Need some expert eyes to look at my schema
Good start so far. Here are some notes:


a movie can be released on different dates in different cities
please add your primary keys, so we can see them
are images for movies? people? why no order column?
movies schedules are more complex than you've got so far. You will want to calculate show times based on some recurrence rules (see stackoverflow for recurrence posts)
what is 'location' in theatres? the address?


Regarding your questions at the bottom, don't loop. You can almost always do everything using SQL and its set logic. Make sure you understand joins:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/a-visual-explanation-of-sql-joins/