dec. 4, 12:55 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord. Tickets cost $26.

• National Theatre Live The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time A broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage on Sunday, Dec. 5, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• An evening with Chevy ChaseA screening of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989, PG-13) plus Q&A with audience on Saturday, Dec. 11, 7 p.m. at the Cap Center. Tickets start at $59.50.

Featured photo: Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Courtesy photo.

Tastes of Trinidad

Manchester’s Wild Orchid Bakery finds a new home on Elm Street

After operating a bakeshop on Manchester’s West Side for a short time last year, self-taught pastry chef and Trinidad native Shelly-Anne Storer has found a new home downtown, where she has expanded her lineup of items to include vegan and gluten-free desserts and savory meals.

Stewed chicken with potatoes, Spanish rice, callaloo and sweet plantains.

Wild Orchid Bakery, now open in the former Lala’s Hungarian Pastry storefront on Elm Street, features a wide selection of custom offerings inspired by flavors of Storer’s homeland. The bakery’s name, she said, even comes from a connection she made between Trinidad and New Hampshire — both have an abundance of wildflower species.

“I wanted to bring part of my home here,” said Storer, who is originally from Diego Martin on Trinidad’s northwestern coast but has lived in the United States since late 2013. “It’s kind of like an oasis. You come in and you see the bright colors and you hear the music, and you’re like, ‘Whoa, where am I? I’m not in the city anymore.’ … Trinidadian food is so flexible. It’s like a melting pot for different cultures, so you can taste all kinds of foods.”

Since opening the doors of her new space earlier this month, Storer has slowly introduced new items each week, from sweeter indulgences like black currant rolls and guava and cream cheese pastries to savory home-cooked meals like corn soup and stewed chicken and curry plates. Callaloo, a vegetable dish cooked in coconut milk that Storer described as being similar to collard greens or okra, and dhal, a yellow split pea-based dish that can be consumed over rice or in a soup, have also been accompaniments to her Trinidadian lunch plates. The bakery even features a selection of bagged snacks and bottled drinks you can try that are popular in Trinidad.

Other dishes like shark and bake, a popular Trinidadian street food, and saltfish buljol, a chopped fish and vegetable salad, will likely be introduced sometime in the future. Storer also has plans to roll out a Trinidadian black cake typically enjoyed around Christmas as the holidays draw near.

Jelly doughnuts.

“It’s a rum-soaked cake, and you only have one slice at a time because it’s so strong,” she said. “After Christmas we’d just have one little sliver of a piece because that was all you needed.”

In addition to cooking and baking some favorite foods she grew up with, Storer has a regularly stocked case of pastries and baked goods, which include her own line of gourmet doughnuts in a variety of flavors, as well as cookies, cupcakes, scones, pies, sticky buns and sweet breads. She also fulfills custom cake orders for occasions large and small.

Continuing a partnership she had at her former shop, Storer is once again collaborating with Mike Brown of Hometown Coffee Roasters in Manchester, offering coffees and espresso drinks with some of his blends, and she’s looking to expand on her own line of flavors.

Adorning the walls of Wild Orchid Bakery are prints and artwork from various local painters and photographers, available for sale. Storer hopes to soon acquire a liquor license, with the intent to serve island-style drinks and brunch cocktails like mimosas and bloody marys.

Wild Orchid Bakery

Where: 836 Elm St., Manchester
Hours: Monday and Thursday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (hours may be subject to change)
More info: Visit wildorchidbakery.com, find them on Facebook and Instagram @wildorchidbakery or call 935-7338

Featured photo: Assorted doughnuts, Trinidadian pastries and coffee. All photos courtesy of Wild Orchid Bakery.

Photos from film

New business is a center for old-style photography

Back when most people were transitioning from film photography to the more instant gratification of digital photography, Jason Lane of Brookline was still using a point-and-shoot camera. He considered going digital, but as an optical engineer who designs lenses for aerospace and defense, he didn’t think it would be much fun to take photos using the same kinds of technology that he used at work all day.

Lane eventually set up a darkroom in his basement, taking his film photography hobby to the next level ― and then the next, as he started to make dry plates.

Photo Retro Shop. Photo courtesy of Jason Lane.

“Dry plates are what photographers used to take pictures with before film was developed,” Lane said. “Pun not intended.”

In 2017, under the business name Pictoriographica, Lane started selling these handmade glass plate negatives. He now ships them around the world.

“The business got to the point where I had to move out of my basement,” Lane said.

Enter Photo Retro. While Lane was looking at space to expand Pictoriographica, he found what he was looking for, and more, in Amherst.

“It was kind of set up really nicely to be a public darkroom,” he said. “It used to be a spa so the space is set up into a bunch of rooms that have running water in them.”

That seemed like a sign to Lane.

“Photo Retro sort of spun out of that realization that I’ve got enough room in this space that I can expand the dry plate making part of the business but also, at the front of the shop, set up a retail store to sell film and also set up these darkrooms … and also do things like have workshops and have a little gallery for guest photographers and kind of make it a center for analog film,” Lane said. “With the film photography popularity kind of coming back … I think there’s a need for it.”

Photo Retro, which is co-owned by mechanical engineer Max Affleck of New Boston, opened on Nov. 5.

“It’s kind of a niche thing so people aren’t beating down the doors, but we have had a steady stream of people coming in,” Lane said.

Dry Plate Ambrotype on Black Glass photo of Jason Lane. Photo by Sid Ceaser.

Lane said he gets the sense that the appeal of digital cameras and their instant gratification are no longer quite as important to people who are interested in the art of photography as the process of taking the picture.

“Younger people are sort of more interested in getting their hands dirty, so to speak,” he said. “For that, it’s not as important to see the image right away. … There’s sort of an anticipation of not finding out right away whether you got a good picture [and that] anticipation appeals to people.”

Lane referred to the “magical moment” in the darkroom when the image starts to form. He thinks that for anyone who wants to get more serious about photography, it’s moments like that in the film process that make it worth trying out.

Photo Retro has some film cameras and photo supplies for sale, though Lane said that stuff is readily available online too. He doesn’t want people to think of the space as a store, but more of a hub for analog photography. The darkrooms are available to the public and have everything needed to develop color or black and white images. There’s a photo studio with special lights and backdrops for early-style portraits, and a small gallery will be available for film photographers to show their work on a revolving basis. For local photographers who shoot film but don’t want to use the darkroom themselves, Photo Retro has partnered with film processor Tomorrow’s Studio of Nashua for processing and scanning.

Lane said they’ve already had their first round of classes but are planning more, to teach the basics of film photography as well as more advanced topics and alternative processes.

Lane thinks of traditional photography and digital photography not as opposing methods but as different options, like oil painting versus acrylic painting.

“It’s just a different art form,” he said.

Photo Retro

Where: 141 Route 101A, Unit B7 (around the back of the plaza), Amherst
Hours: Photo Retro will be open Fridays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. As the business grows the hours will expand.
More information: photoretro.biz or find it on Instagram

Featured Photo: Photo Retro Shop. Photo courtesy of Jason Lane.

So Much Holiday Fun: Big screen holiday

Catch your favorite holiday films at a theater

See holiday classics like Elf, The Polar Express, It’s a Wonderful Life and more on the big screen at these local film events.

• Regal Fox Run(45 Gosling Road in Newington; regmovies.com) is showing a series of classic holiday films, including The Polar Express (G, 2004) on Saturday, Nov. 27, at 1 p.m.; Gremlins ( PG, 1984) on Saturday, Dec. 4, at 1 p.m.; Elf (PG, 2003) on Saturday, Dec. 11, at 1 p.m.; and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (PG-13, 1989) on Saturday, Dec. 18, at 1 p.m. Tickets cost $5.

• Chunky’s Cinema Pub (707 Huse Road, Manchester; 151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua; 150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com) has several holiday-themed events on the schedule. On Thursday, Dec. 2, at 7:30 p.m., Chunky’s Manchester will host a 21+ Die Hard-themed trivia night (It’s a Christmas movie! Debate settled!). For this and other trivia nights, purchase a $5 food voucher to reserve a spot.

Also on Thursday, Dec. 2, at all Chunky’s, catch the 21+ “Christmas Vacation Ugly Sweater Party” starting at 7 p.m. in Manchester and Pelham and 8 p.m. in Nashua. The PG-13 1989 movie will screen during the event, where people who wear ugly Christmas sweaters get extra prizes. Tickets cost $5.99. Take notes — there will be a 21+ Christmas Vacation trivia night on Thursday, Dec. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Manchester.

There are also two Elf (PG, 2003) screenings on the schedule. On Wednesday, Dec. 8, catch a family-friendly screening at all three locations — 6 p.m. in Manchester and 7 p.m. in Pelham and Nashua. On Thursday, Dec. 9, at 7 p.m. at all three locations there will be a 21+ Elf screening.

On Thursday, Dec. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in Manchester, it’s a 21+ Home Alone-themed trivia night.

On Saturday, Dec. 11, and Sunday, Dec. 12, at noon, 3:15 and 6:30 p.m., all three locations will hold screenings of The Polar Express (G, 2004). Tickets cost $5.99.

All three locations will screen It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on Sunday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $5.99.

After multiple TV viewings of A Christmas Story, bring your knowledge of Ralphie and his desire for a Red Ryder BB Gun to the 21+ trivia night on Thursday, Dec. 23, at 7:30 p.m.

• The Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. in Concord; 225-1111, ccanh.com) presents an evening with Chevy Chase including a screening of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (PG-13, 1989) on Saturday, Dec. 11, at 7 p.m. Tickets start at $59.50.

• The Park Theatre (19 Main St. in Jaffrey; theparktheatre.org) will have a free screening of The Polar Express (G, 2004) on Saturday, Dec. 18, at 1 p.m. Admission is free but go online to get tickets. Have a photo taken with Santa and Elves in the lobby.

• The Strand (20 Third St. in Dover; 343-1899, thestranddover.com) hosts its Christmas Break on a Budget event on Saturday, Dec. 18, starting at noon, featuring a screening of Elf (2003, PG) plus family activities and a story time. Tickets cost $8 per person or $20 for a family of four.

• Catch a screening of a broadcast presentation of The Bolshoi Ballet — The Nutcracker on Sunday, Dec. 19, at 12:55 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage (16 S. Main St. in Concord; 225-1111, banknhstage.com). Tickets cost $15.

• The Music Hall will show a series of holiday movies during Christmas week at its Historic Theater (28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth), including White Christmas (1954) on Tuesday, Dec. 21, at 3 p.m.; Love Actually (R, 2003) on Tuesday, Dec. 21, at 7 p.m.; It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on Wednesday, Dec. 22, at 3 and 7 p.m.; The Grinch (2018, PG) on Thursday, Dec. 23, at 3 p.m.; and Last Christmas (2019, PG-13) on Thursday, Dec. 23, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $15 for adults and $12 for seniors age 60 and up, students, military and first responders. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• The Senior Movie Mornings Series at the Rex Theatre (23 Amherst St., Manchester) presents White Christmas(1954) on Tuesday, Dec. 28, at 10 a.m. Tickets cost $10. Call 668-5588 or visit palacetheatre.org/rex-theatre.

Featured photo: Elf. Courtesy photo.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!