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

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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.

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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!

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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:
  1. Anora
  2. Conclave
  3. The Brutalist
  4. Dune: Part Two
  5. A Complete Unknown
  6. Emilia Pérez
  7. Wicked
  8. A Real Pain
  9. Challengers
  10. 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.

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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.

“[With Swept Away,] Wertmüller delivered the first girl power picture, and it’s a stunning masterstroke of a movie.”  – Bill Gibron, DVD Talk

“Wertmüller didn’t just tap the tangled sexual politics of the ’70s— she lit a fuse under them.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“As ferocious as it is funny.” – Judith Crist

“A powder keg of class and sexual politics.” – Scott Tobias, AV Club

 

35th Anniversary WILD AT HEART in memoriam screening for David Lynch February 19 at the NoHo.

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The news of David Lynch‘s death hit like David Bowie’s. Here were two sui generis, irreplaceable artists so original their names became adjectives, and they were gone. There will never be another David Lynch movie, but we can watch Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Lost Highway and the extravagantly violent and sexy romantic comedy Wild at Heart — February 19 at the NoHo — on the big screen as the auteur intended. The 1990 Palme d’Or winner stars Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage as Lula and Sailor, roadtripping lovers plagued by Lula’s crazed mother (Diane Ladd, Oscar nominated for this performance). Willem Dafoe’s frightening turn as the creepy Bobby Peru earned him a Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Enter our Top Five Films of 2024 contest! Bonus: Read Greg Laemmle’s list.

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Can you name your five favorite films released last year? Enter our contest here, use our handy-dandy drop-down menus to quickly choose five, and you’ll automatically be entered into a raffle to win a gift card! Also, we’ll create an overall customer top ten list from all the entries.  In case you need your memory jogged, Greg Laemmle composed the following:
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“I’m actually kind of glad that we are only asking for everyone’s five favorite films this year.  Yes, we will compile all the submissions and ultimately turn it into a Laemmle Patron Top 10 list, so maybe that’s a cheat. But as I sit here looking at my top films from 2024, it’s actually kind of helpful to try to distinguish between the films that are merely really good, and the ones that are most memorable.
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“First, I need to confess that even though I am the person responsible for selecting which films we are going to exhibit, I admit that there are films we are playing (or have played) that I did not see myself. I try to see everything, but it’s not always possible. Also, I have this “thing” about seeing films in a movie theatre and not at home, which makes it doubly hard to see everything. So if you don’t see THE BRUTALIST, EMILIA PÉREZ or THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (among others) on my list, it’s not because I didn’t care for these critical and awards favorites. It’s because I still need to catch up with them at an actual screening.
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“If I could submit a Top 10 list, it would likely include ANORA, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, CONCLAVE, DIDI, DUNE: PART TWO, THELMA or VERMIGLIO. These, and others, are all really good. And on another day or in another situation, they might even crack the Top 5. But as I sit here typing at this moment in time, I believe the following are the five movies from 2024 that will most stick with me.
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“#5 – HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS – Without a doubt, the film that had me laughing the most in 2024. Yes, it is perhaps a bit overstuffed with gags. But hey, they didn’t exactly have a budget for test screenings. Whatever the filmmakers of this indie gem lacked in dollars, though, was more than made up by their ingenuity and verve. I’m worried about what could happen to filmmakers like Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews if they are not supported in the studio system. But also really excited to see what kind of energy they could pump into a Marvel-type film. So go ahead, Hollywood. Give them the keys to the hot rod and see what happens. Whatever it is, it won’t be cookie-cutter boring.
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“#4 – PARADISE IS BURNING – This little gem deserved a lot more attention, and it is hard to understand why it was basically ignored when released at the tail end of summer. Director Mika Gustafson was awarded the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival when the film premiered in 2023, along with Best First Film prize at the subsequent London Film Festival. But when released stateside, it was ignored by both the New York Times and the local rag. That’s a real shame, because this tale of three sisters growing up in quasi-feral conditions in Sweden is the real deal, with a trio of young performers who will knock your socks off.
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“#3 – GAUCHO GAUCHO. Co-directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s previous film was the Oscar-nominated film THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS, which was one of the first films we showed on reopening the theaters in April 2021. And what a great film that was. But GAUCHO GAUCHO is even more beautiful to look at. It is incredibly frustrating that the film was barely available in theatres. Hopefully there will be more opportunities to see it on the big screen down the road. In the meantime, you should be able to find it on the new Jolt streaming service. It’s relatively short, so just hide your phone, lock away your remote after hitting play, and allow yourself to be immersed in this beautiful documentary. You won’t be sorry.
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“#2 – HARD TRUTHS. This isn’t necessarily an easy film. Director Mike Leigh drops us into this film about family dynamics mid story and maybe leaves us without a typical ending too. But he has clearly worked with his cast to create such an extensive backstory for each and every actor, that it just doesn’t matter. Or at least, it didn’t matter to me. If there is any justice in the world, Marianne Jean-Baptiste will be rewarded with an Oscar nomination for her work in this film.
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“#1 – I’M STILL HERE. Fernanda Torres may have been a surprise winner of the Best Actress in a Drama prize at the Golden Globes. But after seeing this film, you will understand why the Globe voters went with her over better-known nominees. She delivers the truest, most lived-in performance of any screen performer this year, and she is superbly aided in this by director Walter Salles, working from a screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega. At this point, it would be a shock if the film is not nominated for the Best International Feature prize.  But if it were up to me, it would be competing for Best Film.”

New weekly series: Worldwide Wednesdays! Great new films from around the globe.

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Laemmle Theatres is pleased to announce our new weekly series of fresh international films, Worldwide Wednesdays. See below for the current schedule. Some are older films enjoying new restorations, but most are newer obscure films that we want to bring to a broader L.A. audience. Putting them in a weekly series format will hopefully help with create more awareness and help overcome the absence of what used to be a reliable marketing platform for smaller foreign films like these, critics’ reviews in the L.A. Times Calendar section. Also this format allows the films to play in multiple venues all over L.A. County rather than forcing interested audiences to schlep to a single location. The films, however, come from many thousands of miles away!
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January 22, 25 & 26, Eat the Night, France, 2024 ~ Pablo, a small-time drug dealer, and his teenage sister Apolline have forged an unbreakable bond through their shared obsession with the online video game Darknoon. When Pablo falls for the mysterious Night, he gets swept up in their liaison, abandoning his sister to deal with the impending shutdown of their digital haven alone. As Pablo’s reckless choices provoke the wrath of a dangerous rival gang, the end of their virtual life draws near, upending their reality. The newest vision from Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever) is a bittersweet, apocalyptic love story with a modern MMORPG twist.

January 29, February 1 & 2, Oceans are the Real Continents, Cuba/Italy, 2023 ~ Three stories of migration, exile, and memory develop in the Cuban town of San Antonio De Los Baños, a place that time forgot. Alex and Edith, a young couple in their 30s, build their lives upon small gestures, reminisces, and a deep connection amidst the nation’s ruins. Milagros survives selling peanut cones on the street, spending her days listening to the radio and reading old letters. Nine-year-old best friends Frank and Alain go to school and dream of emigrating to the U.S. to become baseball players.

February 5, 8 & 9, Sujo, Mexico/France/USA, 2024 ~ After a sicario is murdered, four-year-old Sujo is left orphaned and at risk. With his aunt’s help, he survives in the isolated countryside, facing hardship and danger tied to his identity. As a teenager, he rebels and joins the local cartel. As a young man, Sujo seeks to escape his violent past, but when his father’s legacy resurfaces, he confronts the fate that seems destined for him.

February 12, 15 & 16, Ma Mère, France/Portugal/Austria/Spain, 2004 ~ Ma Mère takes place in the Canary Islands, where the film’s family shares a home. The mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert), cool and in charge, and her teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel), a pious Catholic back from boarding school, discuss his father’s infidelity; the next they learn that he has died in a car crash. Hélène launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her drugging, drinking and sex-fueled nights out.

February 19, 22 & 23, The Blond Boy from Casbah, France, 2023 ~ Filmmaker Antoine travels to his birthplace, Algiers, with his young son to present his new film: an account of his childhood in mid-20th century Algeria during the country’s civil war. As he wanders through the city, the filmmaker immerses us in the moments of happiness, laughter, and tears of his childhood – spent between school, friends, and his Jewish family. Growing up in the final moments of Algeria’s pre-independence period, the young Antoine discovers his profound fascination with cinema and starts to understand who he truly is.

February 26, 29 & 30, Amal, Belgium, 2023 ~ Amal is a powerful film by acclaimed Belgian-Moroccan director Jawad Rhalib, is a thought-provoking drama that explores the transformative power of education and self-expression. The title character is a teacher who courageously confronts fundamentalism through literature, offering a moving exploration of courage and compassion. Starring Lubna Azabal (The Blue Caftan, Incendies), Fabrizio Rongione (Two Days, One Night), and Catherine Salée (The Unknown Girl), Amal tackles urgent themes of identity, tolerance, and acceptance.

March 5, 8 & 9, My Motherland, France, 2023 ~ The celebrated actress Fanny Ardant plays the role of France, a wealthy Frenchwoman living alone in her Parisian apartment since the death of her husband. When she hears on the radio that the Singa association puts homeless migrants in contact with people who can take them in, she decides, against the advice of her friends and family, to take in Reza, a young Hazara Afghan refugee. Directed by Benoit Cohen, My Motherland is based on his own book Mohammad, My Mother, and Me, which is based on his mother’s experience welcoming a young Afghan refugee. This deeply personal film beautifully captures the complexities of navigating identity and belonging.

March 12, 15 & 16, Born for You, Italy, 2023 ~ Born for You tells the moving true story of Luca, a single gay Catholic man who in 2017 adopted Alba, a child with Down syndrome who was abandoned in the hospital shortly after being born. Thirty heterosexual families rejected her before the court decided to entrust her to him: with him, the legal foster care register for singles was inaugurated in Italy. Luca was, in fact, the first case in Italy of a single, gay person successfully adopting a daughter. But his was not a charitable gesture, nor to fight a system set against him and others like him: he simply wanted a family.

April 16, 19 & 20, Love Hotel, Japan, 1985 ~ Newly restored! A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity and coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times veering into near-musical territory, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and livewire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.

BREAKING AWAY with actors Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley in person Tuesday, January 14 at the Laemmle NoHo.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of the Oscar-winning 1979 hit ‘Breaking Away‘ with costar Paul Dooley joining for an in-person Q&A after the screening. The movie earned five Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Yates, and it won the Oscar for the Original Screenplay by Steve Tesich. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical of the year, and it won the Writers Guild award for Best Original Screenplay. Many years later, when the American Film Institute compiled a list of the most inspiring movies in history, ‘Breaking Away‘ ranked in the top 10.

Tesich based the script in part on his own experiences at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The story tells of the bond between four young working-class men raised in the town but unable to afford college. They are scorned by the college students in town and called “cutters” because of their families’ work as stonecutters in the local quarry. The four young men are played by newcomers Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley. Christopher’s parents are played by Paul Dooley and Barbara Barrie, and the snooty college kids include actors Hart Bochner and Robyn Douglass.

Christopher’s Dave, the leading character, becomes obsessed with Italian bicycle racers and Italian culture in general, to the dismay of his working-class father, played by Dooley. Eventually he decides to enter the local bicycle race dominated by the college students, and he becomes a symbol to his pals of the possibilities of transcending their humble backgrounds.

Critics were swept up in the story’s inspirational message. Roger Ebert called ‘Breaking Away‘ “a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin agreed and declared, “Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn’t even need a big budget or a pedigree.” Variety summarized the overwhelmingly positive reviews, calling the film “a thoroughly delightful light comedy, lifted by fine performances from Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley.”

Dooley got his start working several times with director Robert Altman on such films as ‘A Wedding,’ ‘Health,’ and he had a leading role in Altman’s offbeat romantic comedy ‘A Perfect Couple.’ In Altman’s musical adaptation of ‘Popeye,’ Dooley played the role of Wimpy. He also costarred in such films as ‘Paternity,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Underneath,’ ‘Runaway Bride,’ ‘A Mighty Wind,’ and ‘Happy, Texas.’ He provided one of the voices in the ‘Cars’ animated movies, and he also had prominent roles on such popular TV series as ‘thirtysomething’, ‘My So-Called Life,’ ‘Dream On,’ ‘The Practice,’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’