Films Archives – Laemmle Theatres

It’s Identity vs. Politics in Chase Joynt’s ‘State of Firsts’

June 29, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

“Transgender for everyone” is a dog-whistle phrase the current administration frequently uses to scare conservative parents. Yet with additional punctuation, “transgender, for everyone,” it could sum up the campaign of Sarah McBride, the first transwoman elected to Congress. Chase Joynt’s new documentary State of Firsts follows her campaign, its immediate aftermath, and how it changes her along the way.

Catch State of Firsts at the Laemmle Glendale beginning July 2^nd. Director Chase Joynt will participate in Q&As following the 7:30 PM shows on Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, as well as the 3:10 PM show on Sunday, July 5.

Joynt, a professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria, is also an acclaimed documentarian usually focusing on transgender history, in films like No Ordinary Man and Framing Agnes. Here, he gets to chronicle history in real-time: a personal “first” like the others implied in the title. Sarah McBride looked to be the first trans woman elected to Congress in the same year – 2024 – in which she also anticipated the first Black female president, who would have been the first president of South Asian descent as well. That McBride won while Kamala Harris lost reveals an electorate more complex than some pundits might have it.

On his official university faculty page, Joynt states that he is often asked, “Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?” He evidently saw a similar dichotomy in McBride, who wanted to run to represent her constituents primarily, but constantly found herself being pushed into representing every transgender American. For her, politics and the personal are intertwined more in her advocacy for affordable health care than her gender – her husband, a trans man, died of cancer at the age of 28, mere days after they got married.

Through much of the film Joynt’s cameras focus closely on McBride’s face as she’s driving her car. The road trips between campaign stops offer a convenient place to talk, but they also capture emotional nuance and convey the sense that she is very much in control of her path and message. Once she is elected, she notably starts taking the train like her mentor Joe Biden, and the visual metaphor is immediate – now she’s being swept along by the currents of government, forced to be one of many passengers rather than a lone driver.

McBride’s home state of Delaware in 2024 already seems like a time and place far removed from our own, a mere two years later. At least from what we see, McBride receives a mostly positive reception as she goes door to door and talks to ordinary people in public. The menace represented by her opponents, pre-election, mostly comes through in threatening signs, and Joynt periodically narrows the aspect ratio, pointedly boxing McBride’s image in, when he intersperses national news footage.

Once she is elected – hardy a spoiler, since she’s in Congress now – a far more deranged response ensues. In the face of such opposition, can McBride maintain her stance of being the patient listener who’ll talk nicely to her political opponents, or become more confrontational as the situation dictates? The movie offers hints, but you can follow along in real life too.

This July 4^th, State of Firsts reminds us that independence is for everyone.

“In following McBride’s campaign, Joynt confidently transitions from the highly stylised modes of his previous works. “ – Pat Mullen, POV.

“McBride’s grace, steadfastness, and perseverance are the stuff of true heroism. Joynt captures this essential moment of LGBTQ+ history with dignity and respect.” – Frank J. Avella, Edge Media Network.

‘Romería’: Carla Simón’s Moving Portrait of Loss, Identity, and Belonging

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the course of three features, Carla Simón has quietly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European cinema. Following her acclaimed debut Summer 1993 and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, the Spanish filmmaker returns with Romería, a deeply personal coming-of-age drama that continues her exploration of family, memory, and the lingering impact of loss.

Catch Romeria in theaters beginning July 1st at the Laemmle Glendale.

The title translates roughly to “pilgrimage,” an apt description for the journey undertaken by Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave home to study filmmaking. Before she can begin that next chapter, however, she must travel to the Galician city of Vigo in search of documents connected to her late father, whose death years earlier left crucial gaps in her understanding of both her family history and herself.

Raised apart from her father’s relatives, Marina arrives as both an outsider and a blood relation. Her extended family welcomes her warmly enough on the surface, inviting her on boat trips, beach outings, and sprawling family gatherings, yet beneath the hospitality lies a more complicated reality. Old wounds remain unhealed, uncomfortable truths have been buried, and differing accounts of the past begin to challenge everything Marina thought she knew about her parents.

Like Simón’s previous work, Romería unfolds through intimate observations rather than dramatic confrontations. The filmmaker has a remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of family life: overlapping conversations around crowded tables, casual moments of affection, and the subtle tensions that emerge when multiple generations inhabit the same space. Yet as Marina pieces together fragments of her family’s history, Romería expands beyond a straightforward search for answers. Her mother’s diaries, camcorder recordings, and the stories told by her relatives create a layered portrait of two people she barely knew, as what begins as a realistic family drama gradually opens into something more lyrical and impressionistic. Simón incorporates dreamlike passages and flashes of imagined memory, allowing the boundaries between history, recollection, and personal mythology to blur. These touches of magical realism give emotional shape to experiences that can never be fully recovered, only reimagined.

Both tender and quietly heartbreaking, Romería confirms Simón’s status as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Drawing from deeply personal material while touching on universal questions of identity and belonging, she has created a film that is at once a family portrait, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the subtle ways that each of us carries the residue of our forebearers.

“Carla Simón’s story of a young woman untangling a web of family secrets cements the filmmaker’s aptitude for naturalism while also marking a bold new step towards magical realism.” – Sophia Satchell-Baeza, British Film Institute

“A kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

John Early’s ‘Maddie’s Secret’ Finds Heart Beneath the Camp

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

John Early has spent years building a reputation as one of contemporary comedy’s most distinctive voices, whether through scene-stealing performances in projects like Search Party and Stress Positions, or his singular stand-up and musical work. That history makes Maddie’s Secret an especially surprising directorial feature debut. While the film contains plenty of the heightened absurdity and comic precision that fans of Early will recognize, it ultimately reveals itself as something far more sincere: a melodrama about eating disorders, self-worth, and modern womanhood disguised as a campy made-for-television movie.

Catch Maddie’s Secret in theaters beginning June 26th at the Laemmle Monica.

Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a shy but gifted home cook working behind the scenes at a trendy food-media company. Her life changes overnight when a homemade cooking video goes viral, transforming her from anonymous dishwasher to the face of the brand. This sudden attention, however, reawakens her long-suppressed struggle with bulimia. Desperate to conceal her relapse from her loving husband Jake (Eric Rahill) and best friend Deena (Kate Berlant), Maddie tells an impulsive lie that quickly spirals beyond her control.

The premise sounds like the setup for broad satire, and Maddie’s Secret certainly pokes fun at influencer culture, wellness trends, online therapy apps, foodie celebrity, and other fixtures of contemporary life. Yet Early’s screenplay consistently resists easy cynicism, treating its characters with affection and finding humor in their quirks without reducing them to punchlines. Even the broadest personalities feel grounded by an underlying emotional honesty.

That tonal confidence is especially evident in Early’s performance. Playing Maddie could easily have become an exercise in caricature, but he approaches the character with remarkable empathy. Maddie is funny, anxious, talented, vulnerable, and deeply human. The film never treats her eating disorder as a joke, even as it finds comedy in the myriad social pressures, cultural expectations, and personal contradictions that surround it.

What ultimately distinguishes Maddie’s Secret is its refusal to choose between irony and sincerity. In an era when many comedies keep their subjects at arm’s length, Early allows himself to care deeply about his protagonist and the struggles she faces. The film is frequently funny, occasionally outrageous, and unexpectedly moving. By the time it reaches its emotional climax, what initially seemed like a clever genre exercise has transformed into something infinitely richer: a compassionate portrait of a woman trying to reconcile the person she is with the person she believes she should be.

For a filmmaker making his feature directing debut, it is an impressively assured achievement. Campy and heartfelt, and unlike much else in contemporary cinema, Maddie’s Secret announces John Early as a filmmaker worth watching.

“A lesser film would find more cynicism and mockery in the text, but Maddie’s Secret is a testament to the art of trying, finding optimism, and approaching life empathetically.” – Peyton Robinson, RogerEbert.com

“Brimming with style and spirit up to the final scene.” – Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times

“A film of real kindness.” – Sam Bodrojan, IndieWire

‘O Horizon’ Explores Loss in the Age of AI

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Artificial intelligence has long been a staple of science fiction, but as AI becomes an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, filmmakers face a new challenge: how to tell stories about technology that no longer feels wholly speculative. Writer-director Madeleine Rotzler’s O Horizon approaches that question from an intimate angle, using a near-future premise to explore the ravages of grief.

Catch O Horizon in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal.

Maria Bakalova, the Oscar-nominated breakout actress from Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, stars as Abby, a neuroscientist struggling with the death of her beloved father (David Strathairn). Months after his passing, she remains emotionally adrift, unable to fully connect with her family, her work, or her own future. Then she discovers an unusual service called “Seeking a Friend,” which uses personal data—messages, videos, recordings, and emails—to create an AI facsimile of a deceased loved one. Soon Abby finds herself speaking regularly with a digital recreation of her father.

The premise recalls classics such as Her and episodes of Black Mirror, but O Horizon is less interested in providing dystopian warnings than in exploring the emotional complexities of loss. What begins as a source of comfort gradually becomes something more complicated as Abby confronts unresolved feelings, old frustrations, and the question of whether technology can truly help us heal or merely postpone the process of actually moving forward.

Running parallel to Abby’s personal journey is her groundbreaking neuroscience research, which explores the possibility of artificially recreating human sensations and experiences. Together, these storylines examine a common theme: If pain, loneliness, and grief can be technologically softened, what might be lost along the way? The film raises provocative questions without insisting on easy answers.

Much of the film’s appeal rests on Bakalova’s nuanced performance, which brings emotional authenticity to Abby’s complex journey through loss. David Strathairn, for his part, makes a strong impression despite limited screen time, lending warmth and humanity to both the memories of Abby’s father and his AI-generated counterpart. Together, the two actors ground the film’s speculative premise in recognizable human emotions, helping transform a contemporary technological thought experiment into something more personal and universal.

Beautifully photographed and deliberately understated, O Horizon favors reflection over spectacle. Rather than presenting artificial intelligence as either salvation or catastrophe, it uses emerging technology as a lens through which to examine love, memory, and the lingering bonds between parents and children.

At a moment when AI is rapidly moving from science fiction into daily reality, O Horizon offers a timely and deeply personal meditation on what it means to hold on—and when it may finally be time to let go.

“A moving lead performance from Maria Bakalova.” – Alex Harrison, ScreenRant

“Sort of a Black Mirror premise… [but] more of a fable.” – Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

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.