Sabrina

Man did the 1995 remake stink up Billy Wilder’s 1954 original with Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden. Sabrina‘s plot is pure Broadway hokum (rich bachelor brothers vie for their chauffeur’s daughter, now all grown up and babe-a-licious), but Wilder gives the material enough spin to save it from saccharine sweetness. Because, as with her prior Roman Holiday (and subsequent Love in the Afternoon), there’s always just something faintly smutty—which Wilder, of course, adores—about the tacit subject of a virgin’s imminent deflowering. Holden asks, “I’ve been trying to write her a poem. What rhymes with ‘glass?’” Bogie deadpans back, “Glass…hmm…I know, ‘alas.’” Hepburn more than holds her own against these older men, and there’s something touchingly comic and off-balance about Bogie’s cranky businessman falling for a woman half his age. Never mind the real-life subtext of Lauren Bacall; here he makes you share his surprise at finding a fresh start when he didn’t even know one was required. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

June 25-July 1, 6:30 & 8:45 p.m.; Sat., June 26, 4 p.m.; Sun., June 27, 4 p.m., 2010