Awards Archives – Laemmle Theatres

From ‘Cutting Through Rocks’ to ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’: Two Oscar-Nominated Portraits of Courage and Willpower

February 24, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Two of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature could hardly be more different in setting or scale—one unfolding in a remote Iranian village, the other in the intimate spaces of a Colorado home—yet both pulse with urgency, personality, and the stubborn insistence on living fully.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear directors Mohammadreza Eyni, Sara Khaki, and Ryan White discuss their latest films with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch them in person when Cutting Through Rocks returns to the Laemmle Royal on February 26th, kicked off by a live Q&A with Eyni after the 7 p.m. showing, followed by Come See Me in the Good Light on February 28th, beginning with a pair of Q&As featuring Ryan White following the Saturday night and Sunday matinee showings at the Laemmle Noho.

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks introduces us to Sara Shahverdi, a headscarf-clad former midwife in northwest Iran who opens the film wrestling a metal door back into place with a buzzsaw. It’s an image that doubles as a thesis, as Shahverdi has spent her life defying expectations: riding motorcycles, working construction, advocating for girls’ education, and pushing back against child marriage in a deeply conservative region. When she runs for village council, hoping to become its first elected councilwoman, the film embeds with her over several years, capturing both the grassroots thrill of her campaign and the backlash that follows.

Shahverdi is no abstract symbol; she’s charismatic, funny, impatient, and strategic. She rallies women in living rooms, challenges men in council chambers, and leverages her past as a midwife into political capital. The result is a rousing, clear-eyed portrait of incremental revolution, proving Shahverdi’s own personal mantra that, sometimes, one small step can make all the difference in the world.

If Cutting Through Rocks is about carving space within rigid systems, Come See Me in the Good Light turns inward, illuminating the interior landscape of love and mortality. Directed by Ryan White, the film follows celebrated spoken word poet Andrea Gibson and their longtime partner writer Megan Falley after Gibson is diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer. Yet what might sound like familiar “cancer documentary” terrain quickly becomes something far more singular: funny, profane, luminous, and fiercely alive.

Gibson, once a touring poet who commanded stages like a rock star, meets their illness not with platitudes but with radical candor. The film moves between chemotherapy appointments and kitchen-table laughter, between whispered fears and bawdy jokes. The lovers measure life in three-week increments between blood tests, yet refuse to surrender their intrinsic biases toward joy. White interweaves archival performance footage with scenes of present-day intimacy, building toward a final public reading that lands with the emotional force of a championship game.

Taken together, these two nominees remind us not only of the documentary genre’s extraordinary range, but of the commonalities that unite us from across the world. Catch these Oscar-nominated documentaries back on the big screen at Laemmle Theatres and see for yourself why they’re among the year’s most celebrated nonfiction films.

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Every year, the Oscar-nominated short films deliver some of the boldest storytelling, the biggest emotional swings, and the most inventive filmmaking anywhere on the ballot. They’re compact, adventurous, and often unforgettable — and seeing them before the ceremony doesn’t just make you a more informed viewer; it gives you a real edge in our ongoing Oscar contest. If you want a competitive advantage (and bragging rights), the shorts are your secret weapon.

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter — “Retirement Plan”

Come see the 2026 slate of Oscar-nominated shorts beginning February 20th at various Laemmle locations.

This year’s nominees across the Animated, Live Action, and Documentary categories once again prove that small runtimes can deliver enormous impacts. After all, we love short things: short stories, short ribs, short naps, short lines at the concession stand — and yes, short films.

Animated Short Film Nominees

This year’s entries for animation range from historical to mythic to darkly funny:

Butterfly (France) paints the life of Olympic swimmer Alfred Nakache—from glory to Auschwitz and back again—as a flowing stream of memory.
Forevergreen (USA) delivers an eco-fable about an orphaned bear cub and its arboreal protector.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Canada) offers a haunting, handcrafted tale of love, sorrow, and avarice.
Retirement Plan (Ireland) brings wry humor to a man’s elaborate fantasies about his golden years.
The Three Sisters (Israel/Cyprus) unfolds wordlessly, following siblings surviving in isolation.

Live Action Short Film Nominees

The live-action lineup is especially wide-ranging this year as satire, dystopia, tenderness, and social tension all share the same stage:

Butcher’s Stain (Israel) centers on an Arab-Israeli supermarket worker accused of tearing down hostage posters at his workplace.
Jane Austen’s Period Drama (USA) is an Austen-inspired satire about a woman whose sudden menstruation interrupts her much-anticipated marriage proposal.
Two People Exchanging Saliva (France/USA) imagines a future where kissing is punishable by death.
A Friend of Dorothy (UK) follows a lonely widow whose routine is broken by an unexpected connection.
The Singers (USA) builds drama around an unlikely sing-off, inspired by Turgenev’s lauded short story.

Documentary Short Film Nominees

The documentary shorts continue to be a testing ground for urgent, personal, and formally daring nonfiction:

All the Empty Rooms depicts the profound grief of school shootings via the untouched bedrooms of its victims.
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud honors the life, career, and death of an American journalist killed in Ukraine.
Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” follows Israeli peace activists holding silent vigils in Tel Aviv for slain Gazan children.
The Devil Is Busy chronicles the day-to-day operations of a reproductive health clinic post-Roe v. Wade.
Perfectly a Strangeness follows three donkeys exploring an abandoned observatory.

Previous short-film winners have gone on to become cultural touchstones and launch major careers, and they frequently preview themes and talents that shape the future of feature filmmaking. Watching them now isn’t just homework — it’s discovery.

Fathers, Sons, and a Broken Election: Inside ‘My Father’s Shadow’

February 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first-ever Nigerian film to be recognized among the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, plays like a remembered daydream stretched across a political fault line. Set during Nigeria’s fraught 1993 presidential election crisis, the film filters national upheaval through the perspective of two young brothers who’ve been granted a rare day with their mostly absent father. The result is both a coming-of-age story and an act of cinematic reclamation: personal memory reframed as national history.

Catch My Father’s Shadow in theaters beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Akin and his older brother Remi (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), the film begins in a rural village where routine boredom is broken by the sudden return of the boys’ father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). Charismatic, imposing, and emotionally opaque, he arrives without explanation and impulsively decides to take the boys with him to Lagos. Their mother is absent; the boys readily obey.

Folarin’s mission is simple: collect months of unpaid wages before the country’s political uncertainty curdles into chaos. But the errand swiftly becomes a wandering circuit. The boys encounter men who treat Folarin with peculiar deference, calling him “boss” and “leader.” They are told to show respect to strangers presented as quasi-uncles. Davies smartly keeps exposition thin; political crisis is not explained, but is overheard, glimpsed, felt.

What gives the film its emotional core is the gradual reshaping of the boys’ image of their father. Folarin begins as a near-mythic figure: commanding, sharply dressed, unquestionable. Over the course of the day, however, he becomes both more human and more contradictory. He is strict, evasive, possibly unfaithful, and frequently distracted, yet he is also attentive in bursts, showing them city landmarks, recounting his courtship of their mother, teaching Akin to swim, and bending rules to let them explore forbidden spaces. His philosophy of adulthood—that everything is sacrifice, and one must pray not to sacrifice the wrong thing—lands with tragic force in the context of both family and nation.

The film’s governing question emerges when one of the boys repeats his mother’s strange dictum: that their father’s absence is proof of love, because he is away earning money for them, just as God, who also loves them, remains unseen. Is absence love? The film does not provide an easy answer, but lets the question echo against images of political upheaval, paternal limitation, and inherited memory.

By its end, My Father’s Shadow has outgrown its original container as a story about one family on one day into an ambitious exploration about how children assemble identity from partial knowledge, how nations fracture private lives, and how cinema can serve as an instrument of emotional archaeology. It turns political rupture into family myth—and family myth into something like scripture.

“British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Akinola Davies Jr. announces himself as a major cinematic voice.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

“The historic crisis [of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election] makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Moviegoers, Start Your Guesses! The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest Is Back!

January 27, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 2 Comments

The Oscar nominations are out, the debates are raging, and once again it’s time to test your instincts against those of the Academy. Welcome to the Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest, our favorite annual exercise in hope, hubris, and lovingly overthought predictions.

Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another — One Battle After Another

If last year proved anything, it’s that certainty can be a dangerous commodity. After all, a whopping 66.1% of Laemmle patrons were convinced Demi Moore would win Best Actress for The Substance, while only 10.7% correctly predicted Mikey Madison’s longshot victory for Anora. Consensus, as it turns out, is no guarantee of clairvoyance.

The same pattern emerged across the technical and animated races. In Best Film Editing, 35.6% of Laemmle patrons expected Conclave (edited by Nick Emerson) to prevail, compared with only 20.1% backing Anora and Sean Baker. Meanwhile, nearly half of patrons (49.3%) anticipated The Wild Robot would take Best Animated Feature, outpacing Flow, which drew 32.5% of the vote. In each case, confidence ran high—and accuracy proved elusive.

This year’s lineup looks just as volatile. Several major categories feel genuinely up for grabs, with no outcome that can be declared “locked” without inviting embarrassment. Best Picture, in particular, seems poised to divide even the most seasoned Oscar-watchers. That’s where you come in.

If you, dear cinephile, can accurately predict how the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will vote across all 23 categories (or come impressively close), you’ll win movie passes good at all Laemmle locations(!!) along with the quiet satisfaction of having outguessed the crowd. As always, the contest includes a tie-breaker: your best estimate of the ceremony’s total running time.

Moviegoers, Start Your Guesses! The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest Is Back! — Sinners

The 98th Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 15, and we’ll announce the winners shortly afterward, complete with our signature snazzy charts and statistical deep-dives.

Want a real edge over the competition? Don’t overlook the short film categories. The animated, live-action, and documentary shorts are often where the widest gaps in knowledge—and therefore opportunity—exist. Seeing these nominees can dramatically improve your odds, and we’ll begin screening all three categories starting February 20th.

Good luck. Argue passionately. Second-guess everything. And remember: the Oscars rarely reward certainty, but they always reward participation.

Happy guessing!

– Your fellow cinephiles at Laemmle Theatres

Greg Laemmle’s Top Ten Movies of 2025

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

I’m still trying to make sense of 2025. The year in general, and the year in film. After the pandemic shut down and the Hollywood strikes, the mantra for many in the exhibition business was to, “survive to ’25,” with the feeling that this was the year we would get past the hangover of those twin impacts. But sadly, the year ended up being marked by a number of Hollywood films that provided more hype than actual entertainment. On top of that, a number of indie and art films – in my opinion – suffered from filmmaker overreach. I’m hoping that in 2026, producers (and editors) will feel empowered to rein in some of this, so that audiences can get more films that are both enjoyable and illuminating.

As for overall trends, the North American box office is going to come in just shy of $9 billion. It would have been nice to cross that number, but we did get close, and we did have a slight increase over 2024. Numbers are still down about 20% (plus or minus) on pre-pandemic levels, but showing some strength. People still want to see movies in movie theatres. There just needs to be a more consistent supply of diverse genres to engage different audiences. Maybe we can get there in 2026. Or maybe we will see a further decline in production as we see one of our legacy studios get folded into another company.

: Frankenstein

I still love seeing movies in a movie theatre. I believe there are others like me out there. As I type this, people are buying tickets to see Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN and the latest Knives Out installment, WAKE UP DEAD MAN even though these pictures have been out on platforms for weeks. Why? Because the best way to see a movie is in a movie theatre. You’re not escaping into another world when you sit on your couch. That’s more like hiding from reality. Getting out of the house. Sharing space with strangers. Fully turning yourself over the storyteller. That’s what happens when you see a movie the way it is meant to be seen. So thank you to those who are back regularly. And to those who haven’t fully returned, this is a good time to resolve to try something different in the new year.

For me (and in alphabetical order), here were the Top 10 movies of 2025.

ALL THAT’S LEFT OF YOU – Filmmaker Cherien Dabis has every reason to be angry about how her family was displaced during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. And to be sure, there is pain and anguish in her multi-generational tale that spans 70 years in a family story. But there is also more understanding and empathy than I can recall in any other film on the same subject. And with three members of the Bakri family in key roles, including the amazing Mohammad Bakri who recently passed away, the film provides a master class in acting. Shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar, this one is, in my opinion, the finest foreign language film of the year.

BLACK BAG – There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a master filmmaker craft a well-oiled genre picture. And in BLACK BAG, Steven Soderbergh is at the top of his game. This tightly paced spy thriller may not have a lot to say about world affairs and such. But at just a hair over 90 minutes, the film is tightly constructed, well acted, and a fun watch.

: Blue Sun Palace

BLUE SUN PALACE – A beautiful film about the loneliness and displacement of the immigrant experience. The film features a trio of amazing performances, led by veteran actor Lee Kang-sheng, and marks first time director Constance Tsang as someone to watch.

DEAD MAN’S WIRE – Where many veteran directors delivered interesting but bloated films this year, director Gus van Sant, working from a terrific script by Austin Kolodney, reminds us with DEAD MAN’S WIRE what a terrific filmmaker he is. Based on a true story of an armed kidnapping, the film is packed with great acting, led by Bill Skarsgard in the lead role. So far, this one hasn’t gotten a lot of Oscar buzz. But it deserves it, so I encourage you to search it out as it goes wider in January.

DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT – Veteran actress Embeth Davidtz worked both behind and in front of the camera with this story of white farmers in post-colonial Rhodesia. Based on a popular memoir by Alexandra Fuller, the film features perhaps the year’s best performances by a child actor.

: Ghost Trail

GHOST TRAIL – One of the year’s moviegoing highlights for me was catching this film in March at a Rendezvous With French Cinema screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Director Jonathan Millet, a documentarian making his first feature, delivers a Hitchcockian thriller with this story of a Syrian refugee in France trying to track down their former torturers from the Assad regime. Ignored by major critics, this one truly deserves another look.

THE PLAGUE – Charlie Polinger’s debut feature really floored me. Working with a cast of unknown young actors, Polinger tells a story of pre-adolescent bullying that is deeply resonant of his experiences as a kid, but also with much to say about our current political and cultural moment. With great cinematography, some of the year’s best sound design, and other technical achievements, this may be the one of the best debut features of the year.

PREDATORS – My favorite documentary of the year. Since it didn’t make the Academy’s short list, I guess I didn’t see enough docs this year. Or maybe this film was just hit some viewers in an uncomfortable way. While the film does not spare from scrutiny the folks who created the To Catch a Predator TV-series, it also confronts us as audience members with our role in turning the pursuit of justice into entertainment.

: A Private Life

A PRIVATE LIFE – A curious blend of romance, mystery and comedy, Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language picture may not be the tightest film of the year story-wise. But I still found enough to enjoy that I saw it twice, and am ready to go back for a third helping. Stars Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil have perhaps the best on-screen chemistry of any screen couple this year, delivering a totally believable portrayal of a divorced couple rekindling the spark.

SORRY, BABY – Distributor A24 is ending the year on a high note with the box office success of MARTY SUPREME. But for me, this is the best film they had on their schedule in 2025, and I just wish they had been able to get more people to see when it came out in the summer. Eva Victor writes, directs and stars in this comedy, which deftly combines humor with a dark and difficult storyline.

: Song Sung Blue

Honorable Mentions – RENTAL FAMILY and SONG SUNG BLUE . Telling a sentimental story on screen may seem like something easy. But it isn’t. The Hallmark Channel may have a monopoly on telling formulaic stories, but these two films delight in appealing to our emotions without being manipulative or insulting. I encourage you to see them both. And it’s OK if you get a little misty eyed. We all need a good cry every now and then.

–Greg Laemmle.

Calling All Laemmle Moviegoers! Submit Your Top 5 Films of 2025

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 3 Comments

As another incredible movie year comes to a close, we want to hear from you. What were your five favorite films of 2025?

Critics everywhere are weighing in—from major outlets like Variety, IndieWire, Rolling Stone, TIME, the LA Times, and beyond—but now it’s your turn to have a say. Whether your list leans arthouse, international, documentary, studio spectacle, or something gloriously unclassifiable, we want to know what films moved, thrilled, challenged, and/or stuck with you long after the credits rolled.

Was it Josh Safdie’s ballsy sports dramedy Marty Supreme? Ryan Coogler’s vampiric period piece Sinners? Paul Thomas Anderson’s screwball adventure One Battle After Another? Richard Linklater’s cinephile dream Nouvelle Vague? Or something quieter, stranger, or more under-the-radar that critics missed but you didn’t? Consensus is optional—conviction is not.

Submit your personal ‘Top 5 Films of 2025’ by clicking here and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of three $25 Laemmle Gift Cards, perfect for future movie nights, concessions, or merch. One entry per person, open to everyone, and no wrong answers (we promise).

In addition to the contest, all submissions will be tallied and compiled into a Laemmle Patrons’ Top 10 Films of 2025: a collective snapshot of what our audience loved most this year, beyond critics’ lists and awards chatter.

Need inspiration? Feel free to browse the many year-end lists circulating from critics and publications, but don’t feel bound by consensus. This is about your year in movies: the films you championed, revisited, debated, or maybe even defended passionately in the lobby afterward.

We can’t wait to see what rises to the top. Lights down, pens up—Let’s make some lists. 🎬

Explore some sample lists from…

The Hollywood Reporter

Variety

IndieWire

Rolling Stone

RogerEbert.com

Time

NY Post

LA Times

And finally, from our very own Greg Laemmle.

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.

Schindler Space Architect: A Maverick Revisited

November 5, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Schindler Space Architect is an independently produced documentary examining the works and life of a pioneer of modern architecture, R.M. Schindler, narrated by Meryl Streep and Udo Kier, and featuring testimonials by renowned architects Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, and Ray Kappe, among many others.

Having already enjoyed an August run as part of our Culture Vulture series, Schindler Space Architect is now returning to the big screen as regular engagement beginning Friday, November 7th at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in order to qualify for the Oscars’ Best Documentary race. So come check out this fascinating tale of one of architecture’s most impactful (if forgotten) revolutionaries before it’s too late. Click here for tickets.

Message from the producer/director:

“Werner Herzog once said “Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.” This has been my boat and it has taken twelve years to complete the mission.

M. Schindler’s life story is very close to my heart. He is the quintessential underdog: bohemian, rebel, working outside the mainstream, on a path of his own, unsung and quite often misunderstood. And yet, Schindler is the early modernist architect who fundamentally changed how people live, breaking the barriers between “inside” and “outside”, his architecture grew from the land and it was always in dialogue with Nature. Schindler experimented and invented over a period of thirty years, suffering the ups and downs of his creative genius, forging his own vision he left a well of inspiration. I was determined to put the spotlight on, to make a wrong right. As a first-time female filmmaker working outside the mainstream industry I had to overcome many challenges along the way. Wearing all kinds of hats: producer, researcher, writer, director, editor, to name a few, but I kept going, tirelessly fundraising, forging my own vision and attracting along the way collaborators that were inspired by Schindler and contributed their best. So, we end up with a film made with a lot of love and respect for a man who was a true original.

– Valentina Ganeva

“Viennese-born Rudolf Schindler transformed Los Angeles architecture with buildings shaped by space, light and interconnection with nature. In Schindler Space Architect, director Valentina Galena draws on rich archival material, cinematography and interviews to vividly tell the story of Schindler’s ideas, life, loves, and his complicated relationship with L.A.’s other founding Austrian modernist, Richard Neutra. Fascinating.” – Frances Anderton

“Turns basic assumptions about the birth of modern architecture upside down.” – Alan Hess, architect and historian