Featured Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

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

François Ozon’s Cool, Unsettling ‘The Stranger’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean to bring The Stranger—a novel defined by absence, detachment, and interiority—into a medium built on appearances? In his new adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, François Ozon approaches that challenge not by radically reimagining the text, but by making its silences visible. The result is a film that feels at once faithful and interpretive, attuned to both the enduring power of Camus’s text and the historical context it left largely unspoken.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Ozon discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning April 10th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

Set in 1930s Algiers under French colonial rule, the film follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a clerk whose emotional detachment shapes every aspect of his life. He receives news of his mother’s death with little visible reaction, carrying out the rituals of mourning with a kind of mechanical precision. In Ozon’s retelling, it’s as if Meursault has only just arrived in the world at that moment: unformed, unmoored, and curiously untouched by the social expectations that surround him.

That sense of dislocation extends into his relationships. He begins an affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), responds to her questions with indifference, and drifts into the orbit of his volatile neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault rarely initiates; he responds. Yet this passivity proves deceptive as he repeatedly declines to perform basic gestures that would mark him as a passable member of society while simultaneously slipping into patterns of behavior that align him with its ugliest assumptions.

Ozon captures this tension with remarkable precision. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film emphasizes texture and physical sensation: sunlight on skin, the rhythm of breath, the weight of heat pressing down on bodies. These tactile details root us in Meursault’s immediate experience even as his inner life remains opaque. Voisin’s performance is key here: controlled, watchful, and withholding, he becomes a figure defined as much by what he doesn’t express as by what he does.

At the same time, Ozon subtly expands the frame of Camus’ story. Where the novel treats its colonial setting as a given, the film foregrounds it, allowing the social and political tensions of French Algeria to register more clearly. The people who exist at the margins of Meursault’s awareness take on a greater presence, not through overt revision but through subtle shifts in emphasis. The result is a quiet but meaningful rebalancing, one that reframes Meursault’s indifference as something shaped not only by temperament but by environment.

As perhaps the quintessential work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger endures not because it offers answers, but because it resists them. Ozon’s adaptation honors that resistance, even as it invites us to look more closely at the world surrounding it, and at what it means to move through that world without fully engaging with it.

“The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“Ozon’s The Stranger keeps the spirit of its source material alive as a timeless warning in a modern world of stark polarization, ongoing colonialism, and plenty of Meursaults ignoring the suffering of others.” – Monica Castillo, The AV Club

Babysitting the Void: Stalled Adulthood in ‘Fantasy Life.’

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is the kind of modest, perceptive character piece that sneaks up on you: initially breezy, even familiar, before revealing a deeper ache beneath its carefully arranged surfaces. A lightly comic drama about stalled adulthood and second acts, Fantasy Life centers on Sam (Shear), an anxious, recently laid-off paralegal whose life has quietly collapsed. Through a combination of desperation and social proximity, Sam takes a babysitting job for a wealthy, creatively inclined couple, David and Dianne, and finds himself drawn into their fragile domestic ecosystem.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Matthew Shear discuss his directorial debut with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it at the Laemmle Royal, NoHo, Glendale, or Town Center theaters beginning April 3rd.

The premise has the makings of farce, but the film resists easy escalation. Instead, Shear builds a tone of low-key, accumulating discomfort, where every interaction feels slightly off-balance. Sam’s crippling anxiety isn’t played for charm; it’s awkward, limiting, and at times frighteningly disruptive. Yet it also becomes the unlikely bridge between him and Dianne, a former actress who now drifts through her own life with a kind of numbed disillusionment. Their connection—tentative, intimate, and ethically precarious—forms the film’s emotional core, less a conventional romance than a mutual recognition between two people who feel they’ve missed their moment.

It’s here that Amanda Peet delivers what many have called a career-best turn. As Dianne, she is at once brittle and luminous, exuding the residual magnetism of someone who once commanded attention while allowing the cracks in that persona to show. There’s no vanity in her performance: Peet leans entirely into Dianne’s dissatisfaction and flashes of need, and the result is both funny and devastating. In the context of Peet’s long absence from major film roles, the performance carries an added resonance; a meta-textual echo of the character’s own sidelined career. That poignancy deepens further given Peet’s recently disclosed breast cancer diagnosis, lending her return an added layer of vulnerability that subtly accentuates the film’s themes of resilience and reinvention.

Shear, pulling from a historied lineage of New York-based neurotic comedies, crafts dialogue that feels lived-in and unforced, with a sharp ear for the rhythms of privileged but emotionally adrift lives. The ensemble, anchored by Alessandro Nivola’s charmingly self-involved musician, creates a dense social web where everyone seems both deeply connected and fundamentally alone. The stakes are, on paper, relatively small, but Shear understands that for his characters, these life developments and emotional entanglements feel seismic. Ultimately, the film is less about dramatic transformation than about the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day, and the uneasy realization that those stories might be all we have.

In that sense, Fantasy Life more than lives up to its title. It’s about the gap between the lives we imagine and the ones we inhabit, and the strange, fleeting moments when those two begin, however imperfectly, to overlap.

“Shear eloquently portrays the ways that near-misses can still feel like cataclysmic life events.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The kind of quiet film about life’s little moments, insecurities, and challenges that we rarely see… Peet reminds us that she is a bona fide star.” – Phil Walsh, Geek Vibes Nation

The Future Is Thinking: ‘The AI Doc’ and the Anxiety of Our Moment

March 25, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a defining anxiety of the present moment, it may be this: We are building something we do not fully understand. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, begins from that uneasy premise and refuses to resolve it into something comforting. Instead, it becomes a wide-ranging, often disorienting attempt to map the emotional and intellectual terrain of artificial intelligence at a moment when even the experts can’t agree on where we’re headed.

Catch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters beginning March 27th at the Laemmle Noho 7 and Monica Film Center.

Roher, coming off his Oscar-winning Navalny, positions himself not as an authority but as a stand-in for the audience—curious, overwhelmed, and increasingly uneasy. As he and his wife prepare to welcome their first child, a looming question takes hold: What kind of world is he bringing this child into? AI, once an abstract concept, suddenly feels immediate and consequential. The film uses that tension as its narrative spine, turning a global technological shift into an intimate, almost existential dilemma.

From there, The AI Doc expands outward, assembling a striking range of voices across the AI spectrum. On one end are the so-called “doomers,” who warn that the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to catastrophic outcomes, including the possibility—however speculative—of human extinction. Their arguments are not framed as fringe paranoia but as serious, technically grounded concerns: systems growing beyond human comprehension, incentives misaligned with human survival, and a pace of development that far outstrips our ability to comprehend (much less regulate) it.

On the other side are the optimists, those who see AI not as a threat but as a once-in-history opportunity. In their view, the same technology that inspires fear could unlock solutions to some of humanity’s most intractable problems: curing disease, transforming education, addressing climate challenges, and reducing global inequality.

What makes the film compelling is not that it chooses between these camps, but that it refuses to. Roher oscillates between perspectives, absorbing each argument only to have it unsettled by the next. The result is a kind of intellectual whiplash that mirrors the broader cultural conversation around AI: every confident claim met with an equally persuasive counterpoint. Even basic questions—what AI actually is, how it works, where it’s going, etc.—prove surprisingly difficult to answer in any definitive way.

By the closing act, the term “apocaloptimist” emerges as a kind of uneasy compromise, a recognition that AI holds both extraordinary promise and profound danger. The film doesn’t argue for a single path forward so much as it insists on the urgency of pondering the question: How do we navigate between those extremes? It’s a question that extends beyond engineers and executives to anyone living through what may one day be called the “Age of AI.”

“Director Daniel Roher makes a good-faith effort to engage with a topic whose potential impact only gets bigger the closer you look at it.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The type of documentary vital for someone who needs a streamlined explainer of the concerns and hopes around artificial intelligence.” – John Dotson, InSession Film

Running on Empty: Compassion and Crisis in ‘Late Shift’

March 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

When Late Shift premiered in 2025, it quickly established itself as a gripping portrait of life inside an overburdened healthcare system. Now returning to theaters for an expanded run, Petra Volpe’s propulsive hospital drama offers audiences another chance to experience one of the year’s most quietly intense character studies.

Catch Late Shift beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

At the center of the film is Leonie Benesch, an actor who has developed a reputation for portraying capable professionals under extreme duress. After her acclaimed performance in The Teachers’ Lounge—which earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature—and memorable roles in September 5 and The Crown, Benesch once again plays a woman trying to maintain her composure in an environment that threatens to overwhelm her.

In Late Shift, she is Floria, a single mother and dedicated nurse beginning a long night in the surgical ward of a Zurich hospital. The film unfolds almost entirely over the course of one exhausting shift. From the moment Floria pulls on her blue scrubs and steps onto the floor, the pace is relentless. The ward is understaffed, one colleague has called in sick, and the list of patients requiring attention seems endless.

Volpe structures the film as a breathless procession of urgent tasks and interruptions. Floria rushes through corridors, checks charts, administers medication, and tries to keep dozens of patients calm while juggling the demands of doctors, relatives, and a nervous trainee nurse.

The film’s tension comes not from a single dramatic crisis but from the constant accumulation of small ones: An elderly man awaits test results from an overbooked doctor; a patient’s medication allergy threatens to slip through the cracks in the rush of rounds; a terminally ill woman’s worried sons demand updates that Floria scarcely has time to give. Every encounter matters, and every minute lost with one patient means someone else must wait.

Volpe captures this controlled chaos with brisk, fluid filmmaking that keeps the camera close to Floria as she moves through the hospital’s sterile corridors. The effect is immersive: viewers experience the shift as she does, racing from one urgent call to the next with barely a moment to breathe, faithfully mirroring the rhythms of hospital life, where emotional highs and lows arrive in rapid succession.

Amid this constant motion, Benesch gives a performance of remarkable control. Floria is compassionate and efficient, but the strain is always visible just beneath the surface. In small gestures—a weary pause in the hallway, a flicker of frustration when another demand arrives—Benesch reveals the human cost of a job that requires endless patience and emotional endurance.

Returning to theaters for a second go, Late Shift remains a tense, empathetic reminder of the unseen labor that keeps hospitals running, and of the quiet heroism that’s required to endure it.

“Benesch could be cornering the market in tough, competent, hardworking young women doing their best in a stressful situation.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Perhaps the slickest example yet of [Volpe’s] mainstream but character-oriented storytelling sensibility.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

A Summer of Echoes: ‘Miroirs No. 3’ and the Art of Starting Over

March 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Christian Petzold has long been one of Europe’s most distinctive filmmakers, crafting coolly precise dramas wherein ordinary settings conceal deep emotional fault lines. In his latest film, Miroirs No. 3, a chance encounter on a quiet country road sets off a moving tale about grief, identity, and the strange ways people try to begin again.

Catch Miroirs No. 3 in theaters beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, or from March 27th at the Glendale or Town Center 5.

The film opens with Laura (Paula Beer), a piano student in Berlin who seems adrift even before tragedy strikes. After reluctantly accompanying her boyfriend Jakob on a weekend trip out of the city, she asks to turn back almost as soon as they set out. What follows is sudden and violent: a car crash that leaves Jakob dead and Laura, miraculously, alive. Shaken and disoriented, she is taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a middle-aged woman who witnessed the accident and lives nearby in a modest rural home.

Rather than heading to a hospital, however, Laura asks if she can stay with Betty while she convalesces. The arrangement is unexpected but quietly welcomed. In the days that follow, Laura drifts into Betty’s daily routines: helping paint a fence, working in the garden, preparing meals in the kitchen. Freed from the pressures of her former life, she appears almost relieved to inhabit this temporary refuge.

Yet Petzold’s films rarely settle for simple emotional recovery, as subtle signs suggest that Betty’s generosity is tied to deeper wounds of her own. Her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a nearby auto repair shop, seem wary of Laura’s presence. Their unease hints at unresolved family tensions and a past loss that still reverberates through the household.

Visually, Miroirs No. 3 carries the director’s familiar elegance. Shot in natural light by Petzold’s longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm, the Brandenburg countryside becomes a place both serene and uneasy, where summer warmth never quite dispels the lingering chill of grief.

At the center of it all is Paula Beer, continuing her remarkable collaboration with Petzold. Her performance balances opacity with vulnerability, making Laura both enigmatic and deeply human. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Miroirs No. 3 is less about solving a mystery than about watching people tentatively reshape themselves after suffering a loss.

Quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant, the film offers another example of Petzold’s penchant for uncovering profundity within the smallest moments of everyday life.

“A compact, masterful film, with affecting performances.” – Dustin Chang, Screen Anarchy

“A quietly haunting domestic drama that remains cloistered in its pastoral setting.” – Brad Hanford, Slant Magazine

Living With the Volcano: Rosi’s Mesmerizing ‘Pompei: Below the Clouds’

March 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Nearly two thousand years after Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in ash, the volcano remains, less a relic than a constant, ambient presence. In Pompei: Below the Clouds, director Gianfranco Rosi turns his gaze toward the modern communities that live in Vesuvius’ shadow, culminating in a study of daily life shaped by history, haunted by catastrophe, and suspended between past and present.

Catch Pompei: Below the Clouds in theaters beginning March 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Rosi is no stranger to immersive, place-based filmmaking. The Golden Lion-winning Sacro GRA and the Golden Bear recipient’s Fire at Sea established him as one of contemporary cinema’s greatest observers, an artist whose documentaries feel at once intimate and planetary. Shot over three years in and around Naples, Pompei: Below the Clouds may be among his most humane works, yet it hums with unease. Vesuvius does not dominate the frame; instead, it lingers in the background, a calm but potentially devastating fact of life.

Working in luminous black-and-white cinematography, Rosi captures a Naples veiled in silvery cloud and sea mist. Fumaroles exhale pale steam near the volcano’s summit while, down below, the city exhales its own brands of smoke: industrial plumes, street fires, and the everyday combustion of urban existence. The threat of disaster, natural or human-made, never quite recedes.

Elsewhere, archaeologists carefully brush dirt from newly unearthed bones in Pompeii’s ruins, while police pursue tomb robbers tunneling through the storied soil. In a museum basement, a curator tends to long-buried statues and fragments as if they were old friends. “Time destroys everything, but it also preserves everything,” one historian reflects, a sentiment that becomes the film’s quiet thesis.

With its spare, tactile soundscape—blending music with the subterranean murmurs of earth and water—Pompei: Below the Clouds listens as much as it observes. Rosi isn’t interested in spectacle; he’s attentive to rhythms, textures, and the fragile balance between endurance and collapse. The film ultimately suggests that living beneath Vesuvius is less about fearing apocalypse than about negotiating coexistence with it. Past and present aren’t opposites here but layers, compacted together like geological strata. In patiently recording how people work, worry, study, remember, and simply pass the time, Rosi masterfully paints a portrait of a community suspended between memory and possibility, where history is not a distant chapter but a daily companion.

“An intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his [Italy-focused] triptych.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“As a filmmaker, Rosi acts as both guide and preservationist, making movies that may one day be uncovered like statues below ground, dug up by future archeologists trying to grasp how we lived.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and this humming, keen-eyed film is interested in all of them.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

‘Charliebird’: When the Music Doesn’t Fix Everything

March 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

How do you make space for joy inside a children’s hospital? In Charliebird, winner of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival’s US Narrative Feature Prize, the answer is neither grand nor sentimental. It’s a ukulele carried from room to room, a pop song request taken seriously, or a willingness to sit beside someone who doesn’t feel like singing.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Libby Ewing discuss her new hit film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see Ewing, lead actors Samantha Smart and Gabrielle Ochoa Perez, and production designer Emily Li participate in live Q&As following the film’s one-night stay at the Laemmle Royal on March 5th, or to kick off its theatrical run at Glendale beginning March 6-8th.

Charliebird centers on Al (Smart), a music therapist working with seriously ill young patients. Her job description ranges from lullabies for restless five-year-olds to tracking down the right track to coax a guarded teenager into cracking a smile. It’s delicate work—sometimes playful, sometimes devastating—yet the film resists any temptation to frame it as miraculous. Music here doesn’t cure; it connects.

That connection proves hardest to forge with Charlie (Perez), a sharp, funny seventeen-year-old who has spent years in and out of hospitals. Convinced that adults are shielding her from the truth about her condition, Charlie has little patience for forced cheer. What unfolds between her and Al is not a tidy inspirational arc but a gradual, hard-earned friendship. They talk about sex and regret, about fear and boredom, about the awkwardness of being young in a body that won’t cooperate. Their conversations are by turns irreverent and raw, sidestepping clichés about generational divides or saintly caregivers.

The film’s power lies in that restraint. Rather than building toward sweeping melodrama, Charliebird offers glimpses: a Snow White costume that doesn’t quite land, a hospital corridor that feels too narrow, a moment of laughter that catches both women off guard. Cinematographer Luca Del Puppo shoots in an unusual, vertically compressed frame that at first feels constricted, then intimate, as though we’re being invited into a private space. This visual approach mirrors the story itself: focused, uncluttered, attentive to faces.

Smart’s performance as Al reveals a woman whose devotion to her patients coexists with her own unresolved struggles. Perez, meanwhile, delivers a breakout turn, allowing Charlie’s sarcasm to soften into vulnerability without losing her edge.

Ewing makes bold choices in the film’s second half, embracing ambiguity instead of easy answers. Not every question is resolved. Not every outcome is spelled out. The film trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty—much as its characters must.

Ultimately, Charliebird argues for the value of presence over perfection. It suggests that even when one’s circumstances can’t be changed, a shared joke, an honest confession, or a song played slightly off-key can resonate the longest.

“An emotional roller coaster that will inspire viewers to cherish every day.” – Thomas Duffy, Film Book

“A simple, elegant look at friendship and finality.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire