Featured Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

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

The Architecture of Influence: Assayas’ ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

May 5, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Power rarely announces itself outright; more often, it is constructed—carefully, incrementally, and just out of view. In The Wizard of the Kremlin, director Olivier Assayas turns to the machinery behind modern political mythmaking, tracing how influence is shaped not only through force, but through narrative. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s widely discussed novel, the film approaches recent Russian history less as a fixed record than as something actively being authored, revised, and performed. The result is a work that peers behind the curtain to examine the uneasy relationship between image and authority.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Assayas dissect his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning May 15th at the Monica, Town Center, and NoHo 7.

At the center of the film’s world is Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former artist whose creative instincts find an unexpected outlet in the realm of political strategy. Through his eyes, the film moves from the cultural upheavals of the late Soviet period into the consolidating power structures of the Putin era. Baranov is less an ideologue than an architect, someone who understands that, in a media-saturated age, perception can be even more decisive than policy.

If Baranov provides the film’s perspective, it is Jude Law’s Vladimir Putin who supplies its gravitational pull. Eschewing caricature, Law delivers a performance that captures the controlled, often inscrutable presence of a leader who communicates as much through restraint as through declaration. Small gestures—a pause, a glance, the measured calibration of distance—become telling indicators of authority. Rather than attempting to decode the man entirely, the film uses these moments to suggest how power can be projected through absence as much as through expression.

Assayas, whose previous films—from Clouds of Sils Maria to Personal Shopper—have explored identity and performance in more intimate contexts, here scales those concerns up to the level of geopolitics. His collaboration with writer Emmanuel Carrère foregrounds dialogue and ideas, particularly in the film’s extended exchanges between Baranov and the many oligarchs, financiers, and political operatives who orbit him. These conversations, often laced with dark humor, become the film’s engine, illustrating how competing ambitions gradually coalesce into a singular, rigid system.

In this sense, The Wizard of the Kremlin positions itself less as a definitive account than as an inquiry into how such accounts are formed. It suggests that the real story lies not only in what happened, but in how those events were framed, disseminated, and ultimately absorbed. For viewers drawn to political dramas that prioritize ideas alongside performance, the film offers a dense, thought-provoking exploration of power that resonates beyond its immediate setting.

“A sharply-written, and often surprisingly funny, look at power in one of the most unique nation-states in the world.” – Chris Harrison, Shifter Magazine

“Essential viewing for understanding the highly sophisticated workings of a totalitarian propaganda state.” – Travis Jeppesen, BFI

Modern Love, Unfiltered: The Bold Charm of ‘Two Women’

April 28, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There’s a mischievous spark at the heart of Two Women, a film that takes a familiar setup—restless relationships, suburban routines—and flips it into something unexpectedly playful, warm, and quietly subversive. Directed with a light but assured touch by Chloé Robichaud, this Montreal-set comedy finds humor and honesty in the messiness of modern love.

Catch Two Women in theaters beginning May 1st at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center, followed by a special screening and Q&A hosted by Not Your Daddy’s Films following the 7:10 p.m. show on May 2nd at the Monica.

The story centers on two neighbors, Violette and Florence, who form an unspoken bond over their shared dissatisfaction at home. Violette, adjusting to new motherhood, finds herself adrift in a marriage that has lost all sense of intimacy, while Florence, navigating her own partner’s lack of libido, feels similarly disconnected. Their apartments may only be a balcony apart, but emotionally, they’ve both been stranded for some time.

What follows isn’t subtle: both women begin having affairs, embarking on a string of clandestine hookups that quickly spiral into something both comedic and unexpectedly revealing. Yet what might sound like a setup for moralizing instead plays out with a surprising lightness, for rather than framing this infidelity as purely destructive, Two Women treats it as a catalyst—messy, impulsive, and often funny—for the characters to confront what’s missing in their lives and to begin to discover what they actually want.

At the center of it all are two standout performances. Karine Gonthier-Hyndman brings a subtle emotional evolution to Florence, charting her journey from quiet detachment to a more awakened, self-assured presence. Opposite her, Laurence Leboeuf gives Violette a lively, layered warmth, balancing the character’s natural humor with an undercurrent of vulnerability. Together, they create a dynamic that feels genuinely lived-in, less like a traditional movie friendship and more like something instinctive and real.

Robichaud’s direction keeps the tone buoyant even as the film brushes up against larger questions about relationships, expectations, and autonomy. There’s a sense that Two Women is less interested in offering definitive answers than in simply letting its characters explore the questions themselves. That openness extends to the film’s humor, which leans into awkwardness and absurdity without ever losing sight of its characters’ humanity.

Ultimately, Two Women is a film about connection: between friends, between partners, and (perhaps most importantly) with oneself. It’s playful without being trivial, thoughtful without being heavy, and anchored by performances that make every twist feel earned. In a landscape where stories about relationships often follow well-worn paths, this one finds its own rhythm—and invites audiences to enjoy the ride.

“[The film’s] reflections on modern relationships are engagingly comical, cynical and ultimately tender. ” – Allan Hunter, Screen Daily

“[Two Women is] unafraid of sex and female pleasure in a way that feels so rare in modern films.” – Jesse Saunders, Movie Jawn

The Art of Taking: Soderbergh’s ‘The Christophers’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a quiet thrill in encountering a late-period film from the great Steven Soderbergh, The Christophers delivers it almost immediately. Set largely within the cluttered confines of a once-great artist’s London home, the film trades spectacle for something knottier and more intimate: a duel of personalities, ideas, and unresolved histories.

Catch The Christophers in theaters beginning April 17th at the Laemmle Monica, NoHo, Town Center, and Glendale locations.

At its center is Julian Sklar, played with ferocious precision by Ian McKellen. A celebrated painter turned cultural relic, Julian has retreated into a self-made mausoleum of past successes and private grudges. McKellen inhabits him as both tyrant and ruin: acerbic, theatrical, and faintly ridiculous, yet never less than human. His performance resists easy sentiment; whatever sympathy he manages to arouse is accomplished in spite of Julian’s relentless abrasiveness, not because of any softening.

The premise initially suggests a familiar caper. Julian’s estranged children, eager to secure their inheritance, recruit Lori Butler, an art restorer who moonlights in forgery, to infiltrate his home and complete a set of unfinished paintings that could be worth a fortune. But the film quickly pivots away from such familiar Soderberghian mechanics and toward something more elusive as what unfolds between Julian and Lori (played by an electric Michaela Coel) is less a traditional con than a prolonged negotiation of identity and authorship.

Soderbergh, working with a script by Ed Solomon, keeps the narrative in constant motion—not through action, but through nonstop reversals of power. Conversations shift, allegiances blur, and what begins as manipulation gradually takes on the contours of recognition. Lori is not merely an intruder in Julian’s world; she is, in certain respects, his reflection. Both are artists stalled in different ways, each confronting the uneasy distance between creation and self-worth.

Formally, the film is deceptively loose. The camera drifts, lingers, and reacts, giving the impression of spontaneity while maintaining a careful sense of rhythm. The confined setting only heightens the sense of volatility, as if any exchange might tip into revelation or collapse. It’s a reminder of how much Soderbergh can do with minimal space when the material gives him something to push off against.

What ultimately distinguishes The Christophers is its preoccupation with legacy—not as a settled inheritance, but as something negotiated in real time. Who owns a work of art? Who gets to define its meaning? And what do we really leave behind: objects, or impressions? These questions animate every scene, giving the film a momentum that extends far beyond its deceptively contained setting. Anchored by two exceptional performances and a script that relishes every turn of the knife, The Christophers is a sharp, engaging showcase for Soderbergh at his most quietly confident.

“The Christophers feels as rich and expansive as anything Soderbergh has ever done.” – Seth Katz, Slant Magazine

“[The Christophers] bats about ideas pertaining to art, commerce, ownership and legacy with dexterous aplomb and boasts two equally superb leads who make the material crackle.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter