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The bio-documentary JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE opens tomorrow.

April 2, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore 2 Comments

Tomorrow we’ll be opening Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, the new documentary about the singer-songwriter. Filmmaker Varda Bar-Kar will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:00 o’clock shows on Thursday, April 3 at the Laemmle NoHo and April 4 and 5 at the Monica Film Center, as well as after the 1:00 o’clock show at the Laemmle Glendale on April 5. Ms. Ian will join her for the NoHo and Santa Monica screenings. The filmmaker is also featured on the latest episode of Raphael Sbarge and Greg Laemmle’s video podcast Inside the Arthouse.

Director’s Statement: “The pandemic began when I finished my music documentary Fandango at the Wall (HBO/MAX), about a transformative musical convergence at the border between the United States and Mexico. Before Fandango, I had made another music documentary called Big Voice (Netflix) about a high school choir director and his most advanced ensemble. I love experimenting with the alchemy of combining film with music and wanted to continue working in that genre.

“Conversations about identity and how we identify were buzzing at that time. I considered my own identity. How do I identify? Do I feel represented in mainstream media? I resist defining my identity since definitions mainly serve to box us in. I am a free thinker, a bisexual woman, born Jewish, now with a Buddhist bent, and an artist. Like all artists, I am an outsider. I am capable, a roll-up-your-sleeves can-do-it kind of person, and I am an optimist. I don’t see many women like me represented in the media.

“I sat with the question, ‘If I made a film about a female artist with whom I closely identify, who would she be?’ Janis Ian popped into my mind. Her name hit me like a lightning strike. Yet I knew nothing about her outside of a lingering high school memory of listening to her masterful album Between the Lines and crying because her music penetrated my isolation, making me feel seen and heard. Her music assured me that I was not alone. Her music meant the world to me at that time.

“Through research, I discovered that Janis Ian has a significant body of work spanning 60 years. I compiled lengthy playlists of my favorite of her songs – many I had never heard before. I discovered she had written a riveting autobiography called Society’s Child. I could not put the
book down. I learned that not only has Janis made significant contributions to the music world, but she is also a social justice champion and an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. She has endured tremendous hardships and overcome them one after another. Her story of commitment to
artistry and incredible resilience inspired me.

“How could it be that a film had not yet been made about her? This might sound crazy, and maybe it is, but I felt it was my destiny to make a film about Janis.

“I am forever grateful that Janis entrusted me with her magnificent musical story, and I am excited to share it with the world. I am also thankful to my unstoppable producing team and creative collaborators for working with me to overcome a myriad of obstacles and challenges to bring Janis Ian’s story to the screen so that today’s audiences can feel seen and heard just as I did when I listened to Between the Line so many years ago.”

Alan Rudolph’s CHOOSE ME: Special Restoration Screening Tribute to Bob Laemmle with Keith Carradine, Lesley Ann Warren, and more April 3

March 19, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Alan Rudolph’s ‘Choose Me‘ Special 4K Restoration Screening Tribute to Bob Laemmle with costars Keith Carradine, Lesley Ann Warren, and producer David Blocker in person April 3.

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a special 4K restoration screening of writer-director Alan Rudolph’s 1984 comedy-drama fable ‘Choose Me‘ as a tribute to the late Bob Laemmle, owner of Laemmle Theatres, who died in January. The film screens Thursday, April 3 at the historic Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles at 7:00 P.M. Costars Keith Carradine and Lesley Ann Warren will appear in person for a Q&A, joined by producer David Blocker. Bob Laemmle was a long-time supporter of Alan Rudolph and ‘Choose Me’ notably had a lengthy run of several months at the Royal in 1984 and 1985.

Alan Rudolph has been in the forefront of the American indie movement since his breakout arthouse hit ‘Welcome to L.A.’ in 1976. As a protégé of Robert Altman, he specializes in romanticism and fantasy with quirky characters. Set mostly in a nocturnal Los Angeles, ‘Choose Me‘ is essentially a lyrical roundelay among five characters: Nancy (Genevieve Bujold), a radio psychologist who goes by the nom de radio “Dr. Love” and dispenses advice to the lovelorn but is maladjusted herself; Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a former sex worker who owns a bar in a seedy neighborhood; Mickey (Keith Carradine), a released mental patient who may still be quite mad; Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong), an alcoholic aspiring poet; and her wayward husband Zack (Patrick Bauchau). Working on a low-budget, Rudolph achieves high style collaborating with cinematographer Jan Kiesser and production designer Steven Legler and a soundtrack of soulful late-night jazz for the noirish atmospherics.

Critics embraced the film, with Vincent Canby in the New York Times noting how Rudolph features Los Angeles “as much of fairy-tale town as the Emerald City. It’s this quality that makes ‘Choose Me‘ an adult fable of expressive charm.” Janet Maslin, also in the Times, called the characters “garrulous, love-starved loners,” and praised the film “as free-flowing meditation on love, commitment, jealousy, radio call-in shows and just about anything that comes to mind.” Roger Ebert called it “an audaciously intriguing movie…about the endless surprise of human nature.” The Washington Post cited it as “a movie of manners leavened with sophisticated farce…locates the searching quality of contemporary sexual attitudes as well as any this year.” Pauline Kael noted the comedy-fantasy quality, calling it “crazy bananas,” and “in a magical, pseudo-sultry way — it seems to be set in a poet’s dream of a red-light district.”

Our guests have all enjoyed lengthy show business careers, and among their highlights are Academy Award recognition for both Keith Carradine (Best Song Oscar, “I’m Easy” from 1975’s Nashville) and Lesley Anne Warren (Best Supporting Actress nomination, 1982’s ‘Victor, Victoria’). Warren has had an extensive career on stage, screen, and television, including TV’s ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’; memorable movie performances in ‘Clue’ and ‘Life Stinks’; and she gave a Golden Globe-nominated performance (among multiple Globe nominations and one win through the years) in Alan Rudolph’s ‘Songwriter’ in 1984.

Carradine has enjoyed a more than five decades career since his debut in Robert Altman’s ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ in 1971, appeared memorably on Broadway in ‘Will Roger’s Follies,’ and collaborated with Rudolph several times, including ‘Welcome to L.A.,’ ‘The Moderns,’ and ‘Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.’ Notably, both Warren and Carradine are still active in entertainment with numerous projects.

David Blocker has produced several Rudolph films: ‘Choose Me,’ ‘Trouble in Mind,’ ‘The Moderns’ (those three with co-producer Carolyn Pfeiffer), ‘Made in Heaven,’ and ‘Equinox.’ His numerous works in television garnered an Emmy for the TV movie ‘Don King: Only in America’ (1997).

“Modest and moving, it’s a new sports-movie classic, as sneakily effective as the pitch which gives it its title.” ~ EEPHUS opens Thursday.

March 12, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Perhaps no other sport lends itself as well to cinema as baseball, and there have been some memorable ones over the years. The Natural, Moneyball, 42, Field of Dreams and Bull Durham spring to mind. Well, we have a funny, soul-soothing treat for you this week at our Glendale and Santa Monica theaters. “Modest and moving, it’s a new sports-movie classic, as sneakily effective as the pitch which gives it its title.” ~ Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

The filmmakers will participate in Q&A’s in Glendale after the 7:10 PM screenings on 3/13 with writer-director Carson Lund and actor Keith William Richards and moderator Amber A’Lee Frost (Chapo Trap House) and 3/15 with writer Mike Basta, writer-actor Nate Fisher, and moderator Brandon Harris (writer, filmmaker, baseball fan). Lund is also featured on the latest episode of Greg Laemmle (huge Dodger fan and former youth baseball coach) and Raphael Sbarge’s podcast Inside the Arthouse.

Film critics adore Eephus. As of this writing, its Rotten Tomatoes score is 100% with 37 reviews.

“Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make Eephus a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.” ~ Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Many a true devotee will tell you that part of the game’s charm lies in its ability to facilitate socialization… Eephus is a film that understands this, and the script shuffles along with the rhythm of a baseball game.” ~ Christian Zilko, indieWire

“A modest but poignant hangout film that resonates long after the last pitch.” ~ Tim Grierson Screen International

“Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.” ~ Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

“Eephus isn’t exactly a baseball movie — it’s something closer to movie-baseball, where characters endlessly jostle back and forth under no real time constraints, watching the day slowly pass them by, simply out of love for the sport.” ~ Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter

“Has about it a mournful, lightly absurd poetry of the mundane, a rapt attention to the intimacy of transience and the meanings we make from relics and rituals of a time we’re passing through.” ~ Isaac Feldberg, RogerEbert.com

“Baseball is the star, the game is the story, and the only conflicts that matter are the ones that the athletes resolve in play. Nonetheless, in Lund’s keenly discerning view, the game is inseparable from the human element.” ~ Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Something about Eephus reminds me of Wiseman’s long, slow, methodical probing of institutions and of human behavior more broadly.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times

“We come to Eephus expecting a metaphor for life and instead we are faced with life itself.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

“Eephus luxuriates in an unhurried afternoon of leisure.” ~ Dan Kois, Slate

Oscars 2025: The ANORA director advocates for movie theaters, and the Academy honors Robert Laemmle. Plus: Oscar Contest winners.

March 5, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

The 2025 Oscars are in the history books. It was a good night, with a funny, skilled host in Conan O’Brien and a fairly equitable distribution of statuettes for some terrific movies. It was also a good night for theatrical exhibition, better known as good, old-fashioned moviegoing. As he did during his speech accepting the Palme d’Or last year in Cannes, Anora filmmaker Sean Baker gave a passionate, trenchant speech in favor of seeing movies as filmmakers have always intended them to be seen, in theaters. After accepting the Oscar for Best Director from filmmaker (and movie theater owner) Quentin Tarantino, Baker said the following to almost 20 million Americans watching live and far more people worldwide:

“I’m going to take this time up here really quick to read something I’m very passionate about…so we’re all here tonight and watching this broadcast because we love movies. Where did we fall in love with the movies? At the movie theater. Watching a film …in the theater with an audience is an experience. We can laugh together, cry together, scream in fright together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together. And in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home, and right now the theatergoing experience is under threat. Movie theaters, especially independently owned theaters, are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them. During the pandemic we lost nearly 1000 screens in the U.S., and we continue to lose them regularly. If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture. This is my battle cry. Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen. I know I will. Distributors…please focus first and foremost on the theatrical releases of your films. Neon did that for me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Parents…introduce your children to feature films in movie theaters, and you’ll be molding the next generation of movie lovers and filmmakers. And for all of us, when we can, please watch movies in the theater, and let’s keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.”

You can watch his full speech here.

The always moving In Memoriam section of the Oscars broadcast was especially powerful this year. This may have been because the losses of huge talents seemed particularly heavy this year. For us at Laemmle Theatres, of course, we are still grieving the loss of Robert Laemmle, our former president and Greg Laemmle’s father. What an honor for Bob to be the first exhibitor included in the in Memoriam montage.

Finally, we are pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest.

FIRST PLACE: Stefan with 18 correct answers.
SECOND PLACE: Joel with 18 correct answers.
TIE for THIRD PLACE: Kelly & Cole with 17 correct answers (plus closest run-time to actual runtime broadcast).

Check out our nifty pie charts to see how our savvy customers divined the Academy members’ choices. Last year our winner correctly guessed 21 categories, so this was a tough year. As predicted, the Best Actress category was one of the trickiest; only 10.7% guessed that Mikey Madison would win for her turn in Anora, defying the conventional wisdom that Demi Moore would win for The Substance, and that Fernanda Torres was the true dark horse for her performance in I’m Still Here. Half of our contestants thought The Wild Robot would take the Best Animated Feature prize, but the acclaimed little Latvian film Flow came out on top. Almost 25% of contestants thought Timothée Chalamet would win for Best Actor for A Complete Unknown, no doubt misled by his Screen Actors Guild Awards victory.

Winners, we will be in touch to get you your movie pass prizes. Congratulations!

“A warmhearted, bittersweet tale of father and sons,” EX-HUSBANDS with Griffin Dunne opens Friday.

February 26, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Forty years after starring in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette are back, their days of all-night Manhattan romantic misadventures given way to the sober realities of late middle age. Writer-director Noah Pritzker’s dramedy Ex-Husbands beautifully captures the low-key new milieu, in which Dunne plays a father whose faltering marriage coincides with his adult sons’ romantic troubles. (Both Pritzker and Dunne speak about the film in a recent episode of Inside the Arthouse.) Richard Benjamin, James Norton, and Miles Heizer, all terrific, costar. We open Ex-Husbands this Friday at the Monica Film Center in Santa Monica and the Town Center in Encino.

“A warmhearted, bittersweet tale of father and sons.” ~ Melanie Goodfellow, Deadline Hollywood

“A vibrantly charming lead turn from Griffin Dunne…Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.” ~ Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily

“An interesting, intergenerational snapshot of masculine emotional drift in the modern world. What may strike some as lightweight will connect with attuned viewers as a compassionately observed collection of just-so moments—a worthwhile cinematic novella.” ~ Brent Simon, AV Club

“Pritzker navigates his compassionate tale empathetically, portraying a refreshingly kind, gentle, and soft side of masculinity through a group of characters all stuck inside a crossroads life has thrown at them.” ~ Tomris Laffly, RogerEbert.com

“It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to the various predicaments it considers. But Mr. Pritzker has a sagacious understanding of our various stumbles and humiliations.” ~ Kyle Smith, Wall Street Journal

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK ~ 50th anniversary screenings of one of Australia’s premiere films.

February 19, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Before The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s estimable career took off with his eerie, languorous 1975 drama Picnic at Hanging Rock. A milestone for the Australian film industry, it has stood the test of time, and we are thrilled to open a week of screenings this Friday at the Royal. The keepers of world cinema at Janus Films have released a new 4K restoration of Weir’s 1998 director’s cut. Here’s film critic J. Hoberman in the New York Times:

“Once upon a time in Australia: Three schoolgirls and their teacher vanish in broad daylight while touring a prehistoric landscape. Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock epitomizes the idea of the quasi-supernatural ‘outback uncanny’ — the incongruity of a decorous settler civilization on what appears to be an alien planet.

“Based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay that was inspired by a dream, Picnic at Hanging Rock is something of a national treasure, anointed the country’s greatest movie by the Australian Film Institute…On Valentine’s Day, 1900, the young ladies of Appleyard College, an exclusive finishing school well-stocked with Victorian knickknacks, flutter with anticipation at the prospect of a daylong excursion to Hanging Rock, a craggy volcanic formation in central Victoria dating to the Miocene epoch. Swans grace the pond, billets-doux circulate, the Romanian folk musician Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute fills the air.

“’What we see and what we seem are but a dream — a dream within a dream,’ the beautiful and beloved Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), muses, loosely citing a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Once the party reaches the Rock, time stands still … literally. Disregarding the orders of the school’s dragon-like headmistress (Rachel Roberts), the young French teacher, Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers (Helen Morse), allows several of the girls to explore the forbidden geological formation, led by Miranda, whom Mademoiselle compares to a Botticelli angel. The afternoon passes, the girls do not return, even as the remaining classmates fall into a languorous erotic trance. The ensuing procedural scarcely demystifies the absence.

“Hanging Rock has echoes of L’Avventura and Psycho, two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either — ‘both spooky and sexy,’ Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review — and, like the Rock itself, has cast a resilient spell. The actress Chloë Sevigny has namechecked Hanging Rock as a favorite film. Sofia Coppola, whose movies are often set in hermetic worlds populated by privileged young women, seems to have been especially impressed.” (Click here to read the rest of Mr. Hoberman’s piece.)

Top Ten contest results!

February 12, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Our movie-loving customers have votes for their favorite films of 2024! The top ten customer-chosen films are, in order from 1 to 10:

Anora
Conclave
The Brutalist
Dune: Part Two
A Complete Unknown
Emilia Pérez
Wicked
A Real Pain
Challengers
The Substance

The lucky randomly chosen winners for free passes (soon to be mailed) are:

1) Jeff W.

2) Mia S.

3) Riley K.

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone for playing!

SWEPT AWAY 50th anniversary screening February 13 at the Royal. Regular engagement starts February 21 in Glendale.

February 5, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore

For those who don’t like Valentine’s Day, join us for an “anti-romantic” evening with Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of the odd-couple arthouse sensation Swept Away. Lina Wertmüller’s provocative, fable-like two-hander brings together Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini for an oft-ugly battle of the sexes (and classes) cage match with the sparkling Mediterranean for a beautiful backdrop.

Not long after setting off on a yachting expedition, Milanese millionairess Raffaella (Melato) finds herself stranded on an obscure island with the boat’s deckhand (Giannini), a working-class Sicilian communist who promptly establishes dominion over the isle — and his once-prideful ex-employer. A contentious cinematic war of words, which has lost none of its power to inspire heated debate among its viewers.

We will also have a daily regular engagement February 21-27 at the Laemmle Glendale.

In 1976, Wertmüller became the first woman ever to earn an Oscar nomination as Best Director for her film Seven Beauties.