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Repertory Central – Upcoming Classics include THE CONVERSATION, ARMY OF SHADOWS, PARIS, TEXAS and BASQUIAT.

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Wasn’t it fabulous getting to see Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI on the big screen?  Well, there’s more where that came from. Get fired up for Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS, Wim Wenders’s PARIS, TEXAS, and Julian Schnabel’s BASQUIAT in the coming weeks, plus our one-night screening of LEGENDS OF THE FALL (with director Ed Zwick in person for a Q&A).  We’re planning even more for the fall. Add to these all the award-season films coming to Laemmle screens, that is a lot of rewarding moviegoing!
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THE CONVERSATION follows lonely wiretapping expert and devout Catholic Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who is hired to record a seemingly innocuous conversation in San Francisco’s Union Square between two lovers (Frederick Forsythe and Cindy Williams). Upon re-hearing the tapes, however, Caul believes he may put the couple in danger if he turns the material over to his client (Robert Duvall). But what one hears can ultimately turn out to be quite different from what was actually recorded. Opens this Friday at the Laemmle Royal, Town Center, and Glendale.
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ARMY OF SHADOWS opens August 16 at the Royal and Town Center: A gorgeous restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 epic of the French Resistance during World War II, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret. Based on the novel by Joseph Kessel (perhaps best known for Belle de Jour), the film draws on the wartime experiences of Kessel and Melville himself, both active members of the Resistance and Free French Forces. This is the first time the film has been released in the U.S.
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PARIS, TEXAS opens August 30 at the Royal. New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. PARIS, TEXAS follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski).
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BASQUIAT, opening September 13 at the Laemmle NoHo, depicts the meteoric rise of the brilliant artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, played by Jeffrey Wright in one of his first roles. Starting out as a street artist, living in Thompkins Square Park in a cardboard box, Jean-Michel is “discovered” by Andy Warhol’s art world and becomes a star. But success has a high price, and Basquiat pays with friendship, love, and, eventually, his life.

“A puzzle-like homage to the noir genre itself, with echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and CHINATOWN,” ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS opens Friday at the Royal.

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Nineteen nineties small-town China. A woman’s body washes up in the local river. The chief of police, Ma Zhe, is tasked with heading up the investigation. An obvious perp leads to a hasty arrest, though the mystery lingers in Ma Zhe’s mind. What kind of darkness is truly at play here? Director Wei Shujun’s murky throwback film noir, gritty, textured film grain captures the pulpy proceedings. Torrents of rain envelop the characters as they descend into madness in pursuit of the truth. Equal parts atmospheric tour-de-force and beguiling puzzler, Only the River Flows is a masterfully styled ode to a bygone cinematic era and a sharp-edged portrait of provincial paranoia. The film, starring Zhu Yilong, is based on Yu Hua’s popular short novel Mistakes by the River. We open the film this Friday at the Royal.

“In a seamy offbeat world englobing the gleaming surfaces of Park Chan-wook’s terrific Decision to Leave, all scuzzed-up and grimy and the Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice with seams of absurdist dark comedy, Wei Shujun’s inventive riff on Asian-noir gives the expanding subgenre something its Chinese contributions often lack: a pitch-black sense of humor. Like the greatest genre exponent, Raymond Chandler, Wei cares less about logistics than about mood in this rainy, grainy movie (DP Chengma shoots on film in low light, giving the images a lovely dirty texture), lending the film in a cool retro vibe and a schlocky Brian De Palma-style opening. Humanizing quirks and flourishes abound, providing profundity to this touchingly melancholic portrait of small-town desperation.” -Variety.

  

“An enigmatic, progressively more engrossing noir directed by Wei Shujun, structurally inventive, if not downright format-twisting. The cinematography is genuinely star-making.” ~ Screen International

“A film noir that’s so vintage it comes wrapped in crackling celluloid and old cassette tapes. Written and directed by Wei Shujun, the movie is a puzzle-like homage to the noir genre itself, with echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville, Chinatown, and Memories of Murder.” ~ Hollywood Reporter

Wei Shujun was born in 1991 in Beijing, China. He started his career as an actor at age 14. He completed his master’s degree at the Communication University of China. His films include On the Border (short, 2018, Special Jury Award at Cannes Film Festival), Striding into the Wind (2020, Official Selection Cannes Film Festival) and Ripples of Life (2021, Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes). 

THE TERMINATOR 40th Anniversary Screening with Producer Gale Anne Hurd Thursday at the Laemmle NoHo!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 40th anniversary screening of one of the most popular sci-fi films of all time, THE TERMINATOR, the movie that spawned one of the screen’s most profitable film franchises. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his most iconic role, Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. We’re screening it as part of Art House Theater Day on Thursday, July 25 at 7 PM at the NoHo and will host producer Gale Anne Hurd for a Q&A. You might ask, is this really an indie film? Spoiler alert…it is!

“Knowing that many people have never seen the film or missed out on seeing it on the silver screen, I couldn’t be more thrilled to celebrate THE TERMINATOR‘s 40th anniversary with its return to cinemas on Art House Theater Day,” said producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Walking Dead, Armageddon). “People may wonder if THE TERMINATOR is truly an indie film. As the film’s producer, I can assure you it is. Jim Cameron and I made the film for $6.4 million, which included a completion bond and a 10% contingency. We had a variety of co-financiers, pre-sold rights and our distribution was through Orion Pictures rather than a major studio – the very definition of an indie film, both then and now. We hope you’ll enjoy the nostalgic experience of seeing it this summer!”

Writer-director Cameron and producer Hurd had both apprenticed at Roger Corman’s low-budget factory, New World Pictures, in the late 1970s and early 1980s when they joined forces to create THE TERMINATOR. Their original screenplay (with co-writer William Wisher, inspired by works of Harlan Ellison) chronicles the battle for the survival of the human race against Skynet, a synthetic intelligent machine network of the future. In 2029, an automaton killer, T-800 (Schwarzenegger) is dispatched through time to assassinate an unsuspecting waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in 1984, who turns out to be the future mother of the twenty-first–century human resistance leader, John Connor. To protect her, Connor sends guerrilla fighter Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). The ensuing chase, with the seemingly unstoppable Schwarzenegger, a laconic, leather-clad, and lumbering destruction machine pursuing Connor and Reese through the streets of Los Angeles, is a model of low-budget efficiency and resourcefulness.

Contemporary critics embraced the sci-fi suspense thriller, with Kirk Ellis of the Hollywood Reporter calling it “a genuine steel metal trap of a movie.” Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader characterized its “almost graceful violence…(has) the air of a demented ballet,” and Janet Maslin in The New York Times cited it as a “B-movie with flair.” The film was a genuine sleeper, and its success led to several sequels, a television series and video games. The latest incarnation of the series, Terminator: Dark Fate, with Cameron returning to a creative role, is set to open theatrically later this year. The film that started it all, THE TERMINATOR, was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2008.

Cameron, of course, became one of the most sought-after filmmakers in Hollywood, staying in the sci-fi world for several landmark films (Aliens, The Abyss, Avatar) and winning Oscars for a venture into the past, Titanic, the biggest box-office hit of the twentieth century. Schwarzenegger went on to movie superstardom and political success. His terse line reading in the film, “I’ll be back,” is ranked 37th of the American Film Institute’s all-time great movie quotes, and his character Terminator is ranked as the 22nd greatest movie villain. Our guest, Gale Anne Hurd emerged as one of the most successful female producers of the era, with Aliens, Alien Nation, and Armageddon among her hits.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964) 60th Anniversary Screenings.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classic Series present this month’s screening in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Michelangelo Antonioni’s vibrant masterpiece RED DESERT, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1964 and collected rave reviews around the world on its release over the next several months. We will show the film at five of our theaters at 7 PM on Wednesday, July 31.

Antonioni had earned critical acclaim for the three movies in his “alienation trilogy”—’L’Avventura,’ ‘La Notte,’ and ‘Eclipse’ — made during the early 1960s. RED DESERT explored some of the same themes but introduced a new element to the director’s work. The three earlier movies were all shot in black-and-white, but with RED DESERT Antonioni decided to experiment with color cinematography for the first time, and critics heralded his achievement. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann declared, “With Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, the art of the film advances…quite simply, it is the best use of color I have ever seen in a film, exquisite in itself.” Kauffmann added, “there is a buried history of modern painting in it, from the Impressionists through Mondrian to Hopper and Wyeth.”

Monica Vitti, who had starred in all three of Antonioni’s earlier movies, has the leading role of Giuliana, the wife of an industrialist in Ravenna. She is emotionally troubled and eventually begins an affair with an employee at her husband’s factory. Carlo Chionetti plays the husband, and Richard Harris — fresh from his Oscar-nominated performance in Lindsay Anderson’s ‘This Sporting Life’ — plays her lover. Antonioni wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Tonino Guerra.

In addition to its psychological themes, the film offers prescient critique of industrial pollution, with the color cinematography contributing to this political commentary. A key collaborator was director of photography Carlo Di Palma, who worked closely with Antonioni to paint the landscapes when necessary to create the desired mood of malaise. Antonioni and Di Palma collaborated again on the director’s most successful movie, the English-language ‘Blowup,’ an Oscar nominee in 1966. Other directors around the world — including Ettore Scola, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Sidney Lumet — worked with Di Palma. The cinematographer later established a fruitful collaboration with Woody Allen on such films as ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ ‘Radio Days,’ and ‘Bullets Over Broadway.’

Time magazine called RED DESERT “at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by Italy’s masterful Michelangelo Antonioni.” More recently, Geoff Andrew of Time Out hailed “perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni’s entire career.” Robbie Collin of London’s Daily Telegraph declared, “Almost half a century on, RED DESERT remains a film of rare beauty and brooding erotic intensity.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called the film Antonioni’s “most mysterious and awe-inspiring work.”

Screening one night only at the Royal in West Los Angeles, the Town Center in Encino, and Laemmle Theatres in Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall.

“I set out to make a film about solidarity and finding the small gestures of kindness and understanding between strangers and family alike.” Levan Akin on his film CROSSING, opening July 19 at the Royal.

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Next week at the Royal we open Crossing, the acclaimed new film by the Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin (And Then We Danced). It follows Lia, a retired teacher living in Georgia, as she tries to fulfill a promise to find her long-lost niece, Tekla. The search takes her to Istanbul, a beautiful city that seems full of connections and possibilities. There she meets Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights, and Tekla starts to feel closer than ever.
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Akin will attend the July 20 evening screening for a Q&A.
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“A piercing portrait of forgiveness across generations…Dumanli, making her screen feature debut here, is a pure joy to watch, enveloping the movie in a sense of warm coziness and safety as, just being in her presence, you feel like everything will somehow work out.” ~ Ryan Lattanzio, indieWire

“It’s seductive, fragmented, involving.” ~ Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

“Akin makes a calculated choice to raise awareness of the trans community in Istanbul, but he does so through representation rather than manipulation.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety

“This novelistic drama takes time to connect its central triangle but does so with a suppleness and restraint that amplify the emotional rewards of its lovely open-ended conclusion.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Director’s statement: With Crossing I set out to make a film about solidarity and finding the small gestures of kindness and understanding between strangers and family alike. I also wanted to show rooms and places that are rarely explored in stories from the region. 

The film is based on a true story I was told whilst researching And Then We Danced, about a grandmother traveling from Georgia to Turkey in search of her trans granddaughter. Just like with my previous film, making Crossing was very challenging. The existence of LGBTQ+ people in Georgia and Turkey is under large pressure and Turkey’s president Erdogan ran most of his  recent presidential campaign around anti-LGBTQ+ rhetorics. 

In my film we follow retired schoolteacher Lia who is looking to fulfill her recently deceased sister’s dying wish – to find her lost trans daughter, Tekla. Together with a down on his luck  young man, Achi, who claims to have Tekla’s address in Istanbul, she travels from Georgia to  Turkey to find her niece. Lia and Achi are from different generations and as such don’t have  much in common even though they live in the same country. There is a great divide of ideology in Georgia between the Soviet and the post-Soviet generation. Achi desperately wants to leave Georgia as he lives under the oppressive rule of his older brother and he knows there is no future in Georgia for his young western leaning generation. 

As the journey unravels, so does Lia. Through her relationship to Achi and her encounters with  the trans community in Istanbul, specifically with Evrim (a trans woman who works as a lawyer for an NGO in Istanbul), Lia begins to open up and see the world and her place in it differently. All three main characters have made great sacrifices in limiting their lives and inhibitions in order to not upset the ruling hegemony. 

I myself am Georgian born in Sweden (my ancestry is from Batumi), and I have ties to Turkey (both my parents were born there). The journey from Batumi in Georgia, along the Black Sea to Istanbul is a journey I have taken many times myself as a child. I am a mix of many cultures, traditions and norms and the themes of modernity versus tradition are very personal and  something I have struggled with myself. I drew a lot from my own experiences, asking myself if  my grandparents were living today, would they accept me for who I am? Probably not – but in  showing these examples of acceptance I hope to inspire new ways forward.

40th Anniversary Screening of SUBURBIA with Writer-Director Penelope Spheeris in Person Celebrating Art House Theater Day.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 40th anniversary of SUBURBIA (1984), the first narrative feature film of acclaimed writer-director Penelope Spheeris. Co-produced by Roger Corman, with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in an ensemble cast of mostly non-actors, the film plays one night only: Wednesday, July 24 at 7:30 pm at the Laemmle NoHo as a preview of Art House Theater Day (AHTD, officially July 25). AHTD is a celebration of the contributions that art house theaters and independent films make to the cultural landscape.

SUBURBIA was a follow up to Spheeris’ debut film, the landmark documentary ‘The Decline of Western Civilization’ (1981), which focused on the emerging punk rock/hardcore scene in Southern California in the early 1980’s. While the documentary (and its two sequels) dealt with the bands, SUBURBIA looks at their audiences, displaced and disaffected children of the Baby Boomer generation who rejected the consumerism and conservatism of their parents. The movie follows a group of kids (ranging from ages 6 to 18) who squat in a condemned tract-housing development, forming a family unit of punks who call themselves The TRs (the rejected). Although the TRs commit petty crimes to survive, the ostensible villains of the movie are a pair of gun-toting working men who view them as responsible for every crime imaginable and eventually hunt them down.

Spheeris approached Roger Corman to complete financing for the film. He viewed it as a teen exploitation movie that fit into his wheelhouse of low-budget genre pictures, a formula that worked very well for him for decades. Spheeris, however, saw it as a social statement, and chose to use mostly non-actors along with a few musicians (e.g., Flea) for authenticity, pointing out, “It’s easier to teach punks to be actors than actors to be punks.” Flea now cites the film as “the punk rock bible.”

Perceptive critics of the day supported Spheeris’ vision. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “a clear-eyed compassionate melodrama…far better than Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Outsiders’ and ‘Rumblefish.’” This view was echoed by Time Out, noting the movie “combines intelligent social comment with the conventions of the teen-in-revolt exploiter to gripping effect. A justifiably angry film, fast and full of violent action, though there’s plenty of humour too; and the lack of originality is amply compensated for by its manifest sincerity.” And Clayton Dillard in Slant said, “In the end, SUBURBIA‘s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.”

Penelope Spheeris is a multitalented film director (SUBURBIA, ‘The Boys Next Door,’ ‘Wayne’s World,’ ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’) producer (‘Real Life’), documentarian (‘The Decline of Western Civilization’ trilogy, ‘We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n Roll’), actress, screenwriter, and videographer. She has enjoyed success in both the independent film and Hollywood studio arenas, collecting numerous honors and currently receiving well-earned lifetime achievement awards. She joins us to introduce SUBURBIA and discuss her five-decade career making cinematic art.

Agnieszka Holland’s unforgettable new film GREEN BORDER opens Friday at the Royal.

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We are proud to open filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s powerful new film Green Border this Friday at the Royal Theater in West L.A. Thirty years after her Oscar-nominated film Europa Europa, Green Border is set in the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called “green border” between Belarus and Poland. Here refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Finding themselves pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life; Jan, a young border guard; and a Syrian family intertwine.

“By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

The “cruelty can be shocking, and while there are moments in this tough movie when I wept, the rigor of Holland’s filmmaking, and the steadfastness of her compassion, help steady you as a viewer.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times
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“A heart-in-mouth thriller… Agnieszka Holland‘s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A righteous, infuriating and woefully compelling watch.” – Laura Babiak, Observer

“Profoundly moving, flawlessly executed… if cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland‘s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter

“A humanitarian masterpiece.” – Damon Wise, Deadline

“A rapturous cinematic experience,” JANET PLANET opens Friday at the Laemmle Royal, Town Center, and Glendale.

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From film critic Tim Grierson’s recent L.A. Times profile of Janet Planet star Julianne Nicholson:
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“When she was 18, Julianne Nicholson came to New York City to model but quickly grew tired of that — she knew she wanted to act. “I was waitressing and just living my best life,” she says over Zoom, smiling, from A24’s Manhattan offices. “I was basically being a young person in New York without a care in the world. It was wildly different from Janet Planet.” She’s referring to the wonderful new film set during summer 1991 in which she stars — a film that, like Nicholson, doesn’t put on airs but is capable of small miracles. Since its premiere at Telluride, Janet Planet, the debut feature of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker, has been the sort of understated indie revelation that discriminating viewers excitedly share with their friends like a gift.

“Now finally opening in New York on Friday, with the Los Angeles release planned for June 28, Janet Planet is ready for its grand unveiling — and, in a sense, so is the marvelous Nicholson, an Emmy winner who has read the same stories about her that you have.

“Normally, the first thing that’s said about me is ‘underused,’ ‘underappreciated,’ ‘overlooked,’” says Nicholson, with a heard-it-all grin, At age 52, she tries to ignore other people’s perception of her fame and how much more massive they think it ought to be. “Normally, I’m fine with it because I continue to work. But every once in a while, I feel like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so tired — am I still trying to get people’s attention?’”

“Those who have worked with Nicholson need not be reminded of her greatness or the way she makes her artistry invisible. Just don’t expect them to explain why Nicholson isn’t a huge star. When I ask Baker in a separate interview why she thinks the actor isn’t more renowned, she’s mystified that the industry can’t see what she and so many others do. “I find that really perverse,” Baker, 43, replies. “I’m outside of the Hollywood machine, and in my world, Julianne is a mega-celebrity.””

 Click here to read the rest of Mr. Grierson’s profile.
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“There is no way to predict what will strike a chord, or an arrow into your heart, but one thing is certain: the temporal, emotional, and sensory experience of Janet Planet is a uniquely rare gift that needs to be seen and savored.” ~ Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
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“Janet Planet is a brilliant debut for Baker, who doesn’t so much translate her artistry to the screen as discover a whole new frontier for her singular sensibility.” ~ Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“It’s the kind of minimalist, yet emotionally rich memory piece that’s so quietly attuned to people, place and the passing of time that, ironically, it makes you want to shout hosannahs from a mountaintop until you’re hoarse.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“Whether you’re a longtime fan of Annie Baker’s plays, or meeting her work for the first time, Janet Planet is a rapturous cinematic experience.” ~ Drew Gregory, Autostraddle