Abroad Archives - blog.laemmle.com

Oscar-winner NOWHERE IN AFRICA 20th anniversary screenings September 20.

September 6, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 20th anniversary screenings of the Academy-Award winning film NOWHERE IN AFRICA as the next entry in the Anniversary Abroad Series of notable international films. (Following our September 13 screening of SOYLENT GREEN at the Royal with special guest Leigh Taylor-Young.) Coinciding with the High Holidays, NOWHERE IN AFRICA is about a German Jewish refugee family relocating to Kenya to escape the Nazis just before the outbreak of WWII, will play for one night only, September 20 at four Laemmle locations (Royal, Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall).

The Foreign Language Film (AKA International) Oscar winner in 2003, based on the autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, was adapted for the screen by writer-director Caroline Link, who had been previously nominated in the same category for her 1996 film Beyond Silence. The story concerns the Redlich family, Walter (Mirab Ninidze), his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler), and their daughter Regina (Lea Kurka as younger, Karoline Eckertz as older) who flee Nazi persecution in Germany in 1938. Walter leaves behind his law profession and becomes the manager of a British-owned farm in Kenya. While his nine-year-old daughter Regina takes to her new African life, his snobbish wife Jettel has difficulty with the family’s reduced status. They are attended by their Kenyan cook Owuor (beautifully played by Sidede Onyulo), who offers an African perspective to the tale. With the outbreak of WWII, the family is interned by the British along with all German citizens, an ironic twist since they had fled Germany to avoid such a fate in their homeland. The war and their plight put even more pressure on the strained relationship of Walter and Jettel, with Regina (now a teenager) caught in the middle.

Admiration from critics of the day included assessments from Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who said the film was, “laced with poignancy, conflict, urgency, and compassion.” Roger Ebert praised Link for her “interest in good stories and vivid, well-defined characters.” Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune cited it as “a lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.” Rita Kempley in the Washington Post called it a “consistently absorbing family saga that is primarily a safari of the soul.” Newsweek’s David Ansen noted, “an absorbing tale of cultural displacement. It’s also a remarkable, complex examination of a marriage…with its lush cinematography and lush score, (it) has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.” Some critics even called it perfect Oscar bait at the time, and the Academy members agreed, rewarding it with the Foreign Language Film Oscar.

30th Anniversary Screenings of Michelle Yeoh’s THE HEROIC TRIO August 9.

July 26, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Before she demonstrated dazzling fight skills in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning spectacle ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,’ and before she became the first Asian performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once,’ Michelle Yeoh demonstrated her action movie skills and commanding presence in THE HEROIC TRIO in 1993. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 30th anniversary screenings of that martial arts extravaganza to remind moviegoers of Yeoh’s stellar history. Screening at the Laemmle Claremont, Newhall, Glendale and Royal.

The actress had been working in Hong Kong cinema for a decade when she co-starred with Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung in this entertaining action film. Yeoh plays Invisible Woman, Mui portrays Wonder Woman, and Cheung depicts Thief Catcher, three women who band together to foil a kidnapping plot devised by the Evil Master (portrayed by Shi-Kwan Yen). Damian Lau co-stars as the police inspector who heads up the official investigation. The picture is directed by Hong Kong cinema veteran Johnnie To.

Variety praised the film as a “flashy kung fu super-heroine adventure full of solid production values.” Tony Rayns, an expert in Asian cinema, wrote for England’s Sight and Sound, “Its design and mise en scene are expansive and occasionally exhilarating.” The San Francisco Examiner called the movie “a ” And the Austin Chronicle added, “’THE HEROIC TRIO is a live-action comic book and captures the quirky spirit and shrewd logic of the medium better than both ‘Batmans’ put together.”

The movie was successful enough to inspire a sequel later that same year, and Yeoh went on to demonstrate her talents in a rich variety of movies, culminating in her Oscar win this past March. Enjoy an early glimpse of her talents in this rarely revived action spectacle made 30 years ago.

Bergman, Deneuve, Buñuel, Fellini, Eustache and more: The Anniversary Classics Abroad series returns with THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE.

June 28, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

We’re re-launching our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series, screening superb foreign films once or twice a month at our West L.A., Glendale, Claremont and Newhall theaters.

First up, The Mother and the Whore, newly restored. After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

“Three and a half hours long, The Mother and the Whore is both epic and intimate, ethnographic in its cultural detail and subjective in its exposure of the raw nerves of body and psyche.” ~ Amy Taubin, Village Voice

“A classic that remains as burningly alive and shocking today as it was in 1973.” ~ Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

“The Mother and the Whore made an enormous impact when it was released. It still works a quarter-century later because it was so focused on its subjects, and lacking in pretension.” ~ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The full schedule:

July 19 ~ The Mother and the Whore
August 9 ~ The Heroic Trio
August 30 ~ Belle De Jour
September 20 ~ Nowhere in Africa
October 11 ~ Ugetsu
November 1 ~ 8 1/2
November 21 ~ Babette’s Feast
December 13 ~ Fanny & Alexander

Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA 55th Anniversary screenings December 13 at Laemmle Glendale, Newhall & Royal

October 26, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present the 55th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1967) on December 13 at three Laemmle locations. The intense, provocative psychological drama was one of the keystone films of the late-period golden age of the art-house in the 1960s and energized the “Film Generation” that came of age in that seminal decade.

The story concerns an actress (Bergman newcomer Liv Ullmann) who stops speaking in the middle of a performance and refuses to communicate. She is placed in the care of a nurse (Bergman regular Bibi Andersson) and they retreat to the isolation of a beach house for her recovery. As their relationship progresses, it takes fascinating twists and turns. Some have compared their relationship to that of a psychiatrist and patient, with Ullmann paradoxically playing the role of the psychoanalyst whose silence prods the nurse into revealing some of her innermost secrets and deep-seated anxieties. Andersson’s confessions include one vivid memory of an uninhibited sexual encounter that critic Pauline Kael described as “one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history.”

Swedish auteur and all-time film titan Bergman was one of the directors at the center of the international film explosion that captivated moviegoers during that era. College students and engaged moviegoers debated long into the night, trying to decipher all the mysteries of this utterly compelling but sometimes puzzling film, not unlike the reaction to Alain Resnais’ enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad earlier in the decade. Andrew Sarris, the influential film critic of The Village Voice, noted that the film “seems to bewitch audiences even when it bewilders them.” Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune cited it as “one of the screen’s supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman’s finest film.” Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it “sensually brilliant, an endlessly questioning and mysterious disquisition on identity. Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.”

Persona plays one night only, Tuesday, December 13 at 7:00 PM at three Laemmle locations: the Royal (West Los Angeles), Glendale, and Newhall (Santa Clarita).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu_Jvil6ToY

Persona | Trailer | Laemmle [Theatres] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu_Jvil6ToY)

Luis Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL 60th Anniversary Screenings October 12 at Three Laemmle Locations

September 28, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Continuing the 60th anniversary celebration of the milestone film year 1962, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present Luis Buñuel’s scathing surreal satire, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. The film plays one night only, Wednesday, October 12 at 7:00 PM at three Laemmle locations: The Royal in West Los Angeles, the Laemmle Glendale, and the Laemmle Newhall in Santa Clarita.

Buñuel, a Spanish-born iconoclast and provocateur, spent most of his career working outside his native country. In 1962, at the age of 62, Bunuel was enjoying international acclaim after being coaxed out of Mexican exile the year before to make ‘Viridiana,’ which was suffused with his characteristic caustic wit and anti-religious sentiment. The film’s notoriety revived his career and placed him at the center of international film culture for the remainder of his career. THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, made in Mexico, further cemented his credentials as a mordant satirist. The story, written by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, deals with a lavish dinner party at the home of wealthy opera patrons in which the upper-class guests find themselves unable to leave after the meal. After a few days a rescue party is organized but the would-be rescuers cannot enter the house, and chaos ensues. During the ordeal the guests find their veneer of civilization slowly stripped away.

Critics were struck by Buñuel’s unrepentant approach to skewering the ruling elites.Andrew Sarris, the esteemed film critic of The Village Voice, called Buñuel “The last of the classic surrealists of the screen,” and was impressed with his “stylistic serenity. Where he was once merely profane, he is now eminently profound.” Leonard Maltin called it a “wry assault on bourgeois manners,” while Roger Ebert more exuberantly cited it as “a macabre comedy, a mordant view of human nature that suggests we harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets.” Although a curmudgeonly Bosley Crowther of the New York Times gave it an unfavorable review upon its delayed U.S. release in 1967 after years of legal issues over distribution rights, the film’s stature and influence were fully recognized by its inclusion in The New York Times publication, “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made” in 2004.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and was selected as the opening night entry of the first New York Film Festival the following year. Buñuel was propelled into the most successful phase of his long career, and he followed it with a number of memorable films, ‘Belle de Jour’ (1967), ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ (1972), and his final film, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ (1977) among them. Later, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL’s influence extended beyond the screen—in 2016 it was adapted as an opera of the same name by composer Thomas Ades.

Akira Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD 65th Anniversary Screenings September 21.

September 14, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present this month’s installment in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Akira Kurosawa’s unique Shakespearean adaptation, Throne of Blood. The Japanese auteur was always an admirer of the Bard. His late film Ran offered a variation on King Lear. The power, majesty and craftsmanship of a film like Throne of Blood can only fully appreciated in a theatrical setting: with an audience, with a big screen, and sound you can feel. We’ll be showing a DCP.

For many years Kurosawa dreamed of adapting Macbeth, and he put the film together in 1957, with his favorite actor Toshiro Mifune starring as the ambitious, murderous leader. Isuzu Yamada co-stars as the Lady Macbeth character, with Takashi Shimura as the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Macduff. Kurosawa wrote the screenplay with Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Ryuzo Kikushima. They transposed the story from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan and Kurosawa came up with striking visual concepts to revitalize the classic story. The castle exteriors were filmed on the slopes of Mount Fuji and the memorable climax—with a massive array of arrows aimed at the deranged protagonist—remains one of the greatest images in any Kurosawa movie.

Writing of this climactic scene, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane declared,“No stage production could match Kurosawa’s Birnam Wood, and, in his final framing of the hero — a human hedgehog, stuck with arrows — he conjures a tragedy not laden with grandeur but pierced, like a dream, by the absurd.” British critic Derek Malcolm of the Guardian acclaimed Throne of Blood as “a landmark of visual strength… possibly the finest Shakespearean adaptation ever committed to the screen.”

On its original American release, Time magazine praised the film as “a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition.” In his four-star review, Leonard Maltin called the film a “graphic, powerful adaptation of Macbeth in a samurai setting.” It was not simply film critics who endorsed the film. Renowned literary critic Harold Bloom said that Throne of Blood was “the most successful film version of Macbeth.”

Laemmle Theatres will screen Throne of Blood on September 21 at our Glendale, Newhall and Royal theaters on Wednesday, September 21 at 7 o’clock.

DELICATESSEN 30th Anniversary screenings at three Laemmle locations August 31.

August 24, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest installment of the popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series, the 30th anniversary of the U.S. release of the international cult classic, DELICATESSEN. The surrealist black comedy about the inhabitants of a post-Apocalypse French city was the collaboration of tyro feature filmmakers Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who co-directed and co-wrote, with a writing assist by Gilles Adrien.

The story centers on three characters, the owner of an apartment building with a ground floor delicatessen (Jean-Claude Dreyfus); his daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac); and a former clown hired to be the dilapidated building’s maintenance man (Dominique Pinon). They inhabit a world in which food is scarce and lentils are used as currency. The landlord/butcher lures job seekers, murders them, and then prepares “delicacies” to sell to his odd tenants. His daughter falls in love with the latest victim and tries to foil her father’s scheme with the aid of the “lentil-men,” underground rebels.

The film’s hybrid mix of genres had critics and audiences somewhat bewildered and equally delighted amidst generally favorable reviews. Critic Emmanuel Levy provided appropriate praise: “Part macabre humor, part romantic drama, part childlike fable, this ingeniously original French farce defies categorization, but is successful on all these levels.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times cited its “fun-house atmosphere,” calling it “weirdly hilarious” and “lightweight but a sometimes subversively stylish farce.” Stephen Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer found it “indescribably wild,” and Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles Times noted “the whole movie has been conceived in grandiose, garishly witty comic book images,” along with the advisory, “out-shocks and outplays the American horror comedies at their own game…a nasty, childlike, murderously funny show.”

Jeunet handled directing the actors, while Caro was responsible for design and effects, and the two would tap into their fervid imaginations again for THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, another provocative fantasy, in 1995. Their talents were recognized by Hollywood when they were hired as the director (Jeunet) and design supervisor (Caro) for ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997. Jeunet went onto international acclaim for the more conventional romantic comedy AMELIE (2001), nominated for five Academy Awards, including best foreign language film and a screenplay nod for Jeunet. But all this success started with DELICATESSEN, which will be presented for one night only Wednesday, August 31 at 7:00 pm at three Laemmle locations: Glendale, Newhall, and the Royal in West Los Angeles.

“A rambunctious mixture of the bawdy and the sublime,” TAMPOPO 35th Anniversary Screenings Wednesday, July 6, at Laemmle Glendale, Newhall & Royal.

June 22, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 35th anniversary screenings of writer-director Juzo Itami’s delectable comedy, Tampopo, which has developed a strong cult following in the years since it first captivated audiences. The basic story is simple enough. A truck driver and his friends come to the aid of a noodle shop owner’s widow and help her to refine and perfect her ramen dishes. But several quirky subplots and other tasty asides interrupt and enrich the central narrative.

As in other classic movies about food, the noodle dishes themselves are lovingly photographed to whet the audience’s appetites. Beyond that, puckish humor and eroticism add flavor to this savory melange. As Hal Hinson declared in the Washington Post, Tampopo is “a rambunctious mixture of the bawdy and the sublime…perhaps the funniest movie about the connection between food and sex ever made.”

Indiewire’s David Ehrlich added, “Itami’s fiercely beloved film unfolds like a prix fixe tasting menu of strange comic delights.” Writing in Film Comment, Michael Sragow said, “Tampopo creates a culinary empire of the senses while entertaining an audience like crazy.” And the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang wrote, “Tampopo is above all about the romance of food, and the joyous, agonizing devotion and hard work required to tease out its manifold mysteries.”

Tsutomo Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, and Ken Watanabe star. The movie will screen on July 6 at the Royal in West L.A., Glendale, and Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtXSon0yMw

Tampopo Official Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtXSon0yMw)