Featured Films Archives – Page 2 Of 64

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

Roommates, Revolution, and Reverie: Rediscovering Visconti’s ‘Conversation Piece’

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This month, a revival worth savoring is headed back to the big screen: Conversation Piece, the late-period chamber drama from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, returns in a new 4K restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber. If you’ve never encountered this strange, elegant, faintly scandalous film, this theatrical reissue is the ideal way to step inside its rarefied, decaying world.

Catch Conversation Piece in its much-anticipated re-release beginning February 20th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set almost entirely inside a grand Roman apartment—a practical concession to Visconti’s waning health—the film unfolds like a live-in painting: fitting, since its unnamed protagonist, a retired American professor played by Burt Lancaster, specializes in collecting “conversation pieces,” those intimate group portraits of domestic life. His own life, however, is all but sealed off: books, art, routine, and a heavy dose of solitude. That carefully controlled environment is suddenly upended when the Countess Bianca Brumonti (played with Circean glamour by Silvana Mangano) bullies her way into renting the upstairs flat, bringing along her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her volatile young lover Konrad, portrayed by longtime Visconti muse Helmut Berger.

What follows is less a traditional narrative than an all-out invasion, as noise, sex, politics, emotional turbulence, and generational upheaval flood the professor’s cloistered existence. Renovations begin without permission; parties erupt; strangers roam the halls. The professor protests (albeit mildly), yet inexorably finds himself drawn into their disorder, especially toward Berger’s Konrad, whose swaggering vulgarity and wounded intelligence combine to create a dangerous gravitational pull.

Visconti, working after a debilitating stroke and reportedly directing portions of the film from his wheelchair, turns such limitations into style. The film’s confined setting becomes a pressure cooker of class tension, erotic charge, and ideological debate. At times it plays like tragic farce, at others like philosophical confession, resulting in a tonal high-wire act—stately composition colliding with emotional disarray—that gives the movie its peculiar, lingering power.

Lancaster’s casting is part of the fascination. Long associated with physical dynamism and outward force, here he is turned inward: restrained, observant, aching. Whether you view the performance as daringly subdued or intriguingly misaligned, it’s impossible to look away. Berger, by contrast, is all sharp edges and dangerous charm, strutting and smirking through the film like a beautiful provocation.

Conversation Piece is about aging, envy of youth, sexual politics, class hypocrisy, and the uneasy coexistence of radical ideas with decadent taste. It’s also, not incidentally, wickedly funny in stretches, with Visconti allowing the absurdity of his characters’ self-justifications to show through the gilt frame.

Seeing this film restored in 4K reveals the tactile richness of its interiors—fabrics, paintings, skin, candlelight—while accentuating the painterly intent behind every composition. Like the artworks the professor cherishes, this restoration rewards close viewing and theatrical scale.

In short: a film about people who shouldn’t live together, restored so beautifully that you’ll be very glad they do.

(At least for two hours.)

Fathers, Sons, and a Broken Election: Inside ‘My Father’s Shadow’

February 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first-ever Nigerian film to be recognized among the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, plays like a remembered daydream stretched across a political fault line. Set during Nigeria’s fraught 1993 presidential election crisis, the film filters national upheaval through the perspective of two young brothers who’ve been granted a rare day with their mostly absent father. The result is both a coming-of-age story and an act of cinematic reclamation: personal memory reframed as national history.

Catch My Father’s Shadow in theaters beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Akin and his older brother Remi (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), the film begins in a rural village where routine boredom is broken by the sudden return of the boys’ father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). Charismatic, imposing, and emotionally opaque, he arrives without explanation and impulsively decides to take the boys with him to Lagos. Their mother is absent; the boys readily obey.

Folarin’s mission is simple: collect months of unpaid wages before the country’s political uncertainty curdles into chaos. But the errand swiftly becomes a wandering circuit. The boys encounter men who treat Folarin with peculiar deference, calling him “boss” and “leader.” They are told to show respect to strangers presented as quasi-uncles. Davies smartly keeps exposition thin; political crisis is not explained, but is overheard, glimpsed, felt.

What gives the film its emotional core is the gradual reshaping of the boys’ image of their father. Folarin begins as a near-mythic figure: commanding, sharply dressed, unquestionable. Over the course of the day, however, he becomes both more human and more contradictory. He is strict, evasive, possibly unfaithful, and frequently distracted, yet he is also attentive in bursts, showing them city landmarks, recounting his courtship of their mother, teaching Akin to swim, and bending rules to let them explore forbidden spaces. His philosophy of adulthood—that everything is sacrifice, and one must pray not to sacrifice the wrong thing—lands with tragic force in the context of both family and nation.

The film’s governing question emerges when one of the boys repeats his mother’s strange dictum: that their father’s absence is proof of love, because he is away earning money for them, just as God, who also loves them, remains unseen. Is absence love? The film does not provide an easy answer, but lets the question echo against images of political upheaval, paternal limitation, and inherited memory.

By its end, My Father’s Shadow has outgrown its original container as a story about one family on one day into an ambitious exploration about how children assemble identity from partial knowledge, how nations fracture private lives, and how cinema can serve as an instrument of emotional archaeology. It turns political rupture into family myth—and family myth into something like scripture.

“British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Akinola Davies Jr. announces himself as a major cinematic voice.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

“The historic crisis [of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election] makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Carmen Maura Shines in Maryam Touzani’s Tender ‘Calle Málaga’

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For generations of moviegoers, Carmen Maura’s face is inseparable from the films of Pedro Almodóvar, beginning with their first collaboration forty-five years ago and continuing across seven defining features of modern Spanish cinema. In Calle Málaga, Maura reminds us why she remains one of the screen’s most expressive and emotionally generous performers, delivering a luminous late-career lead performance that is by turns funny, sensual, stubborn, and deeply moving.

Catch Calle Malaga on the big screen beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center theaters.

Director Maryam Touzani’s film centers on María Ángeles, an elderly Spanish widow living in Tangier, Morocco, where she has built a comfortable life of routine, friendship, and hard-earned independence. Her days are filled with small but sustaining pleasures: greeting market vendors by name, tending balcony flowers, listening to romantic boleros, and visiting the cemetery where her husband and friends are buried. When her daughter arrives from Madrid with urgent financial troubles and a plan to sell the apartment, María Ángeles is suddenly confronted with the loss not just of her home, but of her autonomy.

The premise may be simple, but its execution is rich in both detail and feeling. Touzani, working from a script co-written with her husband and fellow filmmaker Nabil Ayouch and inspired by her grandmother’s actual experiences, treats domestic space as emotional territory. Rooms, objects, and streets are not background but biography, containers of memory that cannot be easily boxed up and sold. The film understands how profoundly place and identity intertwine, especially later in one’s life.

Maura carries the film with masterful aplomb. The shifts in her inner life register instantly: pride wounded, resolve rekindled, mischief flashing back into her eyes. She never reduces María Ángeles to a stock “feisty elder” archetype, instead grounding her resistance in believable portrayals of dignity and desire. Even moments that do threaten to tip into sentimentality remain anchored by her naturalism and innate charm.

The mother-daughter conflict is drawn with melancholy sharpness, capturing how love and resentment can calcify over time. Yet the film makes room for surprise and renewal. After a forced move into assisted living—and a quick, cleverly engineered escape—María Ángeles begins rebuilding her prior life on her own terms, launching a small neighborhood soccer-night and gradually forming an unexpected bond with a local antiques dealer. What follows includes one of the film’s most refreshing elements: a tender, late-life romantic and sexual awakening, portrayed with warmth and wit.

Above all, Calle Málaga stands as a worthy showcase for Carmen Maura, an icon revisiting familiar themes of womanhood, independence, and reinvention, while proving she remains as captivating now as at the zenith of her career.

“A sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Screen Daily

A Poet: A Darkly Comic Fable About Art, Failure, and the Cost of Belief

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet is a caustic, unexpectedly tender portrait of artistic failure and the uneasy hope that comes with believing in someone else. Set in Medellín, the film follows a middle-aged, alcoholic poet whose early promise has long since calcified into bitterness and artistic paralysis. When he encounters a gifted teenage student from a working-class background, he seizes the chance to reinvent himself as a mentor, projecting his lost ambitions onto her raw natural talent. What unfolds is a sharply observed fable about ego, exploitation, and the uneasy line between nurturing one’s art and using it as a lifeline.

Catch A Poet in theaters beginning January 30th at the Laemmle Royal, or at Glendale beginning February 6th.

Oscar Restrepo (portrayed by newcomer Ubeimar Rios with remarkable authenticity) is introduced as a man at war with the world and himself. He drinks too much, picks arguments about poetry with strangers, and torpedoes rare professional opportunities through self-sabotage and disdain. Yet Soto never treats Oscar as a punchline alone. His failures are rendered with specificity and compassion, revealing a man who grasps the general shape of the life he wanted, even as he proves incapable of living it. Oscar’s volatility is inseparable from his sincerity; his tragedy is not that he lacks talent, but that he cannot reconcile art with adulthood.

The film’s emotional axis shifts when Oscar begins teaching at a public high school and encounters a student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), whose writing displays clarity, intelligence, and an unvarnished sense of voice. Unlike Oscar, she approaches art pragmatically, weighing its value against economic reality and familial obligations. Their relationship is neither inspirational nor redemptive in the traditional sense: Oscar is an erratic, often irresponsible guide, while his protégée resists being molded into a passive, yielding symbol. Their bond is defined less by uplift than by friction, an uneasy negotiation between belief and self-preservation.

A Poet sharpens its satire as the pair enter elite literary spaces, where well-funded institutions eagerly embrace the young writer as a marketable emblem of authenticity. Here, Soto skewers the art world’s hunger for narratives that flatter its own virtue, exposing a system in which mentorship, patronage, and diversity often function as performance. The film’s critique is pointed but never smug, grounded in lived contradiction rather than broad caricature.

Shot on grainy 16mm, A Poet has a tactile, slightly unmoored quality that suits its blend of farce and melancholy. Bursts of music heighten the absurdity of Oscar’s misadventures while allowing moments of genuine tenderness to land unforced. In charting the gap between artistic idealism and material reality, Soto delivers a film that is funny, bruising, and quietly devastating—a story not about succeeding in art, but about what it costs to keep believing in it at all.

“Rios is so believable as Oscar, you’d think this film was a documentary of his life.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety