Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

All the Right Notes: ‘Two Pianos’ and the Music of Complicated Love

April 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There’s a certain kind of cinematic romance that doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings: It yanks them, bends them, and occasionally snaps them altogether. Two Pianos, a lush and emotionally charged drama from Arnaud Desplechin, belongs squarely in that tradition, treating love, memory, and music with the same heightened intensity as a symphony reaching its crescendo.

Catch Two Pianos in theaters beginning May 1st at the Laemmle Royal.

At the film’s center is Mathias, a gifted pianist whose return to his hometown of Lyon sets multiple strands of his life into motion at once. Played with sensitivity and restraint by François Civil, Mathias is a man caught between multiple versions of himself: the rising talent he once was, the underachieving teacher he has become, and the artist he might still be. His reunion with his formidable former mentor Elena—brought to life with imperious precision by Charlotte Rampling—pulls him back toward the stage, even as his personal life threatens to spiral in less controlled directions.

That personal life arrives with a jolt in the form of Claude, an old flame whose sudden reappearance sends the film into a kind of emotional overdrive. Nadia Tereszkiewicz plays her as mercurial and magnetic, someone who can shift from vulnerability to volatility in a heartbeat. What follows between her and Mathias is less a rekindling than a collision, two people circling unresolved feelings with a mixture of longing, regret, and lovestruck impulsivity.

Desplechin leans fully into this heightened register, crafting a story that moves with the unpredictability of memory itself. Chance encounters carry the weight of destiny; small gestures erupt into grand declarations. There are even fleeting touches of the uncanny, as Mathias becomes fixated on a young boy who seems to mirror his own past, adding another layer to the film’s fascination with doubling.

Yet for all its dramatic flourishes, Two Pianos remains grounded by its deep connection to music. The performances, both literal and emotional, are inseparable from the rhythms of the score, which pulses through the film with a restless energy. Classical pieces intertwine with an evocative original composition, creating a soundscape that cleverly mirrors the turbulence of the characters’ inner lives.

Visually, the film is just as expressive. Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume captures Lyon in rich, shifting tones, moving from shadowy interiors to crisp autumnal light, as if the city itself were responding to the characters’ emotional journeys. The effect is immersive without being overstated, allowing the story’s intensity to breathe and stretch its versatile narrative limbs.

If Two Pianos feels like it’s playing multiple melodies at once, that’s part of its design. It’s a film about divided selves and second chances, about the pull of the past and the risk of moving forward. And like any memorable piece of music, it lingers—not because it resolves every note, but because it dares to play them at full volume.

“Desplechin draws something liminal from a specific sense of place.” – Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

“[An] earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

A Life Unfiltered: ‘I Swear’ and the Story of John Davidson

April 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There’s a familiar shape to many “inspiring true story” films, but I Swear finds a way to delicately reshape that mold into something more personal, more unpredictable, and ultimately more humane. Based on the life of Tourette syndrome advocate John Davidson, this BAFTA award-winning film traces one man’s journey from confusion and isolation to self-acceptance and public advocacy without ever reducing him to a symbol.

Catch I Swear in theaters beginning April 24th at the Laemmle Royal, Newhall, and Town Center locations.

What distinguishes I Swear is its commitment to portraying not only what John experiences, but how he experiences it. His Tourette syndrome isn’t treated as a narrative device or a source of easy sentiment, but as a constant, complicated presence. The film allows for laughter, but never at the expense of John’s dignity. Instead, it invites audiences to sit with the uneasy tension between humor and hardship, asking when we laugh, why we laugh, and who gets to decide.

At the film’s center is Robert Aramayo, delivering a performance of remarkable sensitivity and control. He captures both the physical unpredictability of John’s condition and the emotional steadiness that defines him, creating a character who feels fully lived-in rather than performed. It’s a balancing act that could easily tip into caricature, but Aramayo keeps it grounded, ensuring that John’s inner life remains front and center.

Director Kirk Jones approaches the material with a clear respect for both his subject and the audience. The storytelling is straightforward, but never simplistic. Moments of pain—whether social rejection, misunderstanding, or outright cruelty—are counterbalanced by instances of connection and support. The film is especially attuned to the role that community plays in shaping John’s life, highlighting the people who choose empathy over judgment and, in so doing, help redefine what’s possible.

In the end, I Swear is less about overcoming than it is about being seen. It’s about carving out space in a world that isn’t always ready to make room, and about finding strength not in silence, but in expression, however unpredictable that expression may be.

“The film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.” – Catherine Bray, Variety

“Its mix of compassion and clarity allows it to avoid the easy sentimentality of similar tales.” – Ross McIndoe, Slant Magazine

“Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments… add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.” – Kate Erbland, IndieWire

The Art of Taking: Soderbergh’s ‘The Christophers’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a quiet thrill in encountering a late-period film from the great Steven Soderbergh, The Christophers delivers it almost immediately. Set largely within the cluttered confines of a once-great artist’s London home, the film trades spectacle for something knottier and more intimate: a duel of personalities, ideas, and unresolved histories.

Catch The Christophers in theaters beginning April 17th at the Laemmle Monica, NoHo, Town Center, and Glendale locations.

At its center is Julian Sklar, played with ferocious precision by Ian McKellen. A celebrated painter turned cultural relic, Julian has retreated into a self-made mausoleum of past successes and private grudges. McKellen inhabits him as both tyrant and ruin: acerbic, theatrical, and faintly ridiculous, yet never less than human. His performance resists easy sentiment; whatever sympathy he manages to arouse is accomplished in spite of Julian’s relentless abrasiveness, not because of any softening.

The premise initially suggests a familiar caper. Julian’s estranged children, eager to secure their inheritance, recruit Lori Butler, an art restorer who moonlights in forgery, to infiltrate his home and complete a set of unfinished paintings that could be worth a fortune. But the film quickly pivots away from such familiar Soderberghian mechanics and toward something more elusive as what unfolds between Julian and Lori (played by an electric Michaela Coel) is less a traditional con than a prolonged negotiation of identity and authorship.

Soderbergh, working with a script by Ed Solomon, keeps the narrative in constant motion—not through action, but through nonstop reversals of power. Conversations shift, allegiances blur, and what begins as manipulation gradually takes on the contours of recognition. Lori is not merely an intruder in Julian’s world; she is, in certain respects, his reflection. Both are artists stalled in different ways, each confronting the uneasy distance between creation and self-worth.

Formally, the film is deceptively loose. The camera drifts, lingers, and reacts, giving the impression of spontaneity while maintaining a careful sense of rhythm. The confined setting only heightens the sense of volatility, as if any exchange might tip into revelation or collapse. It’s a reminder of how much Soderbergh can do with minimal space when the material gives him something to push off against.

What ultimately distinguishes The Christophers is its preoccupation with legacy—not as a settled inheritance, but as something negotiated in real time. Who owns a work of art? Who gets to define its meaning? And what do we really leave behind: objects, or impressions? These questions animate every scene, giving the film a momentum that extends far beyond its deceptively contained setting. Anchored by two exceptional performances and a script that relishes every turn of the knife, The Christophers is a sharp, engaging showcase for Soderbergh at his most quietly confident.

“The Christophers feels as rich and expansive as anything Soderbergh has ever done.” – Seth Katz, Slant Magazine

“[The Christophers] bats about ideas pertaining to art, commerce, ownership and legacy with dexterous aplomb and boasts two equally superb leads who make the material crackle.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

François Ozon’s Cool, Unsettling ‘The Stranger’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean to bring The Stranger—a novel defined by absence, detachment, and interiority—into a medium built on appearances? In his new adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, François Ozon approaches that challenge not by radically reimagining the text, but by making its silences visible. The result is a film that feels at once faithful and interpretive, attuned to both the enduring power of Camus’s text and the historical context it left largely unspoken.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Ozon discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning April 10th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

Set in 1930s Algiers under French colonial rule, the film follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a clerk whose emotional detachment shapes every aspect of his life. He receives news of his mother’s death with little visible reaction, carrying out the rituals of mourning with a kind of mechanical precision. In Ozon’s retelling, it’s as if Meursault has only just arrived in the world at that moment: unformed, unmoored, and curiously untouched by the social expectations that surround him.

That sense of dislocation extends into his relationships. He begins an affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), responds to her questions with indifference, and drifts into the orbit of his volatile neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault rarely initiates; he responds. Yet this passivity proves deceptive as he repeatedly declines to perform basic gestures that would mark him as a passable member of society while simultaneously slipping into patterns of behavior that align him with its ugliest assumptions.

Ozon captures this tension with remarkable precision. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film emphasizes texture and physical sensation: sunlight on skin, the rhythm of breath, the weight of heat pressing down on bodies. These tactile details root us in Meursault’s immediate experience even as his inner life remains opaque. Voisin’s performance is key here: controlled, watchful, and withholding, he becomes a figure defined as much by what he doesn’t express as by what he does.

At the same time, Ozon subtly expands the frame of Camus’ story. Where the novel treats its colonial setting as a given, the film foregrounds it, allowing the social and political tensions of French Algeria to register more clearly. The people who exist at the margins of Meursault’s awareness take on a greater presence, not through overt revision but through subtle shifts in emphasis. The result is a quiet but meaningful rebalancing, one that reframes Meursault’s indifference as something shaped not only by temperament but by environment.

As perhaps the quintessential work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger endures not because it offers answers, but because it resists them. Ozon’s adaptation honors that resistance, even as it invites us to look more closely at the world surrounding it, and at what it means to move through that world without fully engaging with it.

“The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“Ozon’s The Stranger keeps the spirit of its source material alive as a timeless warning in a modern world of stark polarization, ongoing colonialism, and plenty of Meursaults ignoring the suffering of others.” – Monica Castillo, The AV Club

Babysitting the Void: Stalled Adulthood in ‘Fantasy Life.’

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is the kind of modest, perceptive character piece that sneaks up on you: initially breezy, even familiar, before revealing a deeper ache beneath its carefully arranged surfaces. A lightly comic drama about stalled adulthood and second acts, Fantasy Life centers on Sam (Shear), an anxious, recently laid-off paralegal whose life has quietly collapsed. Through a combination of desperation and social proximity, Sam takes a babysitting job for a wealthy, creatively inclined couple, David and Dianne, and finds himself drawn into their fragile domestic ecosystem.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Matthew Shear discuss his directorial debut with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it at the Laemmle Royal, NoHo, Glendale, or Town Center theaters beginning April 3rd.

The premise has the makings of farce, but the film resists easy escalation. Instead, Shear builds a tone of low-key, accumulating discomfort, where every interaction feels slightly off-balance. Sam’s crippling anxiety isn’t played for charm; it’s awkward, limiting, and at times frighteningly disruptive. Yet it also becomes the unlikely bridge between him and Dianne, a former actress who now drifts through her own life with a kind of numbed disillusionment. Their connection—tentative, intimate, and ethically precarious—forms the film’s emotional core, less a conventional romance than a mutual recognition between two people who feel they’ve missed their moment.

It’s here that Amanda Peet delivers what many have called a career-best turn. As Dianne, she is at once brittle and luminous, exuding the residual magnetism of someone who once commanded attention while allowing the cracks in that persona to show. There’s no vanity in her performance: Peet leans entirely into Dianne’s dissatisfaction and flashes of need, and the result is both funny and devastating. In the context of Peet’s long absence from major film roles, the performance carries an added resonance; a meta-textual echo of the character’s own sidelined career. That poignancy deepens further given Peet’s recently disclosed breast cancer diagnosis, lending her return an added layer of vulnerability that subtly accentuates the film’s themes of resilience and reinvention.

Shear, pulling from a historied lineage of New York-based neurotic comedies, crafts dialogue that feels lived-in and unforced, with a sharp ear for the rhythms of privileged but emotionally adrift lives. The ensemble, anchored by Alessandro Nivola’s charmingly self-involved musician, creates a dense social web where everyone seems both deeply connected and fundamentally alone. The stakes are, on paper, relatively small, but Shear understands that for his characters, these life developments and emotional entanglements feel seismic. Ultimately, the film is less about dramatic transformation than about the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day, and the uneasy realization that those stories might be all we have.

In that sense, Fantasy Life more than lives up to its title. It’s about the gap between the lives we imagine and the ones we inhabit, and the strange, fleeting moments when those two begin, however imperfectly, to overlap.

“Shear eloquently portrays the ways that near-misses can still feel like cataclysmic life events.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The kind of quiet film about life’s little moments, insecurities, and challenges that we rarely see… Peet reminds us that she is a bona fide star.” – Phil Walsh, Geek Vibes Nation

Only ‘Yes!’: Inside Nadav Lapid’s Existential Howl

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a unifying impulse in Nadav Lapid’s cinema, it’s refusal: refusal of comfort, of distance, and of the idea that art can stand apart from the conditions that produce it. In Yes!, his most confrontational film to date, that refusal takes on a new intensity. What begins in manic, almost grotesque satire gradually reveals itself as something closer to an existential reckoning, a film less interested in persuading its audience than in exhausting it.

Catch Yes! in theaters beginning April 2nd at the Laemmle Glendale.

Set in the aftermath of October 7th, Yes! centers on Y, a pianist living in Tel Aviv with his wife and their young child. They are ambitious, affectionate, and acutely attuned to the possibilities of upward mobility. Their strategy is simple: ingratiate themselves with powerful individuals. Moving through parties, performances, and private gatherings, they attach themselves to a network of political, military, and cultural elites, saying “yes” to every opportunity, every demand, every unspoken expectation.

Lapid renders this ascent in a style that is deliberately overwhelming. The film’s early passages unfold in a rush of movement and noise: faces contort, bodies thrash, images veer toward the surreal. Satire here is neither cool nor distancing but feverish, almost desperate. Moments of comedy land uneasily, often collapsing into something more abrasive. The effect is one of constant destabilization, as though the film itself were struggling to contain its own anger.

At the center of it all is Ariel Bronz’s Y, a figure defined by his almost-superhuman capacity for acquiescence. He absorbs the rhetoric around him without question, reshaping himself to fit the expectations of those in power. His ambition—to be seen, to succeed, to matter—drives him forward, even as it erodes any stable sense of self. What Lapid tracks, with increasing severity, is not a moral awakening but the consequences of its absence. Y does not so much choose a path as slide into it, one “yes” at a time.

What distinguishes Yes! is its refusal to offer release. Lapid does not build toward catharsis, nor does he grant his characters the dignity of clear transformation. Instead, he circles a more troubling idea: that complicity is rarely dramatic, rarely declared, but incremental, shaped by small concessions that accumulate over time.

The lingering effect of Yes! is less the shock of its imagery than the persistence of its central idea. Lapid’s film doesn’t argue so much as confront, exploring what it means to live alongside catastrophe, to filter it, to rationalize it, or simply to keep moving. The answers remain unresolved, but the implication is clear enough: indifference is not a neutral position.

“You can hear the rage behind the laughter in Israeli satire Yes… [Lapid] almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A whirling, maximalist satire… Exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Deliriously provocative, a veritable orgy of self-loathing.” – David Ehrlich, Indiewire

The Future Is Thinking: ‘The AI Doc’ and the Anxiety of Our Moment

March 25, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a defining anxiety of the present moment, it may be this: We are building something we do not fully understand. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, begins from that uneasy premise and refuses to resolve it into something comforting. Instead, it becomes a wide-ranging, often disorienting attempt to map the emotional and intellectual terrain of artificial intelligence at a moment when even the experts can’t agree on where we’re headed.

Catch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters beginning March 27th at the Laemmle Noho 7 and Monica Film Center.

Roher, coming off his Oscar-winning Navalny, positions himself not as an authority but as a stand-in for the audience—curious, overwhelmed, and increasingly uneasy. As he and his wife prepare to welcome their first child, a looming question takes hold: What kind of world is he bringing this child into? AI, once an abstract concept, suddenly feels immediate and consequential. The film uses that tension as its narrative spine, turning a global technological shift into an intimate, almost existential dilemma.

From there, The AI Doc expands outward, assembling a striking range of voices across the AI spectrum. On one end are the so-called “doomers,” who warn that the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to catastrophic outcomes, including the possibility—however speculative—of human extinction. Their arguments are not framed as fringe paranoia but as serious, technically grounded concerns: systems growing beyond human comprehension, incentives misaligned with human survival, and a pace of development that far outstrips our ability to comprehend (much less regulate) it.

On the other side are the optimists, those who see AI not as a threat but as a once-in-history opportunity. In their view, the same technology that inspires fear could unlock solutions to some of humanity’s most intractable problems: curing disease, transforming education, addressing climate challenges, and reducing global inequality.

What makes the film compelling is not that it chooses between these camps, but that it refuses to. Roher oscillates between perspectives, absorbing each argument only to have it unsettled by the next. The result is a kind of intellectual whiplash that mirrors the broader cultural conversation around AI: every confident claim met with an equally persuasive counterpoint. Even basic questions—what AI actually is, how it works, where it’s going, etc.—prove surprisingly difficult to answer in any definitive way.

By the closing act, the term “apocaloptimist” emerges as a kind of uneasy compromise, a recognition that AI holds both extraordinary promise and profound danger. The film doesn’t argue for a single path forward so much as it insists on the urgency of pondering the question: How do we navigate between those extremes? It’s a question that extends beyond engineers and executives to anyone living through what may one day be called the “Age of AI.”

“Director Daniel Roher makes a good-faith effort to engage with a topic whose potential impact only gets bigger the closer you look at it.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The type of documentary vital for someone who needs a streamlined explainer of the concerns and hopes around artificial intelligence.” – John Dotson, InSession Film

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting the Cult Classic ‘Harold and Maude’

March 18, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present a tribute to the late Bud Cort with a screening of his most famous movie, the offbeat romantic comedy Harold and Maude, on Wednesday, March 25th at 7:30 p.m. at the Laemmle NoHo.

Cort first attracted attention in two films directed by Robert Altman, the Oscar-winning black comic hit M*A*S*H and the eccentric comedy Brewster McCloud. He also played one of the student protestors in The Strawberry Statement, one of a handful of movies about student rebellion produced in the early 1970s. Yet it wasn’t until he joined forces with Ruth Gordon, Oscar-winning co-star of Rosemary’s Baby, to play one of the oddest couples in movie history, that the talented young actor was launched into what would ultimately develop into a decades-long career.

Cort plays Harold, a death-obsessed young man determined to commit suicide, at least until he meets the vibrant 79-year-old Maude and gradually falls in love with her. Before their chance encounter, Harold spends his days staging elaborate fake suicides to shock his wealthy, emotionally distant mother and attending strangers’ funerals for entertainment, drifting through life with a morbid detachment that borders on performance art. Maude, by contrast, lives with mischievous spontaneity: stealing cars she fancies, rescuing trees slated for demolition, and approaching each moment with irreverent wonder. Their unlikely friendship grows (while sneakily developing into the most improbable of romances) through a series of adventures that gently dismantle Harold’s fascination with death, as Maude introduces him to the pleasures, absurdities, and quiet rebellions that make life worth living. Set against a rich backdrop of early-1970s countercultural whimsy, their relationship challenges social expectations and invites Harold (and, ultimately, the audience) to reconsider what it means to truly embrace being alive.

Written by Colin Higgins as the basis for his Master’s thesis at UCLA and directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude was a critical and financial flop when it first opened in December of 1971. Major critics like Roger Ebert, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, panned the film, and it struggled to find an audience. Pauline Kael gave it a mixed review, noting that it flaunted a bizarre concept, but granted that it had “been made with considerable wit and skill,” also noting the considerable impact it had on young viewers: “Many young moviegoers have returned to this eccentric film repeatedly (in 1974, one 22-year-old claimed to have seen it 138 times).” The venerable New York Review of Books called it “a philosophical black comedy for grandparents and grandchildren.”

It wasn’t until 1983, twelve years after its initial release, that the film finally turned a profit, and that Cort, Gordon, and the filmmakers received their long-overdue royalty checks. In the years that followed, the critics, too, gradually gave the film a second look, and in 1997 it was tagged for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. By 2004, Entertainment Weekly ranked it #4 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Rarely has the phrase “aged like fine wine” been a more apt descriptor for a work of art.

Ashby and Higgins, for their part, also went on to much bigger successes, the former directing a number of acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, while the latter penned the smash-hit comedy Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, followed by a successful directorial run with Foul Play and 9 to 5.

With a deep and memorable cast including Vivian Pickles and the prolific Cyril Cusack, as well as an iconic soundtrack by Cat Stevens—filling in admirably for Elton John, who recommended him for the project after dropping out—Harold and Maude has plenty to offer its viewers, whether seeing it for the first… or 139th time.

Join us in remembering Bud Cort, in his most iconic role, at Harold and Maude‘s one-night-only screening at the Laemmle Noho.