Films Archives – Page 3 Of 149

Roommates, Revolution, and Reverie: Rediscovering Visconti’s ‘Conversation Piece’

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This month, a revival worth savoring is headed back to the big screen: Conversation Piece, the late-period chamber drama from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, returns in a new 4K restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber. If you’ve never encountered this strange, elegant, faintly scandalous film, this theatrical reissue is the ideal way to step inside its rarefied, decaying world.

Catch Conversation Piece in its much-anticipated re-release beginning February 20th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set almost entirely inside a grand Roman apartment—a practical concession to Visconti’s waning health—the film unfolds like a live-in painting: fitting, since its unnamed protagonist, a retired American professor played by Burt Lancaster, specializes in collecting “conversation pieces,” those intimate group portraits of domestic life. His own life, however, is all but sealed off: books, art, routine, and a heavy dose of solitude. That carefully controlled environment is suddenly upended when the Countess Bianca Brumonti (played with Circean glamour by Silvana Mangano) bullies her way into renting the upstairs flat, bringing along her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her volatile young lover Konrad, portrayed by longtime Visconti muse Helmut Berger.

What follows is less a traditional narrative than an all-out invasion, as noise, sex, politics, emotional turbulence, and generational upheaval flood the professor’s cloistered existence. Renovations begin without permission; parties erupt; strangers roam the halls. The professor protests (albeit mildly), yet inexorably finds himself drawn into their disorder, especially toward Berger’s Konrad, whose swaggering vulgarity and wounded intelligence combine to create a dangerous gravitational pull.

Visconti, working after a debilitating stroke and reportedly directing portions of the film from his wheelchair, turns such limitations into style. The film’s confined setting becomes a pressure cooker of class tension, erotic charge, and ideological debate. At times it plays like tragic farce, at others like philosophical confession, resulting in a tonal high-wire act—stately composition colliding with emotional disarray—that gives the movie its peculiar, lingering power.

Lancaster’s casting is part of the fascination. Long associated with physical dynamism and outward force, here he is turned inward: restrained, observant, aching. Whether you view the performance as daringly subdued or intriguingly misaligned, it’s impossible to look away. Berger, by contrast, is all sharp edges and dangerous charm, strutting and smirking through the film like a beautiful provocation.

Conversation Piece is about aging, envy of youth, sexual politics, class hypocrisy, and the uneasy coexistence of radical ideas with decadent taste. It’s also, not incidentally, wickedly funny in stretches, with Visconti allowing the absurdity of his characters’ self-justifications to show through the gilt frame.

Seeing this film restored in 4K reveals the tactile richness of its interiors—fabrics, paintings, skin, candlelight—while accentuating the painterly intent behind every composition. Like the artworks the professor cherishes, this restoration rewards close viewing and theatrical scale.

In short: a film about people who shouldn’t live together, restored so beautifully that you’ll be very glad they do.

(At least for two hours.)

Fathers, Sons, and a Broken Election: Inside ‘My Father’s Shadow’

February 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first-ever Nigerian film to be recognized among the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, plays like a remembered daydream stretched across a political fault line. Set during Nigeria’s fraught 1993 presidential election crisis, the film filters national upheaval through the perspective of two young brothers who’ve been granted a rare day with their mostly absent father. The result is both a coming-of-age story and an act of cinematic reclamation: personal memory reframed as national history.

Catch My Father’s Shadow in theaters beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Akin and his older brother Remi (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), the film begins in a rural village where routine boredom is broken by the sudden return of the boys’ father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). Charismatic, imposing, and emotionally opaque, he arrives without explanation and impulsively decides to take the boys with him to Lagos. Their mother is absent; the boys readily obey.

Folarin’s mission is simple: collect months of unpaid wages before the country’s political uncertainty curdles into chaos. But the errand swiftly becomes a wandering circuit. The boys encounter men who treat Folarin with peculiar deference, calling him “boss” and “leader.” They are told to show respect to strangers presented as quasi-uncles. Davies smartly keeps exposition thin; political crisis is not explained, but is overheard, glimpsed, felt.

What gives the film its emotional core is the gradual reshaping of the boys’ image of their father. Folarin begins as a near-mythic figure: commanding, sharply dressed, unquestionable. Over the course of the day, however, he becomes both more human and more contradictory. He is strict, evasive, possibly unfaithful, and frequently distracted, yet he is also attentive in bursts, showing them city landmarks, recounting his courtship of their mother, teaching Akin to swim, and bending rules to let them explore forbidden spaces. His philosophy of adulthood—that everything is sacrifice, and one must pray not to sacrifice the wrong thing—lands with tragic force in the context of both family and nation.

The film’s governing question emerges when one of the boys repeats his mother’s strange dictum: that their father’s absence is proof of love, because he is away earning money for them, just as God, who also loves them, remains unseen. Is absence love? The film does not provide an easy answer, but lets the question echo against images of political upheaval, paternal limitation, and inherited memory.

By its end, My Father’s Shadow has outgrown its original container as a story about one family on one day into an ambitious exploration about how children assemble identity from partial knowledge, how nations fracture private lives, and how cinema can serve as an instrument of emotional archaeology. It turns political rupture into family myth—and family myth into something like scripture.

“British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Akinola Davies Jr. announces himself as a major cinematic voice.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

“The historic crisis [of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election] makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Carmen Maura Shines in Maryam Touzani’s Tender ‘Calle Málaga’

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For generations of moviegoers, Carmen Maura’s face is inseparable from the films of Pedro Almodóvar, beginning with their first collaboration forty-five years ago and continuing across seven defining features of modern Spanish cinema. In Calle Málaga, Maura reminds us why she remains one of the screen’s most expressive and emotionally generous performers, delivering a luminous late-career lead performance that is by turns funny, sensual, stubborn, and deeply moving.

Catch Calle Malaga on the big screen beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center theaters.

Director Maryam Touzani’s film centers on María Ángeles, an elderly Spanish widow living in Tangier, Morocco, where she has built a comfortable life of routine, friendship, and hard-earned independence. Her days are filled with small but sustaining pleasures: greeting market vendors by name, tending balcony flowers, listening to romantic boleros, and visiting the cemetery where her husband and friends are buried. When her daughter arrives from Madrid with urgent financial troubles and a plan to sell the apartment, María Ángeles is suddenly confronted with the loss not just of her home, but of her autonomy.

The premise may be simple, but its execution is rich in both detail and feeling. Touzani, working from a script co-written with her husband and fellow filmmaker Nabil Ayouch and inspired by her grandmother’s actual experiences, treats domestic space as emotional territory. Rooms, objects, and streets are not background but biography, containers of memory that cannot be easily boxed up and sold. The film understands how profoundly place and identity intertwine, especially later in one’s life.

Maura carries the film with masterful aplomb. The shifts in her inner life register instantly: pride wounded, resolve rekindled, mischief flashing back into her eyes. She never reduces María Ángeles to a stock “feisty elder” archetype, instead grounding her resistance in believable portrayals of dignity and desire. Even moments that do threaten to tip into sentimentality remain anchored by her naturalism and innate charm.

The mother-daughter conflict is drawn with melancholy sharpness, capturing how love and resentment can calcify over time. Yet the film makes room for surprise and renewal. After a forced move into assisted living—and a quick, cleverly engineered escape—María Ángeles begins rebuilding her prior life on her own terms, launching a small neighborhood soccer-night and gradually forming an unexpected bond with a local antiques dealer. What follows includes one of the film’s most refreshing elements: a tender, late-life romantic and sexual awakening, portrayed with warmth and wit.

Above all, Calle Málaga stands as a worthy showcase for Carmen Maura, an icon revisiting familiar themes of womanhood, independence, and reinvention, while proving she remains as captivating now as at the zenith of her career.

“A sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Screen Daily

‘The Love That Remains’: Comedy, Melancholy, and the Strange Work of Letting Go

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

With The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason shifts gears from the icy severity of Godland and the simmering grief of A White, White Day to deliver a warm yet quietly devastating portrait of a family learning how to (co-)exist after a marriage ends. Set against Iceland’s imposing yet luminous landscapes, the film follows a separated couple and their three children across the uneasy months following their split, blending domestic realism with eccentric surrealism to capture the strange emotional limbo that follows love’s collapse. Both gently comic and deeply melancholic, the film becomes less about the breakup itself than about what persists in the wake of its dissolution: habit, tenderness, resentment, and the stubborn bonds that refuse to vanish on schedule.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse on February 4th to hear Pálmason discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale theaters beginning February 6th.

Rather than tracing a traditional narrative arc, Pálmason presents a series of vignettes that drift between everyday routine and flights of imagination. Magnus, or Maggi (Sverrir Gudnason), works long stretches aboard a fishing trawler, returning home to a family life that no longer fully includes him. His estranged wife Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), an artist attempting to push her work into larger spaces, appears steadier but no less burdened, balancing her creative ambitions with the emotional labor of parenting children still adjusting to their new reality.

Their interactions carry an awkward familiarity: shared meals, casual conversations, lingering frustrations, and moments when their prior intimacy briefly resurfaces. But Pálmason repeatedly interrupts these naturalistic scenes with flashes of surreal humor and dreamlike invention: a monstrous rooster stalks Magnus’s nightmares, an art-world charlatan meets an exaggerated fate, and a medieval sword drops inexplicably from the sky beside the children’s play area. These moments lighten the film’s tone while also underscoring the emotional chaos lurking beneath its surface, reflecting how heartbreak rarely unfolds in tidy, realistic beats.

Shot by Pálmason himself on richly textured film stock, the Icelandic landscapes become more than mere scenic backdrops, but dynamic entities that mirror the characters’ emotional isolation while offering tantalizing glimpses of calm and continuity. Everyday play, family pets, and the rhythms of work and weather continue even as adult relationships falter.

What makes The Love That Remains so affecting is its refusal to offer easy resolution. Instead, Pálmason captures the uncomfortable truth that love does not simply disappear—It mutates, lingers, and occasionally resurfaces in unexpected forms. The result is a film that is tender, odd, and quietly profound, finding humor and grace in the messy process of learning how to live with the fractured pieces of our best-laid plans.

“There’s a deceptive sweetness to [its] simple, hypnotic rhythms.” – Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com

“Pálmason’s fourth feature is an album of achingly felt, morbidly funny and increasingly haywire scenes from a marriage.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

Moviegoers, Start Your Guesses! The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest Is Back!

January 27, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 2 Comments

The Oscar nominations are out, the debates are raging, and once again it’s time to test your instincts against those of the Academy. Welcome to the Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest, our favorite annual exercise in hope, hubris, and lovingly overthought predictions.

Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another — One Battle After Another

If last year proved anything, it’s that certainty can be a dangerous commodity. After all, a whopping 66.1% of Laemmle patrons were convinced Demi Moore would win Best Actress for The Substance, while only 10.7% correctly predicted Mikey Madison’s longshot victory for Anora. Consensus, as it turns out, is no guarantee of clairvoyance.

The same pattern emerged across the technical and animated races. In Best Film Editing, 35.6% of Laemmle patrons expected Conclave (edited by Nick Emerson) to prevail, compared with only 20.1% backing Anora and Sean Baker. Meanwhile, nearly half of patrons (49.3%) anticipated The Wild Robot would take Best Animated Feature, outpacing Flow, which drew 32.5% of the vote. In each case, confidence ran high—and accuracy proved elusive.

This year’s lineup looks just as volatile. Several major categories feel genuinely up for grabs, with no outcome that can be declared “locked” without inviting embarrassment. Best Picture, in particular, seems poised to divide even the most seasoned Oscar-watchers. That’s where you come in.

If you, dear cinephile, can accurately predict how the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will vote across all 23 categories (or come impressively close), you’ll win movie passes good at all Laemmle locations(!!) along with the quiet satisfaction of having outguessed the crowd. As always, the contest includes a tie-breaker: your best estimate of the ceremony’s total running time.

Moviegoers, Start Your Guesses! The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest Is Back! — Sinners

The 98th Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 15, and we’ll announce the winners shortly afterward, complete with our signature snazzy charts and statistical deep-dives.

Want a real edge over the competition? Don’t overlook the short film categories. The animated, live-action, and documentary shorts are often where the widest gaps in knowledge—and therefore opportunity—exist. Seeing these nominees can dramatically improve your odds, and we’ll begin screening all three categories starting February 20th.

Good luck. Argue passionately. Second-guess everything. And remember: the Oscars rarely reward certainty, but they always reward participation.

Happy guessing!

– Your fellow cinephiles at Laemmle Theatres

A Poet: A Darkly Comic Fable About Art, Failure, and the Cost of Belief

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet is a caustic, unexpectedly tender portrait of artistic failure and the uneasy hope that comes with believing in someone else. Set in Medellín, the film follows a middle-aged, alcoholic poet whose early promise has long since calcified into bitterness and artistic paralysis. When he encounters a gifted teenage student from a working-class background, he seizes the chance to reinvent himself as a mentor, projecting his lost ambitions onto her raw natural talent. What unfolds is a sharply observed fable about ego, exploitation, and the uneasy line between nurturing one’s art and using it as a lifeline.

Catch A Poet in theaters beginning January 30th at the Laemmle Royal, or at Glendale beginning February 6th.

Oscar Restrepo (portrayed by newcomer Ubeimar Rios with remarkable authenticity) is introduced as a man at war with the world and himself. He drinks too much, picks arguments about poetry with strangers, and torpedoes rare professional opportunities through self-sabotage and disdain. Yet Soto never treats Oscar as a punchline alone. His failures are rendered with specificity and compassion, revealing a man who grasps the general shape of the life he wanted, even as he proves incapable of living it. Oscar’s volatility is inseparable from his sincerity; his tragedy is not that he lacks talent, but that he cannot reconcile art with adulthood.

The film’s emotional axis shifts when Oscar begins teaching at a public high school and encounters a student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), whose writing displays clarity, intelligence, and an unvarnished sense of voice. Unlike Oscar, she approaches art pragmatically, weighing its value against economic reality and familial obligations. Their relationship is neither inspirational nor redemptive in the traditional sense: Oscar is an erratic, often irresponsible guide, while his protégée resists being molded into a passive, yielding symbol. Their bond is defined less by uplift than by friction, an uneasy negotiation between belief and self-preservation.

A Poet sharpens its satire as the pair enter elite literary spaces, where well-funded institutions eagerly embrace the young writer as a marketable emblem of authenticity. Here, Soto skewers the art world’s hunger for narratives that flatter its own virtue, exposing a system in which mentorship, patronage, and diversity often function as performance. The film’s critique is pointed but never smug, grounded in lived contradiction rather than broad caricature.

Shot on grainy 16mm, A Poet has a tactile, slightly unmoored quality that suits its blend of farce and melancholy. Bursts of music heighten the absurdity of Oscar’s misadventures while allowing moments of genuine tenderness to land unforced. In charting the gap between artistic idealism and material reality, Soto delivers a film that is funny, bruising, and quietly devastating—a story not about succeeding in art, but about what it costs to keep believing in it at all.

“Rios is so believable as Oscar, you’d think this film was a documentary of his life.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

H Is for Hawk: A Poetic Exploration of Grief, Nature, and the Human Heart

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

H Is for Hawk adapts Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir into a quietly powerful portrait of grief, healing, and the paradoxical solace of the natural world. Directed with sensitivity and a keen eye for emotional nuance, the film follows a woman’s audacious attempt to navigate profound personal loss by forging a bond with a creature that is, by nature, wild and ungovernable.

Catch H Is for Hawk in theaters beginning January 23rd at the Laemmle Monica, Town Center, Newhall, and Claremont locations.

The film centers on Helen (Claire Foy), a woman devastated by the sudden death of her father. Struggling to articulate her grief, she turns to an unexpected source of solace: training a goshawk, an apex bird of prey whose fierce independence mirrors the untamable terrain of her own emotions. In Helen’s obsessive dedication to understanding and partnering with the hawk, the film finds a natural metaphor for the disorienting, unpredictable landscape of mourning itself, wherein moments of connection coexist with bewilderment, longing, and the jagged edges of loss.

Foy’s performance is quietly magnetic, capturing Helen’s inwardness without collapsing her into cliché. She embodies a character who is determined yet vulnerable, scientifically curious yet emotionally adrift, and consistently compelling in her contradictions. In flashbacks, Brendan Gleeson, as the father who offered both practical wisdom and human warmth, complements Foy with a lived-in presence that anchors many of the film’s quieter moments. Together, their chemistry underscores the film’s central concern: that connection—whether with people, animals, or one’s own past—is every bit as nonnegotiable as eating, breathing, and sleeping.

Visually, H Is for Hawk moves with an abiding stillness. Long, carefully observed takes of misty landscapes and the hawk’s lithe flight underscore the recurring notion that healing is not linear and can unfold in unexpected ways. The cinematography allows the wildness of the British countryside to become an emotional backdrop as rich as any dialogue, suggesting that nature does more than reflect human feeling: it refracts it, alters it, and sometimes softens it.

Critics have noted the film’s success in adapting a highly introspective, literary text to the screen without diminishing its emotional weight. By embracing both the ineffable qualities of grief and the intricate rhythms of human and animal behavior, the adaptation feels faithful not just to the memoir’s chronology but to its philosophical heart.

In a cinematic landscape often driven by resolution and/or theatrics, H Is for Hawk stands out for its emotional honesty and its faith in the audiences’ capacity to sit with an open and unguarded heart. It is a quiet film with a strong heartbeat, one that finds beauty not in what is tamed, but in what is profound, wild, and enduring.

“Philippa Lowthorpe pares Helen Macdonald’s intricately layered memoir down to what she considers essential, focusing on the author’s odd choice to adopt a goshawk as a kind of emotional escapism.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“A sensitive portrayal of a person’s slide into depression… particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning.” – Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter

Culture Vulture: Big-Screen Art, Ideas, and Performance at Laemmle

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture is Laemmle Theatres’ ongoing invitation to experience world-class art, performance, and cultural storytelling on the big screen and with an audience at your side. Curated from across the ballet, opera, theatre, fine art, and documentary landscapes, this series brings exceptional works to the Laemmle Glendale, Monica, and Town Center locations on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 10:00 a.m. and Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m.

Below are the next five Culture Vulture presentations, each offering a distinct outlook on history, creativity, and human expression:

The Hell of Auschwitz: MAUS by Art Spiegelman (January 24)
Blending humor, rigor, and deep emotional intelligence, this documentary explores Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel Maus, a work that permanently transformed how the Holocaust could be represented. By recounting both his father Vladek’s survival of Auschwitz and their fraught father-son relationship in postwar New York, Spiegelman forged a new artistic language, one that made space for memory, trauma, and inherited silence. Director Pauline Horovitz approaches Maus not just as cultural history, but as a personal reckoning, examining its enduring impact through the lens of the “second generation.”

Accompanied by: EGG CREAM (short)
Screening alongside Maus is this affectionate documentary short about the iconic New York City drink that contains neither egg nor cream. Through family stories, archival material, and neighborhood rituals, “Egg Cream” is a meditation on Jewish-American identity, immigration, and the bittersweet pull of nostalgia—small pleasures standing in for much larger histories.

Hamlet – National Theatre Live (January 31)
Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy returns in a filmed presentation from London’s National Theatre. This production emphasizes Hamlet’s psychological intimacy and moral uncertainty, bringing fresh immediacy to a timeless play about grief, power, and the impossibility of clean action. Captured live for the screen, it preserves the electricity of theatre while granting audiences an unusually close encounter with one of drama’s greatest roles.

Frida: Viva la Vida (February 7)
This vivid documentary portrait of Frida Kahlo draws directly from the artist’s own letters, diaries, and writings to illuminate her life beyond the rich mythology she left behind. Moving seamlessly between themes of art, illness, love, and political commitment, the film illuminates Kahlo as both fiercely self-aware and profoundly vulnerable, tracing how pain and creativity became inseparable forces in her work.

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (February 21)
An urgent and inspiring civil rights documentary, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round examines and unpacks the first organized interracial protest in U.S. history. When Black students and white allies joined together in 1960 to desegregate a Maryland amusement park, their sustained picket line became a training ground for future Freedom Riders and a crucible for grassroots activism. Told through immersive storytelling, archival footage, and firsthand accounts, the film expounds upon a pivotal but largely forgotten chapter of American protest history.

Water Lilies of Monet: The Magic of Water and Light (March 7)
This visually sumptuous film immerses viewers in Claude Monet’s lifelong obsession with water, reflection, and light. Moving between art history and sensory experience, it explores how the Water Lilies series redefined modern painting, and how Monet’s garden at Giverny became both subject and sanctuary. Seen on the big screen, the paintings’ scale, texture, and color take on renewed power.

Culture Vulture is an ongoing celebration of art in all possible forms. Whether you’re drawn to history, performance, or visual beauty, these curated screenings offer a rare chance to encounter such landmark works on the big screen, as they were meant to be experienced. Buy your tickets today and prepare to be wowed!