Laemmle Theatres

This week, we’re proud to welcome Shttl (2022) to the big screen—a breathtaking, audacious film that rebuilds a vanished Yiddish-speaking village with a level of authenticity and emotional power that few works of historical cinema can match. Written and directed by Ady Walter, Shttl takes place entirely on June 21, 1941, just one day before the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, wherein Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. What follows feels less like a fast-unfolding tragedy than a prayer, a time capsule, and an elegy rolled into one.

Catch Shttl in its Los Angeles theatrical debut beginning Friday, November 28th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center. Tickets on sale now.

The film’s craftsmanship is nothing short of bold. The dialogue is spoken entirely in Yiddish, a deliberate choice by Walter, who refused to shortcut historical fidelity. With a commitment to authenticity that extends beyond the soundtrack, Walter and his team built a full-scale shtetl set, complete with homes, a synagogue, and winding paths. The effect is immersive, culminating in the kind of reconstruction that feels less like a museum than a living, restless community.

At the center of Shttl is Mendele, played by Moshe Lobel, an aspiring filmmaker who returns to his shtetl from Kyiv to pursue his former sweetheart and confront the world he left behind. His blend of idealism, hurt, and fierce longing gives the film its emotional heart. Meanwhile, veteran actor Saul Rubinek, fluent in Yiddish, plays the local rabbi with gravitas and humanity, embodying the moral complexity of a man steeped in tradition yet unflinchingly cognizant that his world may not survive the present era.

Walter’s film doesn’t shy away from the specter of disaster. As the day progresses, a sense of dread gradually builds—not with explosions, but with intimate tension, whispered fears, and the weight of unmet obligations. Yet even as catastrophe looms, Shttl finds beauty in its quietest moments: a mother’s blessing, children playing, a philosophical debate about faith and modernity. It’s a meditation on loss, but also on connection, and how people come together to sustain their humanity even when everything they know could vanish overnight.

For audiences drawn to films that balance historical gravity with human warmth, Shttl is a rare and deeply affecting experience. It’s a tribute to a lost way of life, a mournful love letter, and a bold reminder that what we reconstruct on screen carries the power to resurrect more than just buildings—It can resurrect memory.

“A keenly observed, deeply cathartic movie… the kind of film most filmmakers dream their entire lives of making.” – Barry Levitt, SlashFilm

“Like being dropped out of a time machine into a vanished world.” – Alan Zeitlin, Unpacked Media

This weekend, Laemmle Theatres welcomes back a film that unravels something far more complicated than simply bidding on a masterpiece. Auction, directed by Pascal Bonitzer, is a tense, morally charged drama that plunges into the high-stakes world of art restitution, and the human cost behind a long-lost painting.

Catch Auction in its much-anticipated theatrical return beginning this Friday, November 21st at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center. Tickets on sale now.

At the film’s center is André (played with wry charm by Alex Lutz), a Parisian auctioneer with a sharp eye and ambition to match. When he learns that a painting once believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis may actually be hanging in an unsuspecting worker’s home, he must decide whether to seize the opportunity with discretion or confront the haunting legacy that comes along with it.

What he’s found proves authentic: a wartime-provenance painting by Egon Schiele, once looted and now unexpectedly returned. But the painting’s journey doesn’t end there, for into this discovery step André’s former wife, an art appraiser played by the perceptive Léa Drucker, and his intern, a mendacious young man whose ambitions make him dangerously flexible. On the other side stands the earnest worker, suddenly aware that something in his modest life carries monumental history and value. And Bonitzer, a former Cahiers du Cinéma critic turned screenwriter, stages their entangled destinies with dry humor, intellectual rigor, and a healthy dose of optimism.

Visually, the film is elegant without being slick. Bonitzer invites us into richly textured interiors—salerooms, private homes, exam rooms where authenticity is confirmed—to show how power and legacy trade hands exchange after exchange. The film’s pace is deliberate, preserving space for questions, for hesitation, and for the weight of what it means to hold something once lost to violence.

Auction doesn’t just dramatize the art world: it skewers its fetishization, its secrecy, its ambition. But it’s not a straightforward condemnation, for the film also dwells on memory, justice, and the possibility of redemption, even as it asks how one’s moral compass might bend in the face of beauty and profit. In this way, the film is both thriller and parable, holding a mirror up to history and art’s persistent ability to provoke, wound, and heal.

Watching Auction on the big screen feels especially significant. It’s more than a movie about art; it’s a story about memory, responsibility, and how the past continues to reverberate in the present. As you settle into your seat, anticipate more than a simple bidding war: This is a meditation on who owns history, and who pays the price.

“Bonitzer… still has a knack for cutting dialogue and unexpected turnarounds.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“The more they argue over the value of “Wilted Sunflowers,” the more we sense that they are being forced to contend with the value of the argument they’re making.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire