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Oscars 2025: The ANORA director advocates for movie theaters, and the Academy honors Robert Laemmle. Plus: Oscar Contest winners.

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The 2025 Oscars are in the history books. It was a good night, with a funny, skilled host in Conan O’Brien and a fairly equitable distribution of statuettes for some terrific movies. It was also a good night for theatrical exhibition, better known as good, old-fashioned moviegoing. As he did during his speech accepting the Palme d’Or last year in Cannes, Anora filmmaker Sean Baker gave a passionate, trenchant speech in favor of seeing movies as filmmakers have always intended them to be seen, in theaters. After accepting the Oscar for Best Director from filmmaker (and movie theater owner) Quentin Tarantino, Baker said the following to almost 20 million Americans watching live and far more people worldwide:
“I’m going to take this time up here really quick to read something I’m very passionate about…so we’re all here tonight and watching this broadcast because we love movies. Where did we fall in love with the movies? At the movie theater. Watching a film …in the theater with an audience is an experience. We can laugh together, cry together, scream in fright together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together. And in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home, and right now the theatergoing experience is under threat. Movie theaters, especially independently owned theaters, are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them. During the pandemic we lost nearly 1000 screens in the U.S., and we continue to lose them regularly. If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture. This is my battle cry. Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen. I know I will. Distributors…please focus first and foremost on the theatrical releases of your films. Neon did that for me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Parents…introduce your children to feature films in movie theaters, and you’ll be molding the next generation of movie lovers and filmmakers. And for all of us, when we can, please watch movies in the theater, and let’s keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.”
The always moving In Memoriam section of the Oscars broadcast was especially powerful this year. This may have been because the losses of huge talents seemed particularly heavy this year. For us at Laemmle Theatres, of course, we are still grieving the loss of Robert Laemmle, our former president and Greg Laemmle’s father. What an honor for Bob to be the first exhibitor included in the in Memoriam montage.
Finally, we are pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest.
FIRST PLACE: Stefan with 18 correct answers.
SECOND PLACE: Joel with 18 correct answers.
TIE for THIRD PLACE: Kelly & Cole with 17 correct answers (plus closest run-time to actual runtime broadcast).
Check out our nifty pie charts to see how our savvy customers divined the Academy members’ choices. Last year our winner correctly guessed 21 categories, so this was a tough year. As predicted, the Best Actress category was one of the trickiest; only 10.7% guessed that Mikey Madison would win for her turn in Anora, defying the conventional wisdom that Demi Moore would win for The Substance, and that Fernanda Torres was the true dark horse for her performance in I’m Still Here. Half of our contestants thought The Wild Robot would take the Best Animated Feature prize, but the acclaimed little Latvian film Flow came out on top. Almost 25% of contestants thought Timothée Chalamet would win for Best Actor for A Complete Unknown, no doubt misled by his Screen Actors Guild Awards victory.
Winners, we will be in touch to get you your movie pass prizes. Congratulations!

“With a small crew, we were able to work within the ebb and flow of the Camino. We became invisible and nimble, and that allowed us to film the real Camino.” THE WAY, MY WAY opens March 7.

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The Way, My Way, which we open March 7 at our Claremont, Santa Monica, and Encino theaters, is the charming and captivating true story of a stubborn, self-centered Australian man who decides to walk the 800 kilometer-long Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route through Spain. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it… but one step at a time, it will change him and his outlook on life forever. Based on Bill Bennett’s best-selling memoir of the same name.

Bennett penned the following about The Way, My Way:

“I really didn’t want to make this film. I didn’t want to make a film about myself; about my failings and vulnerabilities, and hardships which took me right to the brink. Finally I decided to give it a shot – but then I was faced with the question: how do I make a film on the Camino and make it real?

“I decided the only way to tell my story truthfully was to shoot with a very small crew and use the actual pilgrims I’d walked with ten years earlier. Of the twenty speaking parts in the film, only four are professional actors. The rest are pilgrims.

“They proved to be stellar. They set the standard. They held the truth, the authenticity. The professional actors had to step up to the pilgrims’ benchmark. In fact, we all had to, even those of us behind the cameras.

“And with a small crew, we were able to work within the ebb and flow of the Camino. We became invisible and nimble, and that allowed us to film the real Camino.

“The decision to cast the real pilgrims dictated so many other major creative decisions for me as a director. The shooting style, the editing style, the tone of the movie, the staging and blocking of scenes – even what film gear we should use.

“It all had to point towards the authenticity of the Camino experience.

“Now having almost completed post-production, I feel I’ve achieved what I set out to do – to make a truthful film about a man who ultimately undergoes a fundamental shift in character and outlook, through walking the Camino.”

Paul Schrader’s moving OH, CANADA, starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Jacob Elordi, opens Friday.

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In Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada, which we open Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo, and Town Center, Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi play a man at opposite ends of his life, deciding how to live it. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Victoria Hill co-star.

Schrader said this about his film:

“When friend and author Russell Banks (Affliction) took ill I was weighing other story possibilities. I realized that mortality should be the subject. Russell had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked if I would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.

“Leonard Fife became a successful documentary filmmaker after fleeing to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Sick and dying in Montreal, he is interviewed by his former students. ‘I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,’ he says, ‘Now it’s my turn.'”

 

“Paul Schrader and Richard Gere, reunited for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo, are at the peak of their powers.” – Chuck Bowen, Slant

“Energized by the reunion of its director, Paul Schrader, and its star, Richard Gere, in their first collaboration since American Gigolo.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Richard Gere gives his best performance in years.” – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

“Takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning… to sincerely moving effect.” – Justin Chang, The New Yorker 

“My recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.” The New York Times’s Melissa Kirsch on moviegoing in general and ANORA in particular.

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When he accepted the Palme d’Or for his colorful, authentic, surprising, exciting, thrilling comedy Anora earlier this year at Cannes, writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) spoke eloquently about seeing movies in theaters. You can watch the whole thing online, but here’s the key excerpt:
“This literally has been my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years. So I’m not really sure what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life, but I do know that I will continue to fight for cinema because right now, as filmmakers, we have to fight to keep cinema alive. This means making feature films intended for theatrical exhibition. The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone and checking mail, emails and half paying attention is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so. Watching a film with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences. We share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, and, hopefully, have a catharsis with our friends and strangers, and that’s sacred. So I see the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”
After seeing Anora in a theater, Melissa Kirsch of the New York Times wrote this terrific short piece which was posted over the weekend:

“It’s the season when many festival darlings, the films that critics saw and loved in Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto, finally arrive in theaters, and this year, it feels different. More exciting? More like the old days? I’ve been making a concerted effort to actually go and see movies in the movie theater instead of waiting for them to arrive on streaming platforms, and it’s been paying off gloriously.

“The movies I’ve seen recently — “Didi,” “Megalopolis,” “Anora,” “Saturday Night” — have felt urgent and exciting: complicated stories with complicated characters, not a superhero franchise among them. I didn’t love all of these movies equally, but I loved seeing them, loved being in the dark drinking up their writers’ and directors’ idiosyncratic visions. And I loved the intention that led to the experience: I made a decision to see a movie, went to an establishment expressly built for that purpose, sat and paid attention for the length of the film and then, only then, returned to nonmovie life. Contrast that experience with the half-attention I so often pay a movie on a streaming platform, watching it in installments over several nights, maybe on an iPad, maybe while I’m brushing my teeth.

“Each movie I saw in the theater, I talked about afterward, with the friends accompanying me, with colleagues the next day. Some of the movies I’ve streamed — some abandoned before completion — I’ve discussed with no one. As the Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in his wonderful essay “Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?”: “Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation.” I’m willing to wager that no filmmaker ever made a movie hoping or expecting that it would end up beyond the reach of conversation.

“Not every movie you watch has to be a means of connecting with other people, but it could be. Walking out of “Anora” the other night, chatting with friends, comparing the film with the director’s previous ones, I realized how rare the experience of seeing a movie with a group had become for me. Once, it was commonplace, a weekly tradition. Every Sunday evening when I was 14 and 15, my friends Justin and Tracy and I would go with one of our moms (we couldn’t yet drive ourselves) to the SoNo Cinema, an art-house theater in South Norwalk, Conn., where we saw films that would never be shown in our suburb’s mainstream theaters. We saw Hugh Grant in Ken Russell’s horror movie “The Lair of the White Worm.” We saw “Babette’s Feast,” the first Danish film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” After, we’d go out to dinner and discuss what we’d just watched.

“Searching for information about the theater, I found stories about its struggles to stay open over the years, its various fund-raising efforts. “I’m convinced that a lot of the young people we used to draw are raising families now and watching video rental films at home,” the owner told The Times in 1987, the same year we went to SoNo to see the British film “White Mischief,” about the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya. It closed not long after.

“I’ve over-romanticized those early adventures in theatergoing (I’m not the only one — “the movie house equivalent of ‘The Secret Garden,’” Tracy called it when I asked her recently). But the truth is, my friends and I still discuss the movies we saw at SoNo, how they informed our ideas of what life after high school might be like. And while I’m not going to argue that we’re as impressionable in middle age as we were when we’d been alive for barely more than a decade, my recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.”

We are proud to open Anora this Friday at the Glendale, Monica Film Center, and NoHo and November 8 at the Claremont. It is fantastic and even better in a theater.

THE EYE OF THE SALAMANDER Opens Friday.

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THE EYE OF THE SALAMANDER

Opening at the Laemmle Glendale on Friday, November 1

Q&A with Writer/Director Pavel Nikolajev and Producer Olga Polevaya on Saturday, November 2 following primetime showing

An Aztec pyramid figurine found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico stores a dark secret, which is discovered by professor Hiscock, a non-traditional hero, who will learn quantum teleportation the hard way, facing primal folklore fears and his alter ego in the gruesome catacombs of uncharted realm.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“I had a vision to create a film about instant teleportation via an ancient artifact for quite some time and was finally able to finish the script when my son was born, and I had a parental break. Weirdly, COVID that followed helped in creating the creature costume when everybody was locked in and I had plenty of time to do it right. 

For filming, we tried using the style / look & feel of the classic ’80s/’90s Sci-Fi/Thriller films which I’m a big fan of, so most of the effects are practical with minimal CGI! The same technique I used in my previous film HEADSOME. Everything else was just good old exhausting indie filmmaking!” 

-Pavel Nikolajev

FOOD AND COUNTRY Director Laura Gabbert: “Ruth [Reichl] and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system.”

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Ruth Reichl—trailblazing New York Times food critic, groundbreaking Gourmet Magazine editor, best-selling memoirist, and, for decades, one of the most influential figures shaping American food culture—grows concerned about the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestle with both immediate and systemic challenges as the pandemic takes hold.

In Food and Country, Reichl reaches across political and social divides to discover innovators who are risking it all to survive on the front lines. As one person leads her to the next, she follows the unfolding stories of ranchers in Kansas and Georgia; farmers in Nebraska, Ohio, and the Bronx; a New England fisherman; and maverick chefs on both coasts. As she witnesses them navigate intractable circumstances, Reichl shares pieces of her own life, and, in doing so, begins to take stock of the path she has traveled and the ideals she left behind. Through her eyes, we get to know the humanity and struggle behind the food we eat. As Reichl says: “How we grow and make our food shows us our values– as a nation and as human beings.

Food and Country filmmaker Laura Gabbert will participate in Q&As after the 10/9 and 10/10 screenings at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and Glendale. The regular engagement at the Royal begins on October 11.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“What drives me as a filmmaker is finding ways to put us inside, to humanize someone else’s experience; in short to connect us. My own instincts lead me back to food stories again and again because they’re a rich prism through which to understand culture and our relationships to each other. Food is a conduit, a vehicle that connects people to people, and people to culture.

“My 2015 documentary, City of Gold, is about the late Jonathan Gold, the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Jonathan’s writing gave me a way to understand and love Los Angeles. He wrote about restaurants and food as the gateway to connection and empathy across perceived boundaries in a city bursting with multiple cultures and ethnicities. In my next culinary film, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, decadent cakes became an expression and critique of contemporary excess, and laid bare our longing for community in a world of inequity and exclusion. Food and Country, my third food foray, was prompted by Covid, but it’s not actually about Covid; it’s about the people behind our food. Transcending blue state/red state politics, their resilience and ingenuity are the heart of this film.

“In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I saw that independent restaurants were the canary in the coalmine and began to worry about the restaurant owners, chefs, and workers with whom I had grown close while making City of Gold. Knowing so many people in the food world with urgent, compelling stories that needed to be told, I felt I had to document their plight. How they would adapt to survive. I wondered how the potential loss of these businesses would change the fabric of our communities and cities.

“Just as I was preparing to film struggling Los Angeles restaurants, storied food writer Ruth Reichl reached out to me and said, “I hear we’re working on something similar. Let’s talk.” Ruth was taking a bigger picture approach to the crisis — grasping right away the devastating impact the pandemic could have on the entire food chain. Ruth and I quickly decided to join forces and began reaching out to pivotal players in food through video calls. Ruth’s stellar reputation as chronicler and voice of American food culture for the last four decades opened doors, but everywhere we turned, it was Ruth’s authenticity, curiosity, and warmth that inspired trust and elicited truth telling. People across the front lines of the food chain and political divides — from the most celebrated chefs, to food equity activists, to farmers and ranchers— wanted to talk with her. And, we would soon learn, they also wanted to open up and confide in her, and even seek solace. But the connection between Ruth and our characters is a two-way street. Just as they rely on Ruth, so too does Ruth lean on them for insight and closeness.

“Ruth and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system. Collectively their story is the story of all independent businesses fighting to survive an ever-consolidating industry. Their stories also hold up a mirror. How we make and grow our food tells us who we are as a country, who we are as human beings.” — Laura Gabbert

 

“Pessimism, nihilism and melancholia irrigate THE FALLING STAR, but our ensemble of morally inept characters fill our film noir with vibrant, jubilant color.”

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An official selection of the Telluride and Locarno Film Festivals, The Falling Star is the latest caper from Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon (Lost in Paris, The Fairy) filters the language of film noir through their characteristically colorful palette to create a series of deceptively minimalistic set pieces that recall the best of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. Abel plays Boris, a former activist hiding from his dark past, keeping in the shadows as a barkeeper until a one-armed vigilante finally hunts him down. The fortuitous appearance of a double – the depressive recluse Dom (also played by Abel) – seems to offer the perfect decoy. But his tenacious and loopy ex-wife, the private eye Fiona (Gordon), could foil their master plan.

We open The Falling Star this Friday, September 20 at the Royal.

“Next time someone wistfully insists, ‘They don’t make ’em like they used to,’ why not point that nostalgic cinephile to the work of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon? The Belgium-based creative couple are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on-screen.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“Unique and poetic…a symphony of primary colours, scenes composed as if paintings, bodies which speak louder than words, dances which suddenly possess the various characters, and irresistible visual ingeniousness (only they could find such sublimity in toilet paper).” – Aurore Engelen, Cineuropa

Directors’ note: “The Falling Star, our fifth film, takes place in a world of social turmoil: today. Every time we open the door we can hear the chant: a world with no conscience is destroying the world. We’ve placed our disgraced political hero in this contemporary context. Boris continues to bury his head in the sand whilst all around him, ardent activists protest for a fairer, cleaner world. In parallel, we follow a more intimate struggle with Dom and Fiona, two social misfits who continue to exist in a world that continues to exist without them.”

On their style: “Our films are often described as “poetico-burlesque.” By crossing the road from physical comedy to film noir we aren’t abandoning our desire to create laughter. We’re exploring a more bitter palette. Pessimism, nihilism and melancholia irrigate The Falling Star, but our ensemble of morally inept characters fill our film noir with vibrant, jubilant color.”

Fiona Gordon was born in Australia in 1957, Dominique Abel in a small Belgian town called Lobbes the same year. After their studies (theatre for Fiona, economics for Dominique) they studied theater and movement with Jacques Lecoq, Philippe Gaulier & Monika Pagneux in Paris, where they met.

In the eighties, they created several physical theater shows that toured worldwide and founded their company, COURAGE MON AMOUR.They took their first film directing steps in the nineties with three shorts, then began making features, often with their accomplice, Bruno ROMY.

“It’s a story of how we survive our parents, and the beauty of that survival.” Filmmaker Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio on IN THE SUMMERS, opening September 20 at the Royal and September 27 at the Town Center and NoHo.

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Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, In the Summers is a brilliant portrayal of resilience and survival that follows siblings Violeta and Eva. They live in California with their mother, but every summer travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente. Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva learn to appreciate their father as a person.

Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that “the feature is a visual poem, an enveloping four-stanza ode to experiences shared by a man and his daughters.”

“These understated scenes of familial intimacy introduce Lacorazza Samudio as a director with a deft hand for crafting character development from lived-in behavior rather than dialogue…In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.” ~ Carlos Aguilar, Variety

“The most impressive work belongs to that of Residente, a Puerto Rican rapper otherwise known as René Pérez Joglar. As [Vicente], Residente avoids the pitfalls of playing bad fathers… Residente finds the subtlety in his flaws…Because of this attention to the environment that shapes these hot days, In the Summers is brimming full of its characters’ internal aches rendered elegantly across time.” ~ Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire

In the Summers actor Sasha Calle will participate in a Q&As at the Royal on Friday, September 20.

Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s statement:

“My father was a brilliant and beautiful man. Maybe the smartest person I’ve ever known. He had a love of science he wanted to share, even when his audience wasn’t eager. I knew he was prone to anger and drinking and probably drugs. But there was a lot I didn’t understand until he died. 

“I was in a bad car accident with my father and sister when I was young, one where I was severely injured and suffered traumatic brain trauma. What I thought happened was there was a car accident, an ambulance came, and we were taken to the nearest hospital, and eventually we recovered. What I found out after his death, was that he had to drag our bodies from the wreckage and walk down a deserted road until someone stopped to help him. That realization took the car accident, which I have always thought of as my trauma, and made me realize it was also his trauma. Our shared trauma. It made me realize there was a deeper complexity to my father. A deeply wounded, chaotic, man raised me but he also had a deep love for his daughters. 

“And so I started the long process of creating In the Summers. My aim was to explore this human who, for better or worse, was the root of so much of me. During this process I kept asking, can we make amends? For our missteps, our words, our actions? Or will they forever define us? The closer I get to finishing this film the more I realize that the issue is with the question. Life is far more complex. 

“In the Summers explores Latine identity through its characters and how it intersects with fatherhood, addiction, trauma, sexuality and access to opportunity. It’s a story of how we survive our parents, and the beauty of that survival. This is a personal film for me not only because it is inspired by my life but because I want to see complex Latine and Queer characters shown in an honest way. Thank you for considering this project and having the opportunity to tell my story.”