Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

Haifaa Al-Mansour’s ‘Unidentified’ and the Women Hidden in Plain Sight

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the past decade, Haifaa Al-Mansour has become one of the most important cinematic voices to emerge from Saudi Arabia. Her breakthrough feature Wadjda followed a young girl determined to buy a bicycle in a society that discouraged such independence. The Perfect Candidate centered on a woman running for local office. With Unidentified, Al-Mansour again focuses on a female protagonist navigating institutional barriers, but this time she does so through the framework of a murder mystery.

Catch Unidentified in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center.

The film opens with the discovery of a teenage girl’s body abandoned in the desert outside Riyadh. The victim has no identification, few clues, and seemingly little chance of receiving justice. When the case crosses her desk, Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), a recently divorced police clerk and devoted true-crime listener, sets out to uncover the girl’s identity.

What follows is part detective story, part social portrait, as Al-Mansour uses the familiar structure of a procedural to explore larger questions about gender, autonomy, and social expectation. As Nawal begins asking questions, she encounters a world of silences, evasions, and unspoken assumptions. School administrators, family members, and community figures each possess fragments of information, yet the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that solving the crime means understanding the circumstances that allowed the victim to disappear in the first place.

One of the film’s strengths is its refusal to present Saudi women as a monolith. Throughout Nawal’s investigation, she encounters women of different generations, backgrounds, and beliefs, each navigating the constraints of their society in distinct ways. Some push against those limitations; others accommodate them, and many exist somewhere in between.

Mila Alzahrani, reuniting with Al-Mansour after The Perfect Candidate, anchors the film with a performance that balances determination and vulnerability. Nawal’s interest in the case is clearly fueled by her own personal losses, but the film wisely avoids reducing her to a simple symbol or crusader. Instead, she emerges as a complicated individual whose search for answers becomes inseparable from her effort to reclaim agency in her own life.

Stylistically, Unidentified represents a somewhat more commercial turn for Al-Mansour. The film embraces suspense, red herrings, and genre conventions more readily than her earlier work. While the mystery itself remains engaging throughout, the film’s lasting impact comes less from the mechanics of the investigation than from the social realities it reveals along the way.

In the end, Unidentified works as both a compelling thriller and a continuation of Al-Mansour’s long-standing interest in the lives of Saudi women. The mystery may provide the engine, but humanization remains the destination.

“Unidentified… utilizes the death of a young woman to explore how Saudi Arabia’s crushing patriarchy creates both victims and criminals out of its female population. – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.” – Beandrea July, IndieWire

Milagros Mumenthaler’s ‘The Currents’ and the Performance of Stability

May 26, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents unfolds with the unnerving logic of a bad dream: not chaotic exactly, but subtly out of alignment with ordinary life. Here, the Swiss-Argentine filmmaker constructs a hypnotic portrait of psychological unraveling that feels at once intimate and strangely elusive, immersing viewers inside the fractured emotional landscape of a woman who can no longer fully inhabit the life she has built for herself.

Catch The Currents in theaters beginning June 5th at the Laemmle Royal.

There is a moment near the beginning of the film that arrives with such suddenness it barely seems real. Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a successful fashion designer attending an awards ceremony in Geneva, quietly slips away from the event, walks across a bridge, and jumps into the freezing Rhône River below. Mumenthaler films the act from such a distant vantage point that it almost feels accidental, as though the movie itself were struggling to comprehend the reality of what has just occurred.

Following the incident, Lina returns home to Buenos Aires and resumes the routines of her outwardly enviable existence: a thriving career, a handsome husband, a young daughter, a beautiful apartment. Yet something fundamental has shifted. She develops an intense fear of water, avoiding showers and baths even as rashes begin spreading across her skin. But the film wisely refuses to reduce her unraveling to a single diagnosis or symbolic condition; water becomes only one manifestation of a deeper estrangement from herself and the world around her.

The filmmaking itself mirrors that instability. Ordinary sounds grow unnervingly loud, Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography lingers on textures and surfaces until they begin to feel uncanny, and moments of surreal dislocation quietly seep into the film’s otherwise-grounded world. Before long, Lina starts imagining fragments of other women’s lives, observing strangers and acquaintances with an almost mystical attentiveness, as if desperately groping for alternate ways of existing.

Yet for all its psychological tension, The Currents is remarkably compassionate, as Mumenthaler avoids the cold detachment that often defines contemporary art-house depictions of female breakdown. Isabel Aimé González-Sola, for her part, gives a performance of striking restraint, conveying Lina’s mounting alienation through minute shifts in expression and posture rather than overt collapse. The result is a character who remains elusive but deeply recognizable: someone trapped between the expectations placed upon her and her growing inability to continue meeting them.

Like its title suggests, The Currents ultimately unfolds less as a linear narrative than as a drifting accumulation of sensations, anxieties, and fleeting moments of connection. Mumenthaler’s film resists easy explanations, trusting instead in mood, intuition, and emotional texture. What emerges is a haunting study of dislocation that feels at once mysterious and acutely human.

“Impressively composed, searching high-art cinema.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Precise and refined, but free of the self-conscious fastidiousness that often passes for style on the international festival circuit.” – Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter

The Secret Life of Trees: Ildikó Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend’

May 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What if the world around us were constantly speaking, and we simply lacked the patience to hear it? That question drifts through Silent Friend, the latest feature from Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, though “drifts” may be too passive a word for a film so alive with wonder, sensation, and absurd, unexpected connections. Moving across three timelines linked by a towering ginkgo tree in the botanical gardens of Marburg, Germany, Enyedi’s film unfolds less like a conventional drama than an act of gradual attunement: to nature, to loneliness, and to the hidden rhythms that shape human lives whether we notice them or not.

Catch Silent Friend in theaters beginning May 15th at the Laemmle Royal.

If Enyedi’s Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul explored intimacy through dreams, Silent Friend projects that fascination outward onto the natural world. The film’s modern-day thread follows neuroscientist Tony Wong, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai in a beautifully understated performance. Stranded on an empty university campus during the first COVID lockdown, Tony turns his attention away from human cognition and toward the silent life of plants, becoming increasingly fascinated by theories suggesting that trees may communicate in ways that science is only beginning to understand. As he enters into remote correspondence with a French botanist played by Léa Seydoux, the film opens itself to increasingly provocative possibilities about the porous boundary between human and nonhuman life.

Before long, Enyedi masterfully weaves Tony’s story with two earlier narratives set decades apart: one following a pioneering female botany student in the early twentieth century, the other centering on a shy student swept into the idealism and experimentation of the 1970s. The connections between these strands are less narrative-based than emotional and thematic, united by a shared sense of curiosity and by the imposing ginkgo tree quietly observing generations pass beneath its branches.

That openness gives Silent Friend much of its distinctive texture. Enyedi approaches science not as something cold or rational, but as a form of wonder and of looking more closely at the world. At times, the movie feels almost mischievous in its insistence that humans might not be as separate from the natural world as we tend to imagine.

Visually, the film is equally rich. Cinematographer Gergely Pálos shifts fluidly between varying textures and formats, moving from striking black-and-white photography to saturated color and crisp digital imagery depending on the era and emotional register. Combined with the film’s immersive sound design and score, the result is markedly sense-based, a movie less interested in driving its plot forward than in creating an atmosphere that its viewers can sink into.

Like the ancient tree at its center, Silent Friend asks for patience. But in return, it offers something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema: the feeling of slowing down long enough to see the world in a new light

“[A] beguiling, wildly original ode to better living through botany.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“A movie that thinks outside the box, proffering a world view that’s open to new, unusual connections at a time when many people seem to be shutting themselves down.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ Returns to Big Screens Uncut

May 5, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theaters and the Anniversary Classics Series present two screenings of the provocative and lyrical sci-fi classic, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, which marked pop superstar David Bowie’s debut in a lead role on the big screen.

For the film’s 50th anniversary, it will screen Wednesday, May 20, at Laemmle’s NoHo at 7 p.m.; and Wednesday, May 27, at Laemmle’s Royal at 7 p.m. Oscar-nominated actress Candy Clark will appear at both screenings to share memories of her co-star, the director, and her long film career.

The film was adapted by Paul Mayersberg from the novel by Walter Tevis, who also wrote the novel that inspired Paul Newman’s classic, The Hustler. Rip Torn, Buck Henry, and Bernie Casey co-star in the film. Bowie plays a visitor from a distant planet who travels to Earth to find water for his dying planet. He quickly amasses great wealth as an industrialist, but his plans are scotched by a couple of devious antagonists as well as by his love affair with a good-hearted woman played by Clark.

Roeg did the celebrated 2nd unit photography on the Oscar-winning masterpiece from 1962, Lawrence of Arabia. He went on to be the chief cinematographer on such films as Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, and Richard Lester’s Petulia, among other films. He made his directorial debut (sharing credit with Donald Cammell) on the 1970 cult favorite, Performance, which introduced another pop music icon, Mick Jagger, to dramatic filmmaking. Roeg made his solo directing debut on the exquisite Australian adventure, Walkabout, and followed with the classic thriller, Don’t Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

Cinematographer Anthony Richmond, who worked with Roeg on Don’t Look Now, joined him again on The Man Who Fell to Earth. Shot mainly in New Mexico, the film was again notable for its striking visual style. The music for the film was coordinated by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, with original score by Japanese composer Stomu Yamash-ta.

Most of Roeg’s films divided the critics, and this one was no exception, though it boasted a series of extraordinary reviews. At the time of its release, Richard Eder of The New York Times declared, “There are quite a few science-fiction movies scheduled to come out in the next year or so. We shall be lucky if even one or two are as absorbing and as beautiful as The Man Who Fell to Earth.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote a mixed review of the film in 1976 but described Bowie as “the most romantic figure in recent pictures, the modern version of the James Dean lost-boy myth.” Years later, Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out confirmed Eder’s evaluation and called The Man Who Fell to Earth “the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.”

Robert Hawkins of Variety added to the praise for the film: “Bowie’s choice as the ethereal visitor is inspired… Candy Clark, as his naïve but loving mate, confirms the winning ways that won her an Oscar nom in American Graffiti… Her intimate scenes with Bowie… are among the pic’s highlights.”

One of these sex scenes, in which the two played with guns, led the distributor to cut some 20 minutes from the film before the 1976 release. This scene and others were restored when Rialto took over the release, and Laemmle will be screening the uncut version at both anniversary screenings.

Candy Clark earned her Oscar nomination for her warm portrayal of a local girl in George Lucas’s nostalgic breakthrough film, American Graffiti, in 1973. Her other movies include John Huston’s Fat City, Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band, Blue Thunder, At Close Range, The Informant, and a wide range of television appearances over the decades. At both screenings Ms. Clark will participate in Q&As following the screenings, and will sign and sell her recent book of star photos, Tight Heads.

‘Our Land’ and the Weight of History

April 28, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean to look at a landscape not as scenery, but as evidence? In Our Land (also known as Landmarks), acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel turns her attention to terrain that carries the weight of centuries, where questions of ownership, memory, and identity remain unsettled. Best known for her formally adventurous fiction work, Martel takes au uncharacteristically direct approach here, but this shift in style reveals a different kind of precision, one rooted not in ambiguity but in accumulation. What begins as a seemingly isolated account of violence gradually expands into a meditation on how history persists, often invisibly, through the ground beneath our feet.

Catch Our Land in theaters beginning May 8th at the Laemmle Monica.

Set in Argentina’s Tucumán Province, the film centers on the 2009 killing of Indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar and the long-delayed trial that followed. Yet Our Land resists the conventions of a straightforward procedural, as rather than guiding the viewer step-by-step through an endless slog of legal arguments, Martel immerses us in a dense, sometimes disorienting flow of testimony, observation, and lived experience. The effect is less about clarifying every detail than about placing us inside a complex system in which power, prejudice, and historical erasure shape not only outcomes, but the very terms of understanding.

What emerges most vividly is the presence of the Chuschagasta community itself. Through a blend of interviews, archival photographs, and extended moments of reflection, the film builds a layered portrait of a people whose connection to the land predates the structures now used to dispossess them. Chocobar’s widow, Antonia, becomes a central voice, articulating both her own personal loss as well as the broader history that too often gets excluded from official narratives. Her testimony, clear-eyed and unsentimental, anchors the film’s emotional core while opening outward onto questions that extend far beyond this particular case.

Visually, Martel finds unexpected ways to animate this history. The film’s recurring drone imagery, at once fluid, searching, and occasionally unstable, transforms the landscape into something both expansive and contested. These sweeping aerial views do more than situate the story geographically; they suggest a perspective that hovers between observation and implication, as if the land itself were bearing witness to its own methodical desecration. Even moments of disruption—a sudden collision, an abrupt descent—feel integrated into a larger design, reinforcing the tension between control and unpredictability that runs throughout the film.

If Our Land departs from the formal experimentation of Martel’s earlier work, it does so in service of clarity rather than compromise. The film’s restraint and refusal to simplify nuanced issues becomes a quiet strength, allowing the voices at its center to carry the full weight of the story. In doing so, it transforms what might initially appear as a specific legal case into an enduring record of resistance, a reclamation of narrative, and a reminder that the past is rarely as distant as it seems.

“A slow-burning, increasingly incensed unraveling of a horrific murder case underpinned by colonialist privilege and prejudice.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Above all, [Martel] lets the people tell their own story.” – Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily

“A searing and detailed chronicle of murder, bigotry and robbery on a massive scale.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

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