Featured Films Archives – Page 2 Of 65

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

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