Laemmle Theatres

‘Romería’: Carla Simón’s Moving Portrait of Loss, Identity, and Belonging

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the course of three features, Carla Simón has quietly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European cinema. Following her acclaimed debut Summer 1993 and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, the Spanish filmmaker returns with Romería, a deeply personal coming-of-age drama that continues her exploration of family, memory, and the lingering impact of loss.

Catch Romeria in theaters beginning July 1st at the Laemmle Glendale.

The title translates roughly to “pilgrimage,” an apt description for the journey undertaken by Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave home to study filmmaking. Before she can begin that next chapter, however, she must travel to the Galician city of Vigo in search of documents connected to her late father, whose death years earlier left crucial gaps in her understanding of both her family history and herself.

Raised apart from her father’s relatives, Marina arrives as both an outsider and a blood relation. Her extended family welcomes her warmly enough on the surface, inviting her on boat trips, beach outings, and sprawling family gatherings, yet beneath the hospitality lies a more complicated reality. Old wounds remain unhealed, uncomfortable truths have been buried, and differing accounts of the past begin to challenge everything Marina thought she knew about her parents.

Like Simón’s previous work, Romería unfolds through intimate observations rather than dramatic confrontations. The filmmaker has a remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of family life: overlapping conversations around crowded tables, casual moments of affection, and the subtle tensions that emerge when multiple generations inhabit the same space. Yet as Marina pieces together fragments of her family’s history, Romería expands beyond a straightforward search for answers. Her mother’s diaries, camcorder recordings, and the stories told by her relatives create a layered portrait of two people she barely knew, as what begins as a realistic family drama gradually opens into something more lyrical and impressionistic. Simón incorporates dreamlike passages and flashes of imagined memory, allowing the boundaries between history, recollection, and personal mythology to blur. These touches of magical realism give emotional shape to experiences that can never be fully recovered, only reimagined.

Both tender and quietly heartbreaking, Romería confirms Simón’s status as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Drawing from deeply personal material while touching on universal questions of identity and belonging, she has created a film that is at once a family portrait, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the subtle ways that each of us carries the residue of our forebearers.

“Carla Simón’s story of a young woman untangling a web of family secrets cements the filmmaker’s aptitude for naturalism while also marking a bold new step towards magical realism.” – Sophia Satchell-Baeza, British Film Institute

“A kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

John Early’s ‘Maddie’s Secret’ Finds Heart Beneath the Camp

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

John Early has spent years building a reputation as one of contemporary comedy’s most distinctive voices, whether through scene-stealing performances in projects like Search Party and Stress Positions, or his singular stand-up and musical work. That history makes Maddie’s Secret an especially surprising directorial feature debut. While the film contains plenty of the heightened absurdity and comic precision that fans of Early will recognize, it ultimately reveals itself as something far more sincere: a melodrama about eating disorders, self-worth, and modern womanhood disguised as a campy made-for-television movie.

Catch Maddie’s Secret in theaters beginning June 26th at the Laemmle Monica.

Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a shy but gifted home cook working behind the scenes at a trendy food-media company. Her life changes overnight when a homemade cooking video goes viral, transforming her from anonymous dishwasher to the face of the brand. This sudden attention, however, reawakens her long-suppressed struggle with bulimia. Desperate to conceal her relapse from her loving husband Jake (Eric Rahill) and best friend Deena (Kate Berlant), Maddie tells an impulsive lie that quickly spirals beyond her control.

The premise sounds like the setup for broad satire, and Maddie’s Secret certainly pokes fun at influencer culture, wellness trends, online therapy apps, foodie celebrity, and other fixtures of contemporary life. Yet Early’s screenplay consistently resists easy cynicism, treating its characters with affection and finding humor in their quirks without reducing them to punchlines. Even the broadest personalities feel grounded by an underlying emotional honesty.

That tonal confidence is especially evident in Early’s performance. Playing Maddie could easily have become an exercise in caricature, but he approaches the character with remarkable empathy. Maddie is funny, anxious, talented, vulnerable, and deeply human. The film never treats her eating disorder as a joke, even as it finds comedy in the myriad social pressures, cultural expectations, and personal contradictions that surround it.

What ultimately distinguishes Maddie’s Secret is its refusal to choose between irony and sincerity. In an era when many comedies keep their subjects at arm’s length, Early allows himself to care deeply about his protagonist and the struggles she faces. The film is frequently funny, occasionally outrageous, and unexpectedly moving. By the time it reaches its emotional climax, what initially seemed like a clever genre exercise has transformed into something infinitely richer: a compassionate portrait of a woman trying to reconcile the person she is with the person she believes she should be.

For a filmmaker making his feature directing debut, it is an impressively assured achievement. Campy and heartfelt, and unlike much else in contemporary cinema, Maddie’s Secret announces John Early as a filmmaker worth watching.

“A lesser film would find more cynicism and mockery in the text, but Maddie’s Secret is a testament to the art of trying, finding optimism, and approaching life empathetically.” – Peyton Robinson, RogerEbert.com

“Brimming with style and spirit up to the final scene.” – Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times

“A film of real kindness.” – Sam Bodrojan, IndieWire

‘O Horizon’ Explores Loss in the Age of AI

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Artificial intelligence has long been a staple of science fiction, but as AI becomes an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, filmmakers face a new challenge: how to tell stories about technology that no longer feels wholly speculative. Writer-director Madeleine Rotzler’s O Horizon approaches that question from an intimate angle, using a near-future premise to explore the ravages of grief.

Catch O Horizon in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal.

Maria Bakalova, the Oscar-nominated breakout actress from Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, stars as Abby, a neuroscientist struggling with the death of her beloved father (David Strathairn). Months after his passing, she remains emotionally adrift, unable to fully connect with her family, her work, or her own future. Then she discovers an unusual service called “Seeking a Friend,” which uses personal data—messages, videos, recordings, and emails—to create an AI facsimile of a deceased loved one. Soon Abby finds herself speaking regularly with a digital recreation of her father.

The premise recalls classics such as Her and episodes of Black Mirror, but O Horizon is less interested in providing dystopian warnings than in exploring the emotional complexities of loss. What begins as a source of comfort gradually becomes something more complicated as Abby confronts unresolved feelings, old frustrations, and the question of whether technology can truly help us heal or merely postpone the process of actually moving forward.

Running parallel to Abby’s personal journey is her groundbreaking neuroscience research, which explores the possibility of artificially recreating human sensations and experiences. Together, these storylines examine a common theme: If pain, loneliness, and grief can be technologically softened, what might be lost along the way? The film raises provocative questions without insisting on easy answers.

Much of the film’s appeal rests on Bakalova’s nuanced performance, which brings emotional authenticity to Abby’s complex journey through loss. David Strathairn, for his part, makes a strong impression despite limited screen time, lending warmth and humanity to both the memories of Abby’s father and his AI-generated counterpart. Together, the two actors ground the film’s speculative premise in recognizable human emotions, helping transform a contemporary technological thought experiment into something more personal and universal.

Beautifully photographed and deliberately understated, O Horizon favors reflection over spectacle. Rather than presenting artificial intelligence as either salvation or catastrophe, it uses emerging technology as a lens through which to examine love, memory, and the lingering bonds between parents and children.

At a moment when AI is rapidly moving from science fiction into daily reality, O Horizon offers a timely and deeply personal meditation on what it means to hold on—and when it may finally be time to let go.

“A moving lead performance from Maria Bakalova.” – Alex Harrison, ScreenRant

“Sort of a Black Mirror premise… [but] more of a fable.” – Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

‘Peter Asher’: The Man Behind the Music

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For many music fans, Peter Asher is one of those names that seems to appear everywhere once you start paying attention. A member of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon, head of A&R for the Beatles’ Apple Records, producer of landmark albums from James Taylor to Linda Ronstadt, and a trusted collaborator to generations of artists, Asher has spent more than six decades helping shape popular music from both center stage and behind the scenes.

The new documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man traces that remarkable career, revealing how one seemingly modest figure repeatedly found himself at pivotal moments in music history. Helmed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, the film combines archival footage, contemporary interviews, and performances from Asher’s acclaimed live storytelling show to create a portrait of a life that often feels stupefyingly interconnected.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear co-directors Goldfine and Geller discuss their fascinating new release with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning with a special Q&A on June 22nd at the Laemmle Royal.

Asher’s story begins in an unusually artistic household in London. His sister Jane Asher’s relationship with Paul McCartney brought the Beatles directly into the family orbit, with McCartney at one point living in the Ashers’ home. Numerous songs that would become part of popular music history were written there, and the documentary delights in recounting how Peter found himself witnessing events that would later seem legendary.

Yet Everywhere Man makes clear that Asher was never merely a bystander. As one half of Peter & Gordon, he scored international hits, including “A World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, as an executive at Apple Records, he signed a young James Taylor, beginning a partnership that would help define the singer-songwriter boom of the 1970s.

The documentary is particularly compelling when examining Asher’s influence as a producer and manager. Working with Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, and many others, he helped shape the polished California sound that dominated popular music throughout the decade. Along the way, he pushed for greater recognition of studio musicians, insisting that the talented players behind classic recordings receive proper credit on album sleeves—a practice that seems obvious today but was far from standard at the time.

What emerges is not simply a history of one career, but a tour through several eras of popular music, featuring everyone from the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to Elton John, Diana Ross, and Randy Newman. The result is an entertaining and affectionate documentary about a man whose influence extends far beyond the spotlight. Even viewers who don’t immediately recognize Peter Asher’s name may discover that they already know much of the music—not to mention the stories—that he helped usher into the world.

“The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong.” – Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The] film does an amazing job tracking the arc of a career of an artist who was really just about everywhere.” – Brad Auerbach, Entertainment Today

Haifaa Al-Mansour’s ‘Unidentified’ and the Women Hidden in Plain Sight

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the past decade, Haifaa Al-Mansour has become one of the most important cinematic voices to emerge from Saudi Arabia. Her breakthrough feature Wadjda followed a young girl determined to buy a bicycle in a society that discouraged such independence. The Perfect Candidate centered on a woman running for local office. With Unidentified, Al-Mansour again focuses on a female protagonist navigating institutional barriers, but this time she does so through the framework of a murder mystery.

Catch Unidentified in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center.

The film opens with the discovery of a teenage girl’s body abandoned in the desert outside Riyadh. The victim has no identification, few clues, and seemingly little chance of receiving justice. When the case crosses her desk, Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), a recently divorced police clerk and devoted true-crime listener, sets out to uncover the girl’s identity.

What follows is part detective story, part social portrait, as Al-Mansour uses the familiar structure of a procedural to explore larger questions about gender, autonomy, and social expectation. As Nawal begins asking questions, she encounters a world of silences, evasions, and unspoken assumptions. School administrators, family members, and community figures each possess fragments of information, yet the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that solving the crime means understanding the circumstances that allowed the victim to disappear in the first place.

One of the film’s strengths is its refusal to present Saudi women as a monolith. Throughout Nawal’s investigation, she encounters women of different generations, backgrounds, and beliefs, each navigating the constraints of their society in distinct ways. Some push against those limitations; others accommodate them, and many exist somewhere in between.

Mila Alzahrani, reuniting with Al-Mansour after The Perfect Candidate, anchors the film with a performance that balances determination and vulnerability. Nawal’s interest in the case is clearly fueled by her own personal losses, but the film wisely avoids reducing her to a simple symbol or crusader. Instead, she emerges as a complicated individual whose search for answers becomes inseparable from her effort to reclaim agency in her own life.

Stylistically, Unidentified represents a somewhat more commercial turn for Al-Mansour. The film embraces suspense, red herrings, and genre conventions more readily than her earlier work. While the mystery itself remains engaging throughout, the film’s lasting impact comes less from the mechanics of the investigation than from the social realities it reveals along the way.

In the end, Unidentified works as both a compelling thriller and a continuation of Al-Mansour’s long-standing interest in the lives of Saudi women. The mystery may provide the engine, but humanization remains the destination.

“Unidentified… utilizes the death of a young woman to explore how Saudi Arabia’s crushing patriarchy creates both victims and criminals out of its female population. – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.” – Beandrea July, IndieWire

Homoerotic Hitchcock: ‘Strangers on a Train’ at 75

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the movie that launched Hitchcock’s greatest decade of moviemaking, the 1951 suspense classic Strangers on a Train.

On Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m., attend the 75th anniversary screening at Laemmle’s Royal, complete with a Q&A with Stephen Rebello, Author of Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitcchock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train and Hitchcockian Thrillers.

Hitchcock had started his career in England with such top thrillers as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hollywood quickly came calling, and when Hitchcock moved to America, he won his only Best Picture Oscar for Rebecca in 1940. He continued with other classic films Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, and Notorious.

But in the late 1940s the Master of Suspense hit a dry spell, when his films The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright failed to connect with audiences. Searching for inspiration, he landed on Patricia Highsmith’s first acclaimed novel, Strangers on a Train, a story drenched in homoeroticism and perverse psychology. Highsmith, who was herself gay (she later wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley and a lesbian-themed novel, Carol, that was turned into an acclaimed 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), provided the inspiration that Hitchcock needed.

Strangers tells the story of a chance meeting between a handsome tennis star, Guy Haines, and a charming but deranged aristocrat, Bruno Anthony. Bruno has read about Guy’s problems with his estranged wife and suggests half-jokingly that if they swap murders (Bruno wants to get rid of his disapproving father), neither would have a discernible motive for the murders they commit. Guy does not take the suggestion seriously, but when Bruno kills Guy’s wife, he expects Guy to return the favor.

The screenplay is credited to acclaimed mystery writer Raymond Chandler and female writer Czenzi Ormonde, but Chandler actually contributed very little to the movie; he and Hitchcock did not get along. Nevertheless, the script is tightly structured and consistently gripping. Like many Hitchcock movies, Strangers is distinguished by several memorable set-pieces, including the murder at an amusement park, a tense tennis match, and the climax on board a carousel spinning wildly out of control. But it also has the psychological depth of the Master’s best movies. Defying the Production Code, which had a strict prohibition against depictions of homosexuality, Hitchcock and his screenwriters clearly delineate the attraction that Bruno feels toward the handsome tennis champ. Robert Walker, the star of several lighter pictures, relishes his stab at villainy, and he is well matched with Farley Granger, who had starred in Hitchcock’s Rope and was gay in real life.

Ruth Roman, Laura Elliott, Norma Varden, Leo G. Carroll, and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia round out the cast. Robert Burks, who earned an Oscar nomination for his cinematography, went on to work with Hitchcock again on Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, among others. Oscar-winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had worked with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, wrote the effective score.

Stephen Rebello, who will be doing a Q&A at the screening, is the author of the best-selling Alfred Hitchock and the Making of Psycho (which was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) and Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!: Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time. He has written for Movieline, GQ, Playboy, and other publications.

The First Artists: Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There are few filmmakers better suited than Werner Herzog to stand before humanity’s oldest known artworks and ask what, exactly, they mean. Across documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog has spent decades pursuing people and places that seem to exist at the fringes of ordinary experience. With Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), he turns his attention backward across tens of thousands of years, descending into the Chauvet Cave in southern France to confront some of the earliest surviving expressions of human imagination.

Catch Cave of Forgotten Dreams in its triumphant return to theaters, shown in 3D from June 5-11th at the Laemmle Glendale.

Discovered in 1994 and ordinarily closed to the public, the Chauvet Cave contains paintings estimated to be more than 30,000 years old: rhinoceroses, horses, lions, bison, mammoths, and other animals sketched across stone walls with astonishing sophistication. Herzog and a tiny film crew were granted rare access to the cave, resulting in a documentary that feels less like a conventional history lesson than an encounter with something profoundly uncanny. The cave becomes, in Herzog’s hands, not merely an archaeological site but a kind of lost cathedral, suspended outside ordinary time.

The decision to film in 3D proves especially inspired. Rather than using the format for spectacle, Herzog employs it to emphasize the contours and textures of the cave walls themselves, revealing how the ancient artists incorporated the natural curvature of the rock into their drawings. The paintings seem almost to move as the camera glides past them, lending weight to Herzog’s suggestion that these images function as a kind of “proto-cinema,” like an attempt to capture motion long before the invention of film itself.

As always, Herzog’s unmistakable narration hovers somewhere between philosophical inquiry, deadpan comedy, and cosmic bewilderment. He approaches the cave with genuine awe, but also with the peculiar curiosity that has long defined his documentaries. As archaeologists, paleontologists, and art historians offer technical insights into the methods and possible meanings behind the paintings, Herzog repeatedly nudges the discussion toward stranger and more existential territory. What does it mean that human beings, so early in recorded history, already felt compelled to create images like these? Were the paintings artistic, spiritual, communal, or something else entirely that modern language cannot adequately describe?

What emerges is not a film interested in providing definitive answers so much as one fascinated by the persistence of mystery itself. Herzog treats the cave less as a puzzle to be solved than as a prototype of that same inclination toward storytelling, symbolism, and image-making that still defines human culture today.

Few documentaries inspire awe quite this naturally. Seen in 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams becomes something increasingly rare: a film that genuinely expands one’s sense of human history, while quietly reminding us how much remains unknowable.

“As usual, human progress gets the sublimely absurd Herzogian treatment.” – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

“The Chauvet cave is a lost cathedral, and Herzog’s film responds with subdued passion to its profound mystery.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

‘Honeyjoon’ and the Distance Between Grief and Connection

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Grief is rarely a solitary experience. Even when family members mourn the same loss, they often do so in profoundly different ways. That tension lies at the heart of Lilian T. Mehrel’s deeply felt debut feature Honeyjoon, a warm, observant drama about a mother and daughter struggling to find one another in the aftermath of loss.

Catch Honeyjoon in theaters beginning June 12th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set against the lush volcanic landscapes of Portugal’s Azores Islands, the film follows June (Ayden Mayeri) and her Persian-Kurdish mother Lela (Amira Casar) as they mark the first anniversary of the death of June’s father. The destination is not arbitrary: It is a place he’d once visited and loved, making the trip both a memorial and a search for connection. Yet from the outset, it is clear that mother and daughter have arrived carrying vastly different emotional agendas.

Lela wants to sit with her grief, to revisit memories and honor what has been lost. June, meanwhile, seems eager to keep moving, whether through flirtation, distraction, or simply avoiding conversations that might force her to confront feelings she has spent months suppressing. Their differing approaches create moments of tension, but Mehrel wisely avoids turning those disagreements into melodrama. Instead, Honeyjoon finds poignancy in smaller misunderstandings: the comments that sting more than intended, the silences that speak volumes, and the quiet realization that even those closest to us may experience the same event in dramatically different ways.

What distinguishes the film is the compassion it extends to both women. June’s restlessness and Lela’s yearning emerge not as opposing forces but as parallel responses to the same wound. Mayeri and Casar share an easy, lived-in chemistry that makes their relationship feel authentic, capturing the complicated blend of affection, frustration, obligation, and love that often defines parent-child relationships well into adulthood.

The Azores themselves become an essential part of the film’s emotional texture. Mehrel and cinematographer Inés Gowland make full use of the islands’ dramatic coastlines, green hills, and volcanic terrain, creating a setting that feels both idyllic and reflective. The landscape’s beauty never overwhelms the story, but it quietly reinforces the film’s central concerns with memory, change, and the passage of time.

At just over eighty minutes, Honeyjoon unfolds with a light touch, resisting grand revelations or tidy emotional resolutions. The result is a modest but affecting debut that understands grief not as something to overcome, but as something we learn to carry—sometimes alone, and sometimes, if we are fortunate, alongside the people who know us best.

“A story of Iranian diaspora, of sexual and emotional repression, and of culture and politics experienced at a distance.” – Siddhant Adlakha, Variety

“A quietly powerful exploration of grief, family, and the small moments that connect us.” – Rachel West, ThatShelf.com