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Jacques Tati’s MON ONCLE 60th Anniversary Screenings October 17 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest installment in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program, 60th anniversary screenings of the Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film of 1958, Jacques Tati’s MON ONCLE.

Tati made only six feature films over the course of his career (including Jour de Fete, Playtime, and Traffic), and this comedy—his first film in color—is considered one of the highlights.

Tati had introduced the character of Mr. Hulot in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, his highly praised film from 1953. He once again plays the character of Hulot in this more ambitious satire of modern technology and its dehumanizing effect on family life. Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie play a married couple in thrall to a sterile, workaday world. Alain Becourt plays their young son who finds liberation with his playful uncle.

As in many of Tati’s films, Mon Oncle pays homage to the masters of silent comedy. There is very little dialogue in the film; instead the humor is visual, where the slightly futuristic settings are as important as the human characters. The ingenious sets were designed by Jacques Lagrange at the Victorine Studios outside Nice.

Variety wrote, “Jacques Tati’s film has inventiveness, gags, warmth and a ‘poetic’ approach to satire.” Leonard Maltin declared, “Tati’s first color film is a masterpiece… Continuous flow of sight gags (including the funniest fountain you’ll ever see) makes this easygoing, nearly dialogue-less comedy a total delight.”

The film has also had an enduring impact on many other directors. At the AFI Festival in 2010, David Lynch presented a screening of Mon Oncle and announced that it was one of the films that had the greatest influence on him.

MON ONCLE screens Wednesday, October 17, at 7pm at the Royal, Town Center, and Playhouse. Click here for tickets.

35th Anniversary Screenings of THE MAKIOKA SISTERS on Wednesday, August 22 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest offering in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program, Kon Ichikawa’s poignant family drama, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS.

One of the great Japanese masters, Ichikawa is perhaps less widely celebrated than his countrymen Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. He began directing features in the 1940s, and his films The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, Tokyo Olympiad, and others found passionate critical defenders.

One of his later films, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS, is adapted from a popular Japanese novel by Junichiro Tanizaki and follows the fortunes of four sisters from a wealthy family in Osaka. Set in the 1930s on the eve of World War II, the film stars Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, and Yuko Kotegawa as the orphaned sisters, heirs in a wealthy manufacturing family. Their marriages and romantic relationships are a source of tension and jealousy.

The sumptuous art direction and costume design help to create the lush atmosphere of the film. Reviewing the film at the time of its American release, the Los Angeles Times’s Kevin Thomas called it “exquisitely, subtly sensual.”

John Powers of the L.A. Weekly agreed that “this is an uncommonly vibrant and beautiful film.”

And the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it “the most pleasurable movie I’ve seen in several months…the rich colors, the darkness, the low-key lighting—they’re intoxicating.”

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS (1983) screens on Wednesday, August 22, at 7pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 20th Anniversary Screenings on Wednesday, July 18 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest offering in our Anniversary Classics Abroad series: 20th anniversary screenings of the Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film of 1998, Roberto Benigni’s LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.

The film was nominated for seven Oscars in all, including Best Picture of the year, an unusually strong showing for a foreign language film. It also won an Oscar for Benigni as Best Actor, the first time in the Academy’s 70-year history that a male actor had won the top prize for a foreign language performance.

Nicola Piovani also won for his lyrical musical score. In addition to its awards, the film scored an enormous success at the box office. It became the highest grossing foreign language film at the U.S. box office up to that point, and its success reverberated all over the world. With well over $200 million earned worldwide, it remains one of the most financially successful of all foreign language titles.

Benigni was primarily known as a comic actor and filmmaker when he decided to shift gears and tackle the dark realities of the Holocaust in this daring tragicomic fable. The first half of the film plays as a romantic comedy, with Benigni cast as a Jewish Italian bookshop owner who is determined to woo a spirited teacher (played by Benigni’s real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi) despite formidable obstacles. After they marry and have a young son, the tragic realities of the Second World War intrude on their lives, as they are all sent to a Nazi concentration camp. In a desperate desire to save his son, Benigni’s Guido devises an elaborate game to keep the boy distracted from the horrors around him.

Benigni, who directed and wrote the screenplay with Vincenzo Cerami, said that he was inspired by the memoirs of a Jewish Auschwitz survivor named Rubino Romeo Salmoni, whose book, In the End, I Beat Hitler, told how a sense of dark humor helped him to transcend his enslavement. The cast of the film also includes Giorgio Cantarini as the couple’s young son, Giustino Durano as Guido’s beloved uncle, and veteran German actor Horst Buchholz as a German doctor who befriends Guido and his son in the camp.

Although there were a few critics who were discomfited by the film’s whimsical approach to a historical tragedy, most endorsed the film enthusiastically. The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan called the film “sad, funny and haunting.” Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “its sentiment is inescapable, but genuine poignancy and pathos are also present, and an overarching sincerity is visible too.” Leonard Maltin hailed “a unique and beguiling fable that celebrates the human spirit.”

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL screens Wednesday, July 18, at 7pm at the Royal Theatre, Town Center, and Playhouse. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray

Milos Forman’s THE FIREMEN’S BALL Screens Tuesday, June 26 in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A.! Q&A with Co-Screenwriter Ivan Passer at the Royal.

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In conjunction with an American Cinematheque tribute to the late Oscar-winning director Milos Forman, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of Forman’s final Czech film, THE FIREMEN’S BALL. The picture, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1968, is part of our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series. THE FIREMEN’S BALL co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.

Forman was part the Czech New Wave, a group of talented filmmakers (also including Jan Kadar, Jiri Menzel, and Ivan Passer) who emerged during the 1960s. Forman’s 1966 film, Love of a Blonde, was also an Oscar nominee and put him on the map as a director to watch. His wry sensibility received even fuller expression in The Firemen’s Ball, a dark but raucous satire of the chaos that ensues when a group of local firemen try to mount a celebration for their retiring chief. Forman got the idea for the film when he was in a small Bohemian village working on another script, and he happened to attend a real firemen’s ball. The script was co-written by Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jaroslav Papousek. The cast consisted mainly of nonprofessional actors, including Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, and Vaclav Stockel.

The film, which was widely interpreted as a sly critique of the Eastern European Communist system, was made during a brief period of artistic freedom that came to be known as the Prague Spring. But when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, The Firemen’s Ball was banned, and Forman and other leading Czech directors fled the country. As TV Guide later wrote of the film, “This ingratiating farce is perhaps the last noteworthy film of the Czech renaissance before the political crackdown forced most filmmakers into exile.” After arriving in America, Forman went on to achieve many Hollywood successes, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Amadeus.

Among the stellar reviews for THE FIREMEN’S BALL, Time magazine acclaimed “a delicious parody-fable of Slavic bureaucracy,” and Variety paid tribute to “a lively, brimming comedy on human conduct and small-town life.” In his four-star review, Roger Ebert added, “This is a very warm, funny movie.”

This Just In: Co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the June 26 screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.

Milos Forman’s THE FIREMEN’S BALL (1968) screens Tuesday, June 26, at 7:00pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.

Ingmar Bergman’s AUTUMN SONATA on Tuesday, May 15 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad series presents the 40th anniversary of AUTUMN SONATA (1978), as part of the centennial retrospective of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish auteur who has entered the cinematic pantheon. Autumn Sonata represents the last theatrical film for Bergman, whose subsequent work was made for television, and then re-tailored for theatrical release.

For the occasion, Bergman enticed his namesake, legendary actress Ingrid Bergman, to return to her native language and star as a self-centered concert pianist who had favored her career over her children. In the drama of “fraught interpersonal relationships,” (a trademark of the director, as recently noted by Kenneth Turan), Ingrid Bergman’s character of Charlotte is invited by her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann) to visit her and her parson husband in their country home. When Eva also brings her handicapped sister, Helena (Lena Nyman) into the reunion, the past erupts on the present with repressed familial furor.

Bergman’s memorable movies of the 1950s and 1960s had been photographed in luminous black and white. In the 1970s he was working in color, and, as noted by Leonard Maltin, the cinematography by long-time Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist is “peerless,” giving the film visual warmth and intensity.

As to the only collaboration of the two Bergmans, Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said, “Bergman’s casting coup lives up to expectations. Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann invest their roles with undeniable emotional impact.” It was also Ingrid Bergman’s last film role. The three-time Academy Award winner (Gaslight, Anastasia, Murder on the Orient Express) delivers a searing performance that brought her a best actress nomination in 1978, her seventh and final nod overall. Ingmar Bergman’s original screenplay was also nominated, one of his nine career total as writer, producer, and director. Additionally, the movie was named best foreign film by the Hollywood Foreign Press that year.

Autumn Sonata is a story of intense mother-daughter relations, and as part of the Anniversary Abroad series will play two days after Mother’s Day on Tuesday, May 15 at 7:00 PM at three Laemmle locations: Royal, West Los Angeles; Town Center, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena. Format: DCP. Click here for tickets.

Part of the city-wide, two month retrospective, “Ingmar Berman’s Cinema,” at various locations.

For the Anniversary Classics Abroad next attraction, we present another master filmmaker enjoying a retrospective, Milos Forman, with a 50th anniversary screening June 20 of his 1968 Academy Award nominee, The Fireman’s Ball.

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS 50th Anniversary Screening on Wednesday, April 18 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program, a 50th anniversary screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s memorable and still timely political drama, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.

The film was an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film of 1966, but it was not released in the United States until 1968, when it received additional nominations for best director and for best original screenplay by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas. The film was considered so inflammatory that it was not shown in France until 1971.

The picture, filmed in black-and-white to approximate the look of a newsreel, dramatizes Algeria’s war of independence against France. It focuses on the years from 1954 to 1957, when the National Liberation Front began to organize in the Casbah of Algiers to carry out terrorist attacks on civilians as well as the French army. This led to a fierce and brutal counter-insurgency by the French, which meant the battles dragged on for years.

To insure authenticity, Pontecorvo cast the film mainly with non-professional actors recruited in Algeria. The film’s one professional actor, Jean Martin, gave a vivid performance as the complex, intelligent French officer who understands the grievances of the Algerians even as he fights ruthlessly to defeat them. The film’s urgency was heightened by the score of Ennio Morricone.

The film’s influence extended well beyond the cinema. It became a sort of handbook of revolutionary techniques that was studied by many radical groups over the years. Yet in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon also screened the movie in order to better understand the civil war unleashed in that country.

Many prominent filmmakers–including Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone–all testified to influence of Pontecorvo’s movie on their own work. Critic David Elliott of the San Diego Union Tribune called The Battle of Algiers “perhaps the finest political film of the 1960s.” The LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor agreed that it was “a classic of politically engaged filmmaking.”

Our 50th anniversary screening of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1968) screens Wednesday, April 18 at 7pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP

55th Anniversary Screening of TOM JONES March 21st in Pasadena, Encino, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program: a 55th anniversary presentation of the Oscar-winning film of 1963, TOM JONES.

Tony Richardson’s spirited comic romp was the first all-British production to be named best picture by the Academy since Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948. The film won three other Oscars—best director for Richardson, best adapted screenplay by award-winning British playwright John Osborne, and best musical score by a gifted new composer, John Addison. The film received six other nominations, including a record-tying five acting nods—Albert Finney for best actor, Hugh Griffith for best supporting actor (he had won in this category four years earlier, for Ben-Hur), and an unprecedented three nominations in the supporting actress category—for Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman.

Up to this point, Richardson was best known for hard-hitting social protest dramas filmed in black and white—Look Back in Anger (based on Osborne’s hit play), A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. For his new film, adapted from Henry Fielding’s 18th century novel, Richardson made his first period piece, his first comedy, and his first film in color, with superb lensing by Walter Lassally. The director took a playful approach to the material, experimenting with a variety of film techniques, including a silent film opening, and a number of moments when characters broke the fourth wall to address the camera. Yet Richardson and Osborne retained the essence of Fielding’s picaresque tale of a young orphan adopted by a rich nobleman but then thrown into jeopardy by scheming enemies.

The film is remembered for several striking set pieces, including a savage hunt sequence and an erotic eating scene that commingled lust and gluttony. The outstanding cast also includes Susannah York, David Warner, Joan Greenwood, and Peter Bull.

In addition to its Oscar win, the film was named best picture of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called Tom Jones “surely one of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen.”

Time magazine also extolled “a way-out, walleyed, wonderful exercise in cinema” but added that the film was not completely different from Richardson’s gritty earlier films. As the magazine noted, “It is also a social satire written in blood with a broadaxe.” Audiences turned the innovative film into a box office smash.

TOM JONES screens at 7:00pm on Wednesday, March 21st in Pasadena, Encino, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP

Almodovar’s WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN February 21st in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series continue our Anniversary Classics Abroad program with Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar’s international breakthrough film, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. This delightful farce was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988, and was named best foreign film that year by both the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Carmen Maura, who has been a frequent Almodovar collaborator and is Spain’s most honored contemporary actress, stars as a soap opera actress sent into a spiral of comic misfortune when her longtime lover dumps her.

Almodovar had been delving into the liberating sexual politics of post-Franco Spain from his debut in 1980 in a series of scandalous black comedies (Matador, Law of Desire, What Have I Done to Deserve This?). He employs a lighter touch with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the film’s commercial success launched his most productive years on the international stage, culminating with his Oscar winners All About My Mother and Talk to Her.

Critics of the day welcomed Almodovar’s delirious comedy of manners. The Washington Post noted, “In this glossy delight, it’s as if Doris Day had been brought forward in time and confronted with the consequences of living in sin.”

The New York Times’ Vincent Canby pointed out “Mr. Almodovar sets out to charm rather than shock. That he succeeds should not come as a surprise. The common denominator of all Almodovar films, even one that winds up in an ecstatic murder-suicide pact, is their great good humor.”

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, features Antonio Banderas in one of his early roles. Also starring Julietta Serrano, Maria Barranco, Rossy De Palma, and Fernando Guillen.

The 30th anniversary presentation screens on Wednesday, February 21 at 7PM at three Laemmle locations: Royal, Town Center 5, and Pasadena Playhouse 7.

Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP