The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
DISFLUENCY Q&A TIMES at the Laemmle Glendale
– Friday 4:20pm & 10:10pm – Writer/Director Anna Baumgarten & Producer Danny Mooney
– Saturday 4:20pm & 10:10pm – Writer/Director Anna Baumgarten & Producer Danny Mooney
– Sunday 4:20pm – Sevag Chahinian (LA Unit Cinematographer), Nathan Alexander (Composer), Monica Gerraffo (Costume Designer)
– Monday 4:20pm – Cast: Will announce names closer to the date.
January 22, 25 & 26, Eat the Night, France, 2024 ~ Pablo, a small-time drug dealer, and his teenage sister Apolline have forged an unbreakable bond through their shared obsession with the online video game Darknoon. When Pablo falls for the mysterious Night, he gets swept up in their liaison, abandoning his sister to deal with the impending shutdown of their digital haven alone. As Pablo’s reckless choices provoke the wrath of a dangerous rival gang, the end of their virtual life draws near, upending their reality. The newest vision from Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever) is a bittersweet, apocalyptic love story with a modern MMORPG twist.
January 29, February 1 & 2, Oceans are the Real Continents, Cuba/Italy, 2023 ~ Three stories of migration, exile, and memory develop in the Cuban town of San Antonio De Los Baños, a place that time forgot. Alex and Edith, a young couple in their 30s, build their lives upon small gestures, reminisces, and a deep connection amidst the nation’s ruins. Milagros survives selling peanut cones on the street, spending her days listening to the radio and reading old letters. Nine-year-old best friends Frank and Alain go to school and dream of emigrating to the U.S. to become baseball players.
February 5, 8 & 9, Sujo, Mexico/France/USA, 2024 ~ After a sicario is murdered, four-year-old Sujo is left orphaned and at risk. With his aunt’s help, he survives in the isolated countryside, facing hardship and danger tied to his identity. As a teenager, he rebels and joins the local cartel. As a young man, Sujo seeks to escape his violent past, but when his father’s legacy resurfaces, he confronts the fate that seems destined for him.
February 12, 15 & 16, Ma Mère, France/Portugal/Austria/Spain, 2004 ~ Ma Mère takes place in the Canary Islands, where the film’s family shares a home. The mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert), cool and in charge, and her teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel), a pious Catholic back from boarding school, discuss his father’s infidelity; the next they learn that he has died in a car crash. Hélène launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her drugging, drinking and sex-fueled nights out.
February 19, 22 & 23, The Blond Boy from Casbah, France, 2023 ~ Filmmaker Antoine travels to his birthplace, Algiers, with his young son to present his new film: an account of his childhood in mid-20th century Algeria during the country’s civil war. As he wanders through the city, the filmmaker immerses us in the moments of happiness, laughter, and tears of his childhood – spent between school, friends, and his Jewish family. Growing up in the final moments of Algeria’s pre-independence period, the young Antoine discovers his profound fascination with cinema and starts to understand who he truly is.
February 26, 29 & 30, Amal, Belgium, 2023 ~ Amal is a powerful film by acclaimed Belgian-Moroccan director Jawad Rhalib, is a thought-provoking drama that explores the transformative power of education and self-expression. The title character is a teacher who courageously confronts fundamentalism through literature, offering a moving exploration of courage and compassion. Starring Lubna Azabal (The Blue Caftan, Incendies), Fabrizio Rongione (Two Days, One Night), and Catherine Salée (The Unknown Girl), Amal tackles urgent themes of identity, tolerance, and acceptance.
March 5, 8 & 9, My Motherland, France, 2023 ~ The celebrated actress Fanny Ardant plays the role of France, a wealthy Frenchwoman living alone in her Parisian apartment since the death of her husband. When she hears on the radio that the Singa association puts homeless migrants in contact with people who can take them in, she decides, against the advice of her friends and family, to take in Reza, a young Hazara Afghan refugee. Directed by Benoit Cohen, My Motherland is based on his own book Mohammad, My Mother, and Me, which is based on his mother’s experience welcoming a young Afghan refugee. This deeply personal film beautifully captures the complexities of navigating identity and belonging.
March 12, 15 & 16, Born for You, Italy, 2023 ~ Born for You tells the moving true story of Luca, a single gay Catholic man who in 2017 adopted Alba, a child with Down syndrome who was abandoned in the hospital shortly after being born. Thirty heterosexual families rejected her before the court decided to entrust her to him: with him, the legal foster care register for singles was inaugurated in Italy. Luca was, in fact, the first case in Italy of a single, gay person successfully adopting a daughter. But his was not a charitable gesture, nor to fight a system set against him and others like him: he simply wanted a family.
April 16, 19 & 20, Love Hotel, Japan, 1985 ~ Newly restored! A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity and coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times veering into near-musical territory, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and livewire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of the Oscar-winning 1979 hit ‘Breaking Away‘ with costar Paul Dooley joining for an in-person Q&A after the screening. The movie earned five Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Yates, and it won the Oscar for the Original Screenplay by Steve Tesich. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical of the year, and it won the Writers Guild award for Best Original Screenplay. Many years later, when the American Film Institute compiled a list of the most inspiring movies in history, ‘Breaking Away‘ ranked in the top 10.
Tesich based the script in part on his own experiences at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The story tells of the bond between four young working-class men raised in the town but unable to afford college. They are scorned by the college students in town and called “cutters” because of their families’ work as stonecutters in the local quarry. The four young men are played by newcomers Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley. Christopher’s parents are played by Paul Dooley and Barbara Barrie, and the snooty college kids include actors Hart Bochner and Robyn Douglass.
Christopher’s Dave, the leading character, becomes obsessed with Italian bicycle racers and Italian culture in general, to the dismay of his working-class father, played by Dooley. Eventually he decides to enter the local bicycle race dominated by the college students, and he becomes a symbol to his pals of the possibilities of transcending their humble backgrounds.
Critics were swept up in the story’s inspirational message. Roger Ebert called ‘Breaking Away‘ “a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin agreed and declared, “Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn’t even need a big budget or a pedigree.” Variety summarized the overwhelmingly positive reviews, calling the film “a thoroughly delightful light comedy, lifted by fine performances from Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley.”
Dooley got his start working several times with director Robert Altman on such films as ‘A Wedding,’ ‘Health,’ and he had a leading role in Altman’s offbeat romantic comedy ‘A Perfect Couple.’ In Altman’s musical adaptation of ‘Popeye,’ Dooley played the role of Wimpy. He also costarred in such films as ‘Paternity,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Underneath,’ ‘Runaway Bride,’ ‘A Mighty Wind,’ and ‘Happy, Texas.’ He provided one of the voices in the ‘Cars’ animated movies, and he also had prominent roles on such popular TV series as ‘thirtysomething’, ‘My So-Called Life,’ ‘Dream On,’ ‘The Practice,’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’
Acclaimed filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck, three-time Sundance honorees who previously took audiences to the secret corners of the Italian countryside in search of white truffles with The Truffle Hunters, recently sat down with Inside the Arthouse hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge to talk about their latest striking nonfiction work. Gaucho Gaucho paints an Argentinian western with images and sounds of operatic beauty, building on their earlier success with The Last Race, a film that explored the last stock car racetrack on Long Island.
Kershaw and Dweck’s focus is now on the vast mountains of Argentina, expressed in stunning black-and-white photography, and a small community of gauchos who hold profound connections to the surrounding nature and their own traditions. As older generations dispense their wisdom, the film keeps its eye toward a new generation which continue to fight for their families’ legacies in a modern world.
“These filmmakers have enormous reserves of love and empathy for traditions that miraculously survive in spite of the modern world. And their compassion has never looked more cinematic.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar
“An affecting tone poem which ruminates on the passage of time and the passing of traditions from one generation to the next.” ~ Tim Grierson, Screen International
Palestine’s Official Submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, From Ground Zero is a powerful collection of short films by 22 Palestinian filmmakers living through war in Gaza. Through a unique blend of animation, documentary, and fiction, these stories capture the unyielding steadfastness of the human spirit and enduring creativity that thrives even in the face of relentless devastation. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has short-listed the film in its Best International Feature Film category for the 97th Academy Awards.
In Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada, which we open Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo, and Town Center, Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi play a man at opposite ends of his life, deciding how to live it. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Victoria Hill co-star.
Schrader said this about his film:
“When friend and author Russell Banks (Affliction) took ill I was weighing other story possibilities. I realized that mortality should be the subject. Russell had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked if I would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.
“Leonard Fife became a successful documentary filmmaker after fleeing to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Sick and dying in Montreal, he is interviewed by his former students. ‘I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,’ he says, ‘Now it’s my turn.'”
“Paul Schrader and Richard Gere, reunited for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo, are at the peak of their powers.” – Chuck Bowen, Slant
“Energized by the reunion of its director, Paul Schrader, and its star, Richard Gere, in their first collaboration since American Gigolo.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Richard Gere gives his best performance in years.” – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies
“Takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning… to sincerely moving effect.” – Justin Chang, The New Yorker
It has been another excellent year for animated features. Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, Look Back, Art College 1994, Chicken for Linda and Memoir of a Snail stand out; Moana 2 just had a record-setting weekend; and we still have The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, The Colors Within and The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie to look forward to.
But, as Yoda said, “there is another.” The adventure-fantasy Flow follows a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood. Teaming up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, they must rely on trust, courage, and wits to survive the perils of a newly aquatic planet. From the boundless imagination of the award-winning Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis (Away), Flow is a thrilling animated spectacle as well as a profound meditation on the fragility of the environment and the spirit of friendship and community. Steeped in the soaring possibilities of visual storytelling, it is a feast for the senses and a treasure for the heart and we open it this Friday at the Laemmle Claremont, Glendale, Monica Film Center, and Newhall.
“Critic’s Pick! Grade: A! A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too. The anthropomorphic animal characters of 21st century U.S. animated features have nothing on the animal stars of ‘Flow.'” – Christian Blauvelt, Indiewire
“At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there’s something about the purity of great animated storytelling that can shatter your heart and then make it whole again. (Think Toy Story 3.) Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ captivating second feature, Flow, is that kind of marvel, a vividly experiential white-knuckle survival adventure that takes place in a world on the brink of ruin. Told entirely without dialogue, this tale of a cat that evolves from self-preservation to solidarity with a motley crew of other species is something quite special” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
“Flow is as hard to resist as a pair of plaintive, saucer-shaped eyes peering out from a bundle of fur. Gints Zilbalodis’s second feature is a rousing animated adventure in which a devastating flood obliges an independent cat to seek allies among the animal kingdom. Technical virtuosity is matched by storytelling vigour and dramatic heft in a film with a ready appeal to ailurophiles and animal lovers of all ages.”- Allan Hunter, Screen Daily