Featured Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

Daniel Roher’s ‘Tuner’: When the Piano Man Goes Bad

June 29, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

While movie industry observers have noted the surprise success of smaller movies this summer like Obsession and Backrooms, there’s another one slowly and steadily holding on arthouse screens everywhere: Daniel Roher’s Tuner. Now about to enter its third smash month in theaters, the first narrative film from the acclaimed documentarian behind Navalny and The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist blends crime, romance, jazz piano, and even a touch of real-life super power in the tale of a piano tuner whose nimble fingers and ears also serve him well at safe-cracking.

You can still catch Tuner at Laemmle’s Town Center and Laemmle’s Monica Film Center.

One key reason not to miss Tuner in theaters is the distinctive sound design by Maximilian Behrens, whose audio work on The Zone of Interest contributed greatly to that film’s overall impact. Behrens’ work puts us directly inside the head of Niki (The White Lotus‘ Leo Woodall), who has hyperacusis, a condition that makes loud noises painful and debilitating, but allows him to hear other things inaudible to most humans. As he listens for distinctions between piano notes, or for tumblers in a lock to slide into place, we feel it. Mercifully, when the sounds of the world go in the other direction, the movie only gives us a small taste of the pain that forces Niki to wear earplugs and headphones almost 24-7.

Roher takes a break from real-world existential threats like Vladimir Putin and Artificial Intelligence to focus on much more personal stakes. Niki’s irascible mentor Harry (a scene-stealing Dustin Hoffman) has angrily and temperamentally canceled his own Medicare, and refuses to eat healthy; before long, he’s stuck with a hospital bill he can’t afford. Piano tuning, even for New York’s rich and careless, doesn’t earn Niki enough to help, so he takes the slightly less legal route, working for an unethical “security” company that skims from clients’ safes.

Meanwhile, a romance is blossoming with hard-working piano prodigy Ruthie (model-turned actress Havana Rose Liu) who reminds him of himself before the hearing condition made playing literally painful. He wants to help her, but the erratic, spontaneous needs of his illegal work threaten to tear him away.

Unmoored from the demands of documentary reality, Roher treats the story like a parable; it involves some extreme coincidence, but treats it as karmic justice. The ending is designed to get audiences talking, and perhaps arguing, the moment they leave the theater. And the director couldn’t have asked for a better cast to anchor his first drama. Jean Reno shows up as a musical maestro, Tovah Feldshuh gives as good as she gets playing Hoffman’s wife, Herbie Hancock appears as himself, and Lior Raz brings lived-in menace to Niki’s criminal boss Uri. Prior to being an actor, Raz was an IDF commando and a bodyguard for Arnold Schwarzenegger; he doesn’t have to do much to persuade a viewer of his inherent threat level.

Be sure to catch Tuner in theaters while you still can. With its canny, subjective soundscapes, original numbers by Marius de Vries (La La Land), and carefully-selected jazz classics, you’ll want the premium speaker experience. But the story might just stick in your head as well.

“Roher knows that in crime flicks, as in jazz, pacing is everything: he reveals just enough but allows the audience to fill in the gaps.” – Wendy Ide, The Observer.

“It’s a thrill to watch this kind of original, adult moviemaking that’s all too rare these days.” – Katie Walsh, Tribune.

‘Romería’: Carla Simón’s Moving Portrait of Loss, Identity, and Belonging

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the course of three features, Carla Simón has quietly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European cinema. Following her acclaimed debut Summer 1993 and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, the Spanish filmmaker returns with Romería, a deeply personal coming-of-age drama that continues her exploration of family, memory, and the lingering impact of loss.

Catch Romeria in theaters beginning July 1st at the Laemmle Glendale.

The title translates roughly to “pilgrimage,” an apt description for the journey undertaken by Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave home to study filmmaking. Before she can begin that next chapter, however, she must travel to the Galician city of Vigo in search of documents connected to her late father, whose death years earlier left crucial gaps in her understanding of both her family history and herself.

Raised apart from her father’s relatives, Marina arrives as both an outsider and a blood relation. Her extended family welcomes her warmly enough on the surface, inviting her on boat trips, beach outings, and sprawling family gatherings, yet beneath the hospitality lies a more complicated reality. Old wounds remain unhealed, uncomfortable truths have been buried, and differing accounts of the past begin to challenge everything Marina thought she knew about her parents.

Like Simón’s previous work, Romería unfolds through intimate observations rather than dramatic confrontations. The filmmaker has a remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of family life: overlapping conversations around crowded tables, casual moments of affection, and the subtle tensions that emerge when multiple generations inhabit the same space. Yet as Marina pieces together fragments of her family’s history, Romería expands beyond a straightforward search for answers. Her mother’s diaries, camcorder recordings, and the stories told by her relatives create a layered portrait of two people she barely knew, as what begins as a realistic family drama gradually opens into something more lyrical and impressionistic. Simón incorporates dreamlike passages and flashes of imagined memory, allowing the boundaries between history, recollection, and personal mythology to blur. These touches of magical realism give emotional shape to experiences that can never be fully recovered, only reimagined.

Both tender and quietly heartbreaking, Romería confirms Simón’s status as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Drawing from deeply personal material while touching on universal questions of identity and belonging, she has created a film that is at once a family portrait, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the subtle ways that each of us carries the residue of our forebearers.

“Carla Simón’s story of a young woman untangling a web of family secrets cements the filmmaker’s aptitude for naturalism while also marking a bold new step towards magical realism.” – Sophia Satchell-Baeza, British Film Institute

“A kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

John Early’s ‘Maddie’s Secret’ Finds Heart Beneath the Camp

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

John Early has spent years building a reputation as one of contemporary comedy’s most distinctive voices, whether through scene-stealing performances in projects like Search Party and Stress Positions, or his singular stand-up and musical work. That history makes Maddie’s Secret an especially surprising directorial feature debut. While the film contains plenty of the heightened absurdity and comic precision that fans of Early will recognize, it ultimately reveals itself as something far more sincere: a melodrama about eating disorders, self-worth, and modern womanhood disguised as a campy made-for-television movie.

Catch Maddie’s Secret in theaters beginning June 26th at the Laemmle Monica.

Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a shy but gifted home cook working behind the scenes at a trendy food-media company. Her life changes overnight when a homemade cooking video goes viral, transforming her from anonymous dishwasher to the face of the brand. This sudden attention, however, reawakens her long-suppressed struggle with bulimia. Desperate to conceal her relapse from her loving husband Jake (Eric Rahill) and best friend Deena (Kate Berlant), Maddie tells an impulsive lie that quickly spirals beyond her control.

The premise sounds like the setup for broad satire, and Maddie’s Secret certainly pokes fun at influencer culture, wellness trends, online therapy apps, foodie celebrity, and other fixtures of contemporary life. Yet Early’s screenplay consistently resists easy cynicism, treating its characters with affection and finding humor in their quirks without reducing them to punchlines. Even the broadest personalities feel grounded by an underlying emotional honesty.

That tonal confidence is especially evident in Early’s performance. Playing Maddie could easily have become an exercise in caricature, but he approaches the character with remarkable empathy. Maddie is funny, anxious, talented, vulnerable, and deeply human. The film never treats her eating disorder as a joke, even as it finds comedy in the myriad social pressures, cultural expectations, and personal contradictions that surround it.

What ultimately distinguishes Maddie’s Secret is its refusal to choose between irony and sincerity. In an era when many comedies keep their subjects at arm’s length, Early allows himself to care deeply about his protagonist and the struggles she faces. The film is frequently funny, occasionally outrageous, and unexpectedly moving. By the time it reaches its emotional climax, what initially seemed like a clever genre exercise has transformed into something infinitely richer: a compassionate portrait of a woman trying to reconcile the person she is with the person she believes she should be.

For a filmmaker making his feature directing debut, it is an impressively assured achievement. Campy and heartfelt, and unlike much else in contemporary cinema, Maddie’s Secret announces John Early as a filmmaker worth watching.

“A lesser film would find more cynicism and mockery in the text, but Maddie’s Secret is a testament to the art of trying, finding optimism, and approaching life empathetically.” – Peyton Robinson, RogerEbert.com

“Brimming with style and spirit up to the final scene.” – Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times

“A film of real kindness.” – Sam Bodrojan, IndieWire

Haifaa Al-Mansour’s ‘Unidentified’ and the Women Hidden in Plain Sight

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the past decade, Haifaa Al-Mansour has become one of the most important cinematic voices to emerge from Saudi Arabia. Her breakthrough feature Wadjda followed a young girl determined to buy a bicycle in a society that discouraged such independence. The Perfect Candidate centered on a woman running for local office. With Unidentified, Al-Mansour again focuses on a female protagonist navigating institutional barriers, but this time she does so through the framework of a murder mystery.

Catch Unidentified in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center.

The film opens with the discovery of a teenage girl’s body abandoned in the desert outside Riyadh. The victim has no identification, few clues, and seemingly little chance of receiving justice. When the case crosses her desk, Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), a recently divorced police clerk and devoted true-crime listener, sets out to uncover the girl’s identity.

What follows is part detective story, part social portrait, as Al-Mansour uses the familiar structure of a procedural to explore larger questions about gender, autonomy, and social expectation. As Nawal begins asking questions, she encounters a world of silences, evasions, and unspoken assumptions. School administrators, family members, and community figures each possess fragments of information, yet the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that solving the crime means understanding the circumstances that allowed the victim to disappear in the first place.

One of the film’s strengths is its refusal to present Saudi women as a monolith. Throughout Nawal’s investigation, she encounters women of different generations, backgrounds, and beliefs, each navigating the constraints of their society in distinct ways. Some push against those limitations; others accommodate them, and many exist somewhere in between.

Mila Alzahrani, reuniting with Al-Mansour after The Perfect Candidate, anchors the film with a performance that balances determination and vulnerability. Nawal’s interest in the case is clearly fueled by her own personal losses, but the film wisely avoids reducing her to a simple symbol or crusader. Instead, she emerges as a complicated individual whose search for answers becomes inseparable from her effort to reclaim agency in her own life.

Stylistically, Unidentified represents a somewhat more commercial turn for Al-Mansour. The film embraces suspense, red herrings, and genre conventions more readily than her earlier work. While the mystery itself remains engaging throughout, the film’s lasting impact comes less from the mechanics of the investigation than from the social realities it reveals along the way.

In the end, Unidentified works as both a compelling thriller and a continuation of Al-Mansour’s long-standing interest in the lives of Saudi women. The mystery may provide the engine, but humanization remains the destination.

“Unidentified… utilizes the death of a young woman to explore how Saudi Arabia’s crushing patriarchy creates both victims and criminals out of its female population. – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.” – Beandrea July, IndieWire

Homoerotic Hitchcock: ‘Strangers on a Train’ at 75

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the movie that launched Hitchcock’s greatest decade of moviemaking, the 1951 suspense classic Strangers on a Train.

On Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m., attend the 75th anniversary screening at Laemmle’s Royal, complete with a Q&A with Stephen Rebello, Author of Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitcchock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train and Hitchcockian Thrillers.

Hitchcock had started his career in England with such top thrillers as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hollywood quickly came calling, and when Hitchcock moved to America, he won his only Best Picture Oscar for Rebecca in 1940. He continued with other classic films Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, and Notorious.

But in the late 1940s the Master of Suspense hit a dry spell, when his films The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright failed to connect with audiences. Searching for inspiration, he landed on Patricia Highsmith’s first acclaimed novel, Strangers on a Train, a story drenched in homoeroticism and perverse psychology. Highsmith, who was herself gay (she later wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley and a lesbian-themed novel, Carol, that was turned into an acclaimed 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), provided the inspiration that Hitchcock needed.

Strangers tells the story of a chance meeting between a handsome tennis star, Guy Haines, and a charming but deranged aristocrat, Bruno Anthony. Bruno has read about Guy’s problems with his estranged wife and suggests half-jokingly that if they swap murders (Bruno wants to get rid of his disapproving father), neither would have a discernible motive for the murders they commit. Guy does not take the suggestion seriously, but when Bruno kills Guy’s wife, he expects Guy to return the favor.

The screenplay is credited to acclaimed mystery writer Raymond Chandler and female writer Czenzi Ormonde, but Chandler actually contributed very little to the movie; he and Hitchcock did not get along. Nevertheless, the script is tightly structured and consistently gripping. Like many Hitchcock movies, Strangers is distinguished by several memorable set-pieces, including the murder at an amusement park, a tense tennis match, and the climax on board a carousel spinning wildly out of control. But it also has the psychological depth of the Master’s best movies. Defying the Production Code, which had a strict prohibition against depictions of homosexuality, Hitchcock and his screenwriters clearly delineate the attraction that Bruno feels toward the handsome tennis champ. Robert Walker, the star of several lighter pictures, relishes his stab at villainy, and he is well matched with Farley Granger, who had starred in Hitchcock’s Rope and was gay in real life.

Ruth Roman, Laura Elliott, Norma Varden, Leo G. Carroll, and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia round out the cast. Robert Burks, who earned an Oscar nomination for his cinematography, went on to work with Hitchcock again on Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, among others. Oscar-winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had worked with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, wrote the effective score.

Stephen Rebello, who will be doing a Q&A at the screening, is the author of the best-selling Alfred Hitchock and the Making of Psycho (which was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) and Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!: Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time. He has written for Movieline, GQ, Playboy, and other publications.

The First Artists: Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There are few filmmakers better suited than Werner Herzog to stand before humanity’s oldest known artworks and ask what, exactly, they mean. Across documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog has spent decades pursuing people and places that seem to exist at the fringes of ordinary experience. With Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), he turns his attention backward across tens of thousands of years, descending into the Chauvet Cave in southern France to confront some of the earliest surviving expressions of human imagination.

Catch Cave of Forgotten Dreams in its triumphant return to theaters, shown in 3D from June 5-11th at the Laemmle Glendale.

Discovered in 1994 and ordinarily closed to the public, the Chauvet Cave contains paintings estimated to be more than 30,000 years old: rhinoceroses, horses, lions, bison, mammoths, and other animals sketched across stone walls with astonishing sophistication. Herzog and a tiny film crew were granted rare access to the cave, resulting in a documentary that feels less like a conventional history lesson than an encounter with something profoundly uncanny. The cave becomes, in Herzog’s hands, not merely an archaeological site but a kind of lost cathedral, suspended outside ordinary time.

The decision to film in 3D proves especially inspired. Rather than using the format for spectacle, Herzog employs it to emphasize the contours and textures of the cave walls themselves, revealing how the ancient artists incorporated the natural curvature of the rock into their drawings. The paintings seem almost to move as the camera glides past them, lending weight to Herzog’s suggestion that these images function as a kind of “proto-cinema,” like an attempt to capture motion long before the invention of film itself.

As always, Herzog’s unmistakable narration hovers somewhere between philosophical inquiry, deadpan comedy, and cosmic bewilderment. He approaches the cave with genuine awe, but also with the peculiar curiosity that has long defined his documentaries. As archaeologists, paleontologists, and art historians offer technical insights into the methods and possible meanings behind the paintings, Herzog repeatedly nudges the discussion toward stranger and more existential territory. What does it mean that human beings, so early in recorded history, already felt compelled to create images like these? Were the paintings artistic, spiritual, communal, or something else entirely that modern language cannot adequately describe?

What emerges is not a film interested in providing definitive answers so much as one fascinated by the persistence of mystery itself. Herzog treats the cave less as a puzzle to be solved than as a prototype of that same inclination toward storytelling, symbolism, and image-making that still defines human culture today.

Few documentaries inspire awe quite this naturally. Seen in 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams becomes something increasingly rare: a film that genuinely expands one’s sense of human history, while quietly reminding us how much remains unknowable.

“As usual, human progress gets the sublimely absurd Herzogian treatment.” – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

“The Chauvet cave is a lost cathedral, and Herzog’s film responds with subdued passion to its profound mystery.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Last Great Maestro: Inside ‘Bernstein’s Wall’

May 19, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There was a time in American culture when a conductor could become something close to a national celebrity: part educator, part activist, part showman, and part mystic. Few embodied that role more completely than Leonard Bernstein, whose larger-than-life presence animated concert halls, television screens, political movements, and Broadway stages alike. Douglas Tirola’s Bernstein’s Wall revisits that extraordinary life not through conventional talking-head retrospection, but almost entirely through archival footage, home movies, and Bernstein’s own words, allowing the composer and conductor to narrate his story at his own impeccable tempo.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Douglas Tirola discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch one of his live post-screening Q&As running May 21-23rd at the Laemmle Glendale, Royal, and Town Center theaters.

Rather than unfolding as a straightforward cradle-to-grave biography, Bernstein’s Wall assembles an impressionistic portrait of a man whose myriad passions—for music, politics, teaching, sociology, and more—were inseparably intertwined. The result feels less like a summary than an attempt to capture the restless energy that made Bernstein such a singular public figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

For audiences primarily familiar with Bernstein as the composer of West Side Story, the film offers a broader look at the figure who became one of the defining cultural personalities of postwar America. Bernstein was not merely a conductor but a communicator, someone who approached classical music with evangelical enthusiasm and a rare ability to make it feel accessible without diminishing its complexity. The documentary’s many clips from his televised lectures and Young People’s Concerts reveal his innate talent for speaking about music with warmth, humor, and genuine conviction, treating audiences not as passive listeners but as treasured participants in something emotionally and spiritually vital.

The film also captures the sheer physical electricity of Bernstein as a performer. Watching him conduct, drenched in sweat and completely consumed by the music, one understands why he inspired such devotion. Tirola repeatedly emphasizes Bernstein’s ability to embody music rather than simply direct it, transforming orchestral performance into a kind of emotional theater all its own.

Bernstein’s Wall also thoughtfully explores the tensions that shaped Bernstein’s personal life, addressing his sexuality with unusual candor while drawing from deeply personal letters that illuminate the emotional strain placed upon his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein’s outspoken activism, too—from civil rights advocacy to antiwar protests—remains central to this portrait of artist-as-advocate, particularly in relation to his now-infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers that inspired Tom Wolfe’s term “radical chic.”

Yet for all its historical scope, Bernstein’s Wall is ultimately less about legacy than vitality, as the film continually returns to Bernstein’s overwhelming appetite for life itself. The result is a moving reminder of a singular artist who believed deeply in the power of music not merely to entertain, but to awaken something larger within us.

“A lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.” – Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“A thoughtfully constructed tribute that lacks neither cultural and political context nor intimate personal perspective.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

The Secret Life of Trees: Ildikó Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend’

May 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What if the world around us were constantly speaking, and we simply lacked the patience to hear it? That question drifts through Silent Friend, the latest feature from Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, though “drifts” may be too passive a word for a film so alive with wonder, sensation, and absurd, unexpected connections. Moving across three timelines linked by a towering ginkgo tree in the botanical gardens of Marburg, Germany, Enyedi’s film unfolds less like a conventional drama than an act of gradual attunement: to nature, to loneliness, and to the hidden rhythms that shape human lives whether we notice them or not.

Catch Silent Friend in theaters beginning May 15th at the Laemmle Royal.

If Enyedi’s Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul explored intimacy through dreams, Silent Friend projects that fascination outward onto the natural world. The film’s modern-day thread follows neuroscientist Tony Wong, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai in a beautifully understated performance. Stranded on an empty university campus during the first COVID lockdown, Tony turns his attention away from human cognition and toward the silent life of plants, becoming increasingly fascinated by theories suggesting that trees may communicate in ways that science is only beginning to understand. As he enters into remote correspondence with a French botanist played by Léa Seydoux, the film opens itself to increasingly provocative possibilities about the porous boundary between human and nonhuman life.

Before long, Enyedi masterfully weaves Tony’s story with two earlier narratives set decades apart: one following a pioneering female botany student in the early twentieth century, the other centering on a shy student swept into the idealism and experimentation of the 1970s. The connections between these strands are less narrative-based than emotional and thematic, united by a shared sense of curiosity and by the imposing ginkgo tree quietly observing generations pass beneath its branches.

That openness gives Silent Friend much of its distinctive texture. Enyedi approaches science not as something cold or rational, but as a form of wonder and of looking more closely at the world. At times, the movie feels almost mischievous in its insistence that humans might not be as separate from the natural world as we tend to imagine.

Visually, the film is equally rich. Cinematographer Gergely Pálos shifts fluidly between varying textures and formats, moving from striking black-and-white photography to saturated color and crisp digital imagery depending on the era and emotional register. Combined with the film’s immersive sound design and score, the result is markedly sense-based, a movie less interested in driving its plot forward than in creating an atmosphere that its viewers can sink into.

Like the ancient tree at its center, Silent Friend asks for patience. But in return, it offers something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema: the feeling of slowing down long enough to see the world in a new light

“[A] beguiling, wildly original ode to better living through botany.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“A movie that thinks outside the box, proffering a world view that’s open to new, unusual connections at a time when many people seem to be shutting themselves down.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter