Anniversary Classics Archives

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting the Cult Classic ‘Harold and Maude’

March 18, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present a tribute to the late Bud Cort with a screening of his most famous movie, the offbeat romantic comedy Harold and Maude, on Wednesday, March 25th at 7:30 p.m. at the Laemmle NoHo.

Cort first attracted attention in two films directed by Robert Altman, the Oscar-winning black comic hit M*A*S*H and the eccentric comedy Brewster McCloud. He also played one of the student protestors in The Strawberry Statement, one of a handful of movies about student rebellion produced in the early 1970s. Yet it wasn’t until he joined forces with Ruth Gordon, Oscar-winning co-star of Rosemary’s Baby, to play one of the oddest couples in movie history, that the talented young actor was launched into what would ultimately develop into a decades-long career.

Cort plays Harold, a death-obsessed young man determined to commit suicide, at least until he meets the vibrant 79-year-old Maude and gradually falls in love with her. Before their chance encounter, Harold spends his days staging elaborate fake suicides to shock his wealthy, emotionally distant mother and attending strangers’ funerals for entertainment, drifting through life with a morbid detachment that borders on performance art. Maude, by contrast, lives with mischievous spontaneity: stealing cars she fancies, rescuing trees slated for demolition, and approaching each moment with irreverent wonder. Their unlikely friendship grows (while sneakily developing into the most improbable of romances) through a series of adventures that gently dismantle Harold’s fascination with death, as Maude introduces him to the pleasures, absurdities, and quiet rebellions that make life worth living. Set against a rich backdrop of early-1970s countercultural whimsy, their relationship challenges social expectations and invites Harold (and, ultimately, the audience) to reconsider what it means to truly embrace being alive.

Written by Colin Higgins as the basis for his Master’s thesis at UCLA and directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude was a critical and financial flop when it first opened in December of 1971. Major critics like Roger Ebert, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, panned the film, and it struggled to find an audience. Pauline Kael gave it a mixed review, noting that it flaunted a bizarre concept, but granted that it had “been made with considerable wit and skill,” also noting the considerable impact it had on young viewers: “Many young moviegoers have returned to this eccentric film repeatedly (in 1974, one 22-year-old claimed to have seen it 138 times).” The venerable New York Review of Books called it “a philosophical black comedy for grandparents and grandchildren.”

It wasn’t until 1983, twelve years after its initial release, that the film finally turned a profit, and that Cort, Gordon, and the filmmakers received their long-overdue royalty checks. In the years that followed, the critics, too, gradually gave the film a second look, and in 1997 it was tagged for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. By 2004, Entertainment Weekly ranked it #4 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Rarely has the phrase “aged like fine wine” been a more apt descriptor for a work of art.

Ashby and Higgins, for their part, also went on to much bigger successes, the former directing a number of acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, while the latter penned the smash-hit comedy Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, followed by a successful directorial run with Foul Play and 9 to 5.

With a deep and memorable cast including Vivian Pickles and the prolific Cyril Cusack, as well as an iconic soundtrack by Cat Stevens—filling in admirably for Elton John, who recommended him for the project after dropping out—Harold and Maude has plenty to offer its viewers, whether seeing it for the first… or 139th time.

Join us in remembering Bud Cort, in his most iconic role, at Harold and Maude‘s one-night-only screening at the Laemmle Noho.

Summer, Youth, and Self-Discovery: Rediscovering Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’

February 24, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

A journey into the countryside becomes something far richer in Days and Nights in the Forest, the quietly radiant 1970 film from Indian master Satyajit Ray. Long regarded as one of Ray’s foremost (if relatively underappreciated) achievements, this film serves as a reminder of why he remains one of world cinema’s most revered humanists—a filmmaker of uncommon grace, wit, and emotional intelligence.

Catch the newly restored Days and Nights in the Forest beginning February 6th at the Laemmle Royal, or February 13th at Glendale.

On the surface, the premise is simple: Four young professionals from Kolkata escape the pressures of city life for a few carefree days in the forests of eastern India. They arrive with cigarettes, bravado, and a pocketful of assumptions. They bribe a caretaker to secure lodging they never reserved. They drink too much. They talk too loudly. They treat the rural landscape as backdrop to their own amusement. Ray sketches these early episodes with a light touch that feels almost casual, airy, even playful. But a closer inspection reveals that what seems effortless is in fact exquisitely composed.

Ray builds the film from contrasts: urban and rural, privilege and poverty, men and women, innocence and experience. His camera often frames characters in medium groupings, encouraging us to observe them in relation to one another rather than as isolated heroes. There is no single protagonist here; instead, we’re invited to study a small social ecosystem. Time passes gently. Conversations drift. Meaning accumulates.

When two women vacationing nearby, Aparna and Jaya, enter the men’s orbit, the film’s tone subtly shifts. Banter gives way to vulnerability; posturing reveals insecurity. Ray’s women, clear-eyed and self-possessed, register the men’s arrogance with bemusement rather than outrage. The flirtations and conversations that follow are modest on their face—a walk, a game of badminton, shared laughter—yet they carry the quiet charge of lives tilting off course.

The film’s most celebrated sequence arrives during a picnic, when the six characters play a memory game, each adding the name of a famous figure to an ever-growing list. It might sound inconsequential, but in the rhythms of hesitation and recall, in the glances exchanged and the names chosen, whole inner worlds flicker into view. Ray orchestrates the scene with the delicacy of chamber music. Nothing is underlined; everything resonates.

What makes Days and Nights in the Forest endure is its refusal of easy symbolism or tidy moralizing. Ray does not punish his characters, nor does he absolve them. He simply watches with compassion, irony, and patience as they brush up against their own limitations. The revelations are often small, but they linger. Only after viewing the entire film do you realize just how much it has revealed: about class and conscience, about love and pride, and about the uneasy passage from youth toward self-knowledge.

Roommates, Revolution, and Reverie: Rediscovering Visconti’s ‘Conversation Piece’

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This month, a revival worth savoring is headed back to the big screen: Conversation Piece, the late-period chamber drama from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, returns in a new 4K restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber. If you’ve never encountered this strange, elegant, faintly scandalous film, this theatrical reissue is the ideal way to step inside its rarefied, decaying world.

Catch Conversation Piece in its much-anticipated re-release beginning February 20th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set almost entirely inside a grand Roman apartment—a practical concession to Visconti’s waning health—the film unfolds like a live-in painting: fitting, since its unnamed protagonist, a retired American professor played by Burt Lancaster, specializes in collecting “conversation pieces,” those intimate group portraits of domestic life. His own life, however, is all but sealed off: books, art, routine, and a heavy dose of solitude. That carefully controlled environment is suddenly upended when the Countess Bianca Brumonti (played with Circean glamour by Silvana Mangano) bullies her way into renting the upstairs flat, bringing along her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her volatile young lover Konrad, portrayed by longtime Visconti muse Helmut Berger.

What follows is less a traditional narrative than an all-out invasion, as noise, sex, politics, emotional turbulence, and generational upheaval flood the professor’s cloistered existence. Renovations begin without permission; parties erupt; strangers roam the halls. The professor protests (albeit mildly), yet inexorably finds himself drawn into their disorder, especially toward Berger’s Konrad, whose swaggering vulgarity and wounded intelligence combine to create a dangerous gravitational pull.

Visconti, working after a debilitating stroke and reportedly directing portions of the film from his wheelchair, turns such limitations into style. The film’s confined setting becomes a pressure cooker of class tension, erotic charge, and ideological debate. At times it plays like tragic farce, at others like philosophical confession, resulting in a tonal high-wire act—stately composition colliding with emotional disarray—that gives the movie its peculiar, lingering power.

Lancaster’s casting is part of the fascination. Long associated with physical dynamism and outward force, here he is turned inward: restrained, observant, aching. Whether you view the performance as daringly subdued or intriguingly misaligned, it’s impossible to look away. Berger, by contrast, is all sharp edges and dangerous charm, strutting and smirking through the film like a beautiful provocation.

Conversation Piece is about aging, envy of youth, sexual politics, class hypocrisy, and the uneasy coexistence of radical ideas with decadent taste. It’s also, not incidentally, wickedly funny in stretches, with Visconti allowing the absurdity of his characters’ self-justifications to show through the gilt frame.

Seeing this film restored in 4K reveals the tactile richness of its interiors—fabrics, paintings, skin, candlelight—while accentuating the painterly intent behind every composition. Like the artworks the professor cherishes, this restoration rewards close viewing and theatrical scale.

In short: a film about people who shouldn’t live together, restored so beautifully that you’ll be very glad they do.

(At least for two hours.)

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting Henry & June With Philip Kaufman

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

First on the 2026 docket for Laemmle Theatres’ Anniversary Classics Series comes Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June, a film that helped redraw the boundaries around what American cinema could openly explore. Released in 1990, it was the first film to receive the NC-17 rating, a designation that became inseparable from its reputation, but which only partially explains its lasting appeal. More than a provocation, Henry & June is a lush, literary meditation on desire, authorship, and the porous line between lived experience and art.

Get your tickets today to see Henry & June on Sunday, January 11th, 2026 at the Laemmle Royal, kicked off by a pre-screening discussion with director Philip Kaufman moderated by Stephen Farber, ex-president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (which will be honoring Kaufman with their Career Achievement Award the day prior) and host of Reel Talk at Laemmle Theatres.

Set in 1930s Paris, the film draws from the diaries of Anaïs Nin, whose encounters with the fledgling writer Henry Miller (still working on his masterpiece-to-be Tropic of Cancer) and his enigmatic wife June catalyze both personal and creative awakenings. Kaufman treats this triangle less as a conventional erotic drama than as a shifting constellation of gazes and power. Anaïs, played with quiet intensity by Maria de Medeiros, begins as an observer—absorbing, recording, translating sensation into language—before gradually stepping into her own erotic and artistic agency. Fred Ward’s Henry is all swagger and verbal excess, while Uma Thurman’s June is an apparition, at once muse, manipulator, and mirror for the myriad desires projected onto her.

What distinguishes Henry & June is its attention to interiority. Kaufman visualizes thought and memory as tactile experiences: ink bleeding across paper, shadows pooling in lamplit rooms, bodies framed as if already being remembered. The film’s eroticism is inseparable from its interest in writing itself, in how confession, exaggeration, and performance shape identity. Sex here is never reduced to spectacle for its own sake, but a language through which the characters attempt to define themselves.

Following Henry & June’s release, the controversy surrounding its NC-17 rating often obscured how carefully crafted the film really is. Its sensuality is deliberate and measured, rooted in atmosphere rather than shock, while its emotional core lies in Anaïs’s struggle to reconcile intimacy with autonomy. Kaufman resists easy moralizing, allowing contradictions to coexist: freedom and dependency, inspiration and exploitation, love and self-invention.

Seen today, Henry & June feels less like a boundary-pushing outlier than a throwback to a brief moment in time when American studios were willing to support adult, intellectually curious filmmaking that trusted audiences to engage with such complexity. Its frankness remains striking, but so does its elegance, as well as its belief that erotic experience can be cinematic without being reductive or vulgar. More than three decades on, the film endures as a portrait of artists in formation and as a sensual inquiry into how stories—especially the ones we tell about ourselves—come into being.

Anniversary Classics Presents: Power, Politics, and Passion in Nixon and Doctor Zhivago

December 2, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This holiday season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present two sweeping cinematic epics: Oliver Stone’s Nixon and David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, the latter celebrating its 60th anniversary. Though separated by three decades and worlds apart in style, these films form a captivating double feature: one a feverish psychological portrait of American power, the other an expansive romantic epic set against the convulsions of revolutionary Russia. Together, they reflect cinema’s enduring ability to illuminate the human stakes behind history’s most turbulent eras.

Get your tickets today to see Nixon on December 21st, featuring an in-person Q&A with director Oliver Stone alongside author Tim Grieving to discuss his new book on legendary composer John Williams, or Doctor Zhivago on December 30th, both playing at the Laemmle Royal.

Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) remains one of the filmmaker’s boldest achievements. Rather than approaching Richard Nixon as a political symbol, Stone crafts a bruised, haunted character study of a man who carried childhood wounds into the Oval Office. Anthony Hopkins delivers a mesmerizing performance as Nixon, capturing him in all his yearning, paranoia, cunning, and profound isolation. Then there’s John Williams’ brooding, elegant score, which guest speaker Tim Grieving argues ranks among the composer’s most underrated works. His and Stone’s post-screening conversation promises an illuminating look into the film’s creation, its political resonance, and the musical architecture that gives it shape.

Seen nearly three decades after its release, Nixon feels startlingly contemporary, its themes of secrecy, ambition, partisan rage, and the weight of personal demons on public decision-making continuing to echo. Stone’s approach, blending documentary grit with operatic intensity, constructs not a straightforward biopic but a cautionary American tragedy.

If Nixon examines a presidency from the inside out, Doctor Zhivago (1965) offers a radically different but equally powerful meditation on individuals swept into history’s path. Even sixty years after its making, David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize–winning novel remains one of cinema’s most beloved epics: a story of love, revolution, and moral endurance set during Russia’s collapse into modernity. Omar Sharif gives one of his finest performances as Yuri Zhivago, a poet and physician who is forced to navigate the conflicting directives of loyalty, passion, and survival, while Julie Christie’s luminous turn as Lara elevates the film into mythic territory.

Lean’s filmmaking—full of painterly compositions, sweeping landscapes, and meticulous craftsmanship—creates a world that feels both intimate and vast. The film’s visual grandeur is matched by Maurice Jarre’s iconic score, whose themes have become synonymous with cinematic romance. Yet for all its beauty, Doctor Zhivago is fundamentally a story about how political upheaval reshapes the contours of private life, and how love endures even as the world fractures.

Screened across consecutive weekends at the Laemmle Royal, these Anniversary Classics invite audiences to rediscover the emotional, historical, and artistic power of these two landmark films. Whether exploring the shadows of American politics or the passions of a Russia in revolt, Nixon and Doctor Zhivago remind us why great cinema remains one of the profoundest tools we have for understanding both our past and our present.

An Evening of Hitchcock & Herrmann

October 28, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 2 Comments

North by Northwest screening with Oscar winner Paul Hirsch and author Steven C. Smith on November 5th at 7:00 PM at Laemmle’s Royal Theatre.

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present “An Evening of Hitchcock and Herrmann,” celebrating the collaboration of two of the most influential masters of cinema, director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, with a screening of one of their greatest triumphs, North by Northwest (1959). This special event coincides with the publication of Hitchcock & Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema by Steven C. Smith. Academy Award-winning film editor Paul Hirsch, a friend and close collaborator of Herrmann, who was an integral part of the last years of Herrmann’s life, joins us for an introductory discussion of the film on Wednesday, November 5th at 7:00 p.m. at the historic Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles.

North by Northwest, a spy thriller with elements of action, suspense, humor, and romance, is the perfect showcase for the talents of both Hitchcock and Herrmann. They first teamed up in 1955, and over the following decade turned out such seminal masterworks as Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho, thus cementing Hitchcock’s reputation as the “master of suspense” while proving Herrmann as the ideal musical partner for Hitchcock’s visual mastery.

The film’s plot hangs on the premise of mistaken identity. When a Manhattan advertising executive (Cary Grant) is chased across the country by a sinister spy ring mistakenly targeting him as a government agent, as well as by the police, who think him a murderer, he must think fast (and move even faster!) in order to elude his pursuers. With Oscar nominations for original screenplay (Ernest Lehman), film editing (George Tomasini), and color art/set decoration, not to mention additional superlative work by cinematographer Robert Burks (Rear Window, Vertigo, The Music Man), the movie is perhaps the ultimate source of pure entertainment in the entire Hitchcock canon.

Herrmann sets the film’s tone by placing his opening title music over a memorable abstract credit sequence designed by Saul Bass, which Herrmann described as a “kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango designed to kick off the exciting route which follows.” Along the way, Grant encounters nefarious villains (James Mason, Martin Landau); a mysterious, alluring blonde (Eva Marie Saint); and “helpful” government agents headed by Leo G. Carroll, with the action deftly underscored by Herrmann’s propulsive music.

A critical and commercial smash, North by Northwest has received rapturous reviews ever since its 1959 premiere. Penelope Houston of Sight and Sound called it a “gleefully mischievous chase thriller” while citing Hitchcock’s “unmatched ingenuity.” The Hollywood Reporter touted the tongue-in-cheek element amid the cloak-and-dagger, with apt praise for Grant and the “ice-covered volcano” played by Eva Marie Saint. The New York Times enthused, “a suspenseful and delightful Cook’s tour of the most photogenic spots in these United States all done in brisk, genuinely witty and sophisticated style.”

Renowned for its distinctive set pieces of a menacing crop duster and a memorable climax on Mt. Rushmore, North by Northwest has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. In 1995, it was inducted into the National Film Registry for “cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.”

Paul Hirsch won the Academy Award for film editing for Star Wars in 1977. During his distinguished career, spanning five decades and 40+ films, he has collaborated with Brian De Palma on eleven films including Sisters, Carrie, Blow Out and Mission: Impossible; John Hughes on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; and received a second Oscar nomination for the biopic Ray in 2005. His collaboration with Herrmann in the 70s helped to resurrect the maestro’s A-list career. He recently published his memoir, A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away.

Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated journalist and producer of more than 200 documentaries about music and cinema. In addition to Hitchcock and Herrmann, he is the author of the definitive biographies, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, and Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer.

“An Evening of Hitchcock and Herrmann” with a screening of North By Northwest plays one night only, Wednesday, November 5 at 7:00 p.m. at the historic Royal Theater (continuously operating as a movie theater since 1924). Discussion and Q&A with Paul Hirsch and Steven C. Smith will take place before the screening.

A book sale and signing will accompany the event.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN 40th Anniversary Screening July 30 at the Royal.

July 16, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 40th Anniversary screening of the delightful comedy ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ which teamed Rosanna Arquette and pop star Madonna in her first acting role. This was a feminist movie ahead of its time in many ways, with women holding most of the important positions behind the camera as well as on screen. The original screenplay was written by Leora Barish, and the film was directed by Susan Seidelman as her first mainstream movie after her low-budget hit ‘Smithereens’ had established her as a filmmaker to watch. The movie was produced by Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, two pioneering female producers who made their mark in an industry that was still male dominated. The screening is Wednesday, July 30, at 7:00 P.M. at Laemmle Royal Theatre. Producers Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, and executive producer Michael Peyser will be there for an in-person Q&A.

The story centers on Roberta (played by Arquette), a dissatisfied housewife in New Jersey who is fascinated by the personal ads in a New York tabloid and the character of Susan, who seems to be leading the adventurous life that Roberta only dreams about. Eventually she meets Susan and her bohemian entourage, and they swap roles, changing both of them through their unlikely friendship. Arquette was an up-and-coming young actress who starred the same year in Martin Scorsese’s ‘After Hours.’ Madonna had already made her mark as a pop icon with such giant hits as “Material Girl” from her second album, “Like a Virgin.” In her review of the film, Pauline Kael aptly called Madonna “an indolent, trampy goddess.”

The supporting cast included many rising actors, including Aidan Quinn, Robert Joy, Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, and Giancarlo Esposito. The movie scored at the box office, and reviews were strong. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby ranked it among the 10 best movies of the year. The New York Post called it “the most entertaining movie of the year.” Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Ellis declared “an attractive, energetic young cast and some witty, off-center visual humor make the resultant laughs more than worth the wait.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas called the movie “a lark, an exhilarating celebration of people who have the good sense to be in touch with themselves and with each other.”

Later, Rolling Stone ranked it as one of the 100 greatest movies of the 1980s. In 2023 it was selected to be included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, reserved for films of “historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance.” The costumes designed by Santo Loquasto also had an enduring impact. The jacket worn by Madonna in the movie fetched $252,000 at auction in 2014.

Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford also produced such memorable films as ‘River’s Edge,’ ‘How to Make an American Quilt,’ ‘Love Field,’ ‘Eight Men Out,’ ‘Immediate Family,’ and the landmark TV movie about the AIDS crisis, ‘And the Band Played On.’ They will be joined by the executive producer of ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ Michael Peyser, whose credits include ‘F/X,’ ‘Ruthless People,’ ‘Big Business,’ and ‘Matilda.’

CROUPIER 25th Anniversary Screening with Clive Owen in Person June 4 at the Royal.

May 27, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 25th anniversary screening of ‘Croupier,’ the sleeper hit that helped to save the specialized movie business during a dry period at the beginning of the 21st century. Mike Hodges, the director of the British crime thriller ‘Get Carter’ with Michael Caine, had his most acclaimed film since then when he directed ‘Croupier.’

Clive Owen, who had mainly appeared in British television dramas before this, rose to full-fledged movie stardom as a result of this movie. He plays an aspiring writer who takes a job at a casino where he juggles a few romantic relationships and also has to contend with a robbery threat. Alex Kingston, Gina McKee, Kate Hardie, and Nicholas Ball costar. The script was written by Paul Mayersberg, who also wrote Nicolas Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Eureka,’ as well as Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.’

The film opened in England in 1999 but made few waves at the box office. When it came to America in 2000, veteran marketing executive Mike Kaplan (who had worked frequently with Stanley Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, and Malcolm McDowell) devised a whole new marketing campaign that highlighted Owen’s resemblance to tough-guy Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark. The strategy worked, and the picture lit up art house screens for several months, eventually reaching mainstream theaters as well.

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden called the film “a breezy meditation on life as a game of chance,” and he added, “Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.” Newsweek’s David Ansen declared, “Coolly hypnotic, the lean British sleeper ‘Croupier‘ is a reminder that movies don’t have to wave their arms and scream to hold our attention.” Roger Ebert wrote that Owen has “the same sort of physical reserve as Sean Connery in the Bond pictures.”

Newsday’s Gene Seymour wrote, “Not since 1971 has British director Mike Hodges made a movie as deep, dark and compelling as this thriller.” British film journal Sight and Sound concurred that “Hodges is unfailingly professional in matching style to story.”

The movie’s success catapulted Owen to full-fledged stardom, and he went on to work with many of the world’s top directors and stars. He earned an Oscar nomination when he costarred with Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman in Mike Nichols’ ‘Closer.’ He costarred in Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ with Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster. Owen was part of the large ensemble cast in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning ‘Gosford Park.’ He had the leading role in Alfonso Cuaron’s futuristic thriller ‘Children of Men.’ He played Sir Walter Raleigh to Cate Blanchett’s Queen Elizabeth in ‘Elizabeth: The Golden Age,’ then re-teamed with Roberts in ‘Duplicity.’ He also starred with Juliette Binoche in Fred Schepisi’s ‘Words and Pictures.’

Owen scored on television as well, starring in Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed medical series ‘The Knick.’ He earned an Emmy nomination playing Ernest Hemingway in Philip Kaufman’s ‘Hemingway and Gelhorn,’ co-starring with Nicole Kidman. In Ryan Murphy’s TV miniseries ‘American Crime Story,’ Owen played President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair. And he recently played an older version of detective Sam Spade in ‘Monsieur Spade.’

Mike Kaplan will introduce the screening by reporting on its troubled but ultimately triumphant history. Owen will participate in a Q&A after the film.