Resistance: They Fought Back Q&A’s at the Town Center will be hosted on May 11th at 7:10 PM by Co-Director & Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell, Co-Director Kirk Wolfinger, along with Roberta Grossman, Co-Executive Director of Jewish Story Partners, and actress and writer Romy Rosemont. On May 12th at 1:10 PM, Co-Director & Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell and Co-Producer Yael Beals will host a Q&A and on May 13th at 7:10 PM, Co-Director & Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell and Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Professor of Jewish & Holocaust Studies at American Jewish University, will host a Q&A.
“The deal Mr. Haffmann tries to strike is wild. But they were wild times, and nothing was normal.” Daniel Auteuil on his new film FAREWELL, MR. HAFFMANN.
French star Daniel Auteuil (Caché, Jean de Florette, The Well-Digger’s Daughter, many more) stars in Farewell, Mr. Haffmann as a talented Jewish jeweler in Nazi-occupied Paris who arranges for his family to flee the city and offers one of his employees (Gilles Lellouche) the opportunity to take over his store until the conflict subsides. When his own escape is thwarted, he has to rely on his employee to protect him. We open the film this Friday at the Royal and Town Center.
M. Auteuil recently sat for an interview about Farewell, Mr. Haffmann:
WHO IS JOSEPH HAFFMANN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FILM?
He is a man whose sole purpose is to save the lives of himself and his family. He is hunted, in danger, and the whole situation is closing in on him. But I’d say that deep down, his purpose is the same as that of François (Gilles Lellouche): both men are obsessed with their children. The children Haffmann hopes to see again, and the one François hopes to have.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THE TWO MEN?
It’s a relationship where the power dynamic immediately shifts. It’s what I liked when I first read the script. The deal Mr. Haffmann tries to strike is wild. But they were wild times, and nothing was normal. There was no “normal” behavior. It was the law of survival. War and danger create a context in which you react however you can to the crazy violence around you. When Haffmann comes up from the basement, he “acts crazy.” He can’t take it anymore. Because there is a moment when people who are persecuted want to revolt. Even if it puts their lives on the line. Anyway, that’s how I experienced it… or how I acted it!
THE FILM IS SHOT BASICALLY ON ONE SET, AND CENTERS ON THE INTIMACY OF THE THREE MAIN CHARACTERS. WERE YOU AFRAID TO BE IN SUCH CLOSE QUARTERS?
Not at all! There are wonderful examples like Claude Miller’s GARDE À VUE (THE INQUISITOR) where Lino Ventura and Michel Serrault face off in a room throughout the entire film. It’s more of a challenge for directors, who need to find more ideas for shots, than it is for actors. And we shot in a studio. When I was young, I preferred shooting on location, but certain films work better in studio. Farewell, Mr. Haffmann is one of them. We are more concentrated on these characters, who are obliged to dig within themselves. And Fred Cavayé hones things down up until the very last minute. He is constantly streamlining his writing. He removes more than he adds. He pares down, cuts to the bone. It’s amazing because it gives the actors more room to let themselves go in front of the camera.
HAFFMANN IS NOT AT ALL TALKATIVE. HE ONLY SAYS THE STRICT MINIMUM. DO YOU ENJOY ACTING SILENCES AND PREGNANT STARES?
Not particularly. I play the score I’m given. What can I say? I’m alone in a basement, so…! But it’s true I’ve been told that before, especially for Claude Sautet’s A HEART IN WINTER. I often heard: “You don’t say much, but your eyes.” And when I saw the movie, I realized I was speaking all the time. But it’s not what people remembered …
SARA GIRAUDEAU REFERS TO YOUR EXTREME CALM ON THE SET. IS THAT ALWAYS THE CASE OR WAS YOUR CHARACTER THAT CALLED FOR IT?
Well, I know I’m going to be spending 12 hours doing the same thing over and over, so I try to go about it as serenely as possible! And it’s a pleasure for me to be there. Film shoots are a privilege. They allow me to work in good conditions. I love the atmosphere on sets, love watching the actors and the crew. When you work in cinema, you’re protected from the outside world. But I must say that is calming. But sometimes, actors do become their characters, unconsciously. Haffmann’s discretion, his silent presence, may have rubbed off on me…
THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE ACTED WITH GILLES LELLOUCHE…
Yes, and I accepted the film because I knew who my partners were. It was wonderful to witness Gilles’ enthusiasm, his method, his search, his questioning… He overflows with an energy that I must now try to preserve. Everyone on the set was extremely absorbed, focused. There was a lot of pleasure in doing as we were doing it. That’s already pretty good, right?
PURE O Q&As
Several screenings of Pure O will feature Q&As. Here are the details:
-
-
Date: Friday, April 5th
-
Description: Join us for an exclusive screening of the film as we collaborate with the International OCD Foundation. With a focus on serving a diverse global community affected by OCD and related disorders, the IOCDF is dedicated to providing support, resources, and fostering connections for individuals, families, mental health professionals, and researchers worldwide.
-
-
-
Date: Sunday, April 7th
-
Description: Don’t miss this special screening of Pure O, featuring a collaboration with the creators of Purely OCD: the Podcast, hosted by Lauren Rosen and Kelley Franke. Gain invaluable insights into OCD treatment and navigate the complexities of the disorder’s journey with guidance from these experienced therapists.
-
-
-
Date: Tuesday, April 9th
-
Description: Mark your calendars for an empowering screening event in partnership with OCD Gamechangers. Dedicated to serving individuals affected by OCD, their families, and healthcare providers globally, OCD Gamechangers is committed to fostering a supportive community and inspiring hope.
-
-
-
Date: Thursday, April 11th
-
Description: Join us for the final screening of Pure O, featuring a collaboration with the Made of Millions Foundation. As a leading global advocacy nonprofit, Made of Millions is actively re-shaping perceptions around mental health, offering support, encouragement, and a platform for change.
-
Jean-Pierre Melville & Alain Delon’s 1967 French noir LE SAMOURAÏ, newly restored, opens April 5.
“The closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.” – John Woo
“Noir Nirvana.” – Eddie Muller
“Jean-Pierre Melville’s coolest, sleekest, and most influential salute to the French underworld.” – Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
“The beauty of Le Samouraï isn’t its plot, but the assured handling of tone, mood, and style, which tips its hat to the noir of the past while standing out as a unique heady cocktail of its own.” – Angelica Jade Bastien, Vulture
“[Jean-Pierre Melville] made the coolest gangster films ever.” – Quentin Tarantino
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le Samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.
We open Le Samouraï April 5 and the Laemmle Glendale and Royal.
The “tender and eye-opening tribute” REMEMBERING GENE WILDER opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center with multiple Q&As.
This Friday we’re so pleased to open Remembering Gene Wilder at the Royal in West L.A. and the Town Center in Encino. A loving tribute that celebrates the life and legacy of the comic genius behind an extraordinary string of film roles, from his first collaboration with Mel Brooks in The Producers, to the enigmatic title role in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, to his inspired on-screen partnership with Richard Pryor in movies like Silver Streak. It is illustrated by a bevy of touching and hilarious clips and outtakes, never-before-seen home movies, narration from Wilder’s audiobook memoir, and interviews with a roster of brilliant friends and collaborators like Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, and Carol Kane. Remembering Gene Wilder shines a light on an essential performer, writer, director, and all-around mensch.
We have several introductions and Q&As scheduled with executive producer Julie Nimoy, writer Glenn Kirschbaum, and Mr. Wilder’s widow Karen Wilder.
“A hugely enjoyable walk through Gene Wilder’s entire life” – The Broad Street Review
“Tender and eye-opening tribute.” – Jewish Film Institute
Anniversary Classics in April ~ LA CÉRÉMONIE, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY & CHOCOLAT.
Spring forward by looking back at some classic films next month. We’ve got two modern French classics, Claude Chabrol’s dark masterpiece La Cérémonie (April 2 at the Royal with actress Jacqueline Bisset in person for a Q&A, and Chocolat by Claire Denis (April 24 at multiple theaters). We’ll also be screening two quintessential films from the milestone movie year 1962: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Ride the High Country, to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies. The films will have separate screenings at two different Laemmle locations, with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? only at the NoHo 7 in North Hollywood on April 11, and Ride the High Country only at Newhall in Santa Clarita on April 16. Both films are notably among nine 1962 movies selected by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for “historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance.”
Acclaimed French auteur Claude Chabrol was one of the masters of the French New Wave, along with Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer. His acclaimed films of the 1950s, Le Beau Serge and The Cousins, established Chabrol’s reputation as an astute observer of contemporary French society.
He continued to demonstrate satirical gifts in his later films but added an interest in suspense and crime stories with such films as La Femme Infidele, This Man Must Die, Le Boucher, and Violette, starring Isabelle Huppert. His partnership with Huppert continued over several films, including a new adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Story of Women, a bold study of a woman executed for performing illegal abortions during World War II.
Chabrol re-teamed with Huppert, who joined rising actress Sandrine Bonnaire and veterans Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel, for La Cérémonie, adapted from the novel by acclaimed mystery writer Ruth Rendell. Bonnaire plays a maid who is hired to work for a wealthy family living in an isolated mansion in Brittany. Eventually she strikes up a friendship with a savvy postal worker living in the nearby town, played by Huppert. The two young women devise a plan to take advantage of Bonnaire’s employers, played by Bisset and Cassel.
Huppert won the Cesar award, France’s equivalent of the Oscar, for her performance, and Bisset earned a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The Guardian named La Cérémonie as one of the 25 greatest crime films of all time. Craig Williams of the British Film Institute called it “perhaps Chabrol’s greatest achievement.” Both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics named it the Best Foreign Language Film of 1995.
The cult classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two screen legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood, who were facing career fadeouts by 1962, the plight of aging actresses both then and now. Studio disinterest and the lack of appropriate roles forced them to seek unorthodox parts, and the screen adaptation of a Henry Farrell novel about the intense psychological rivalry between two reclusive sisters, former actresses holed up in Hollywood obscurity, seemed tailor-made. Producer-director Robert Aldrich hired Lukas Heller to write the screenplay, and the expert mix of black comedy and suspense, along with powerful acting by the cast, made the film a worldwide success. The movie scored a trifecta: a box-office bonanza, pop culture phenomenon, and show business sensation. It also revived the careers of both Davis and Crawford, restoring their places in the Hollywood pantheon, and spawned a genre of Grande Dame Guignol that gave veteran actresses roles for the next decade.
Part of the appeal of the film was the alleged off-screen rivalry between Davis and Crawford, and that rumored feud fostered high anticipation for both the press and fans of the day. “Feud,” a 2017 miniseries about the rivalry between Davis and Crawford while shooting the movie, sparked the most recent interest in the film. When the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Bette Davis among the Best Actress nominees, the feud was putatively exacerbated by the omission of Crawford. It won the Oscar for black-and-white costume design, and among its other nominations were Victor Buono (Best Supporting Actor) in his screen debut, and master cinematographer Ernest Haller (Oscar winner for Gone With the Wind), who had worked with both stars in their 1940s heyday. Among critical reception at the time, the Chicago Daily News saw “…the outlines of a modern Greek tragedy. Yet it is great fun too, because this is pure cinema drama set in a real house of horrors.”
Ride the High Country is now regarded as one of the all-time western classics and was only the second feature film by director Sam Peckinpah, who had honed his writing-directing skills on television westerns. Peckinpah also had a hand in revising an original screenplay by writer N.B. Stone, Jr. about two aging former lawmen tasked with a gold delivery from a mining camp at the turn of the twentieth century. Hollywood Golden Age actors Randolph Scott (in his final film) and Joel McCrea portray the venerable gunfighters, appropriate casting for the veteran actors who had extended their careers in post-war screen oaters. The film also features Mariette Hartley in her screen debut and character actors Warren Oates, L. Q. Jones, James Anderson, Edgar Buchanan, and R. G. Armstrong, with expert color cinematography by Lucien Ballard, another Golden Age veteran who became a frequent Peckinpah collaborator.
Ride the High Country’s setting at the twilight of the Old West and its theme of men who have outlived their times but cling to their moral code (for the most part) would be revisited by Peckinpah later in his career, most notably at the end of the decade in The Wild Bunch and into the 1970s in The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Although The Wild Bunch would ensure his legacy, the underseen Ride the High Country is now considered a seminal film in the western canon and his first masterpiece.
MGM underwent a regime change after the film’s production wrapped and its new president thought so poorly of the film that it was relegated to the neighborhood theater circuits as the lower half of double bills, which effectively killed its U.S. box office. But critics worldwide rescued the film from obscurity and heralded the arrival of a major new talent in Peckinpah. Among the accolades were the Paris Council of Film Critics’ ranking as one of the best films of the year. Newsweek placed it atop their year-end ten best list, and upon its original release exclaimed, “In fact, everything about this picture has the ring of truth, from the unglamorous settings to the flavorful dialogue and the natural acting, Ride the High Country is pure gold.”
Claire Denis drew on her own childhood experiences growing up in colonial French Africa for Chocolat, her multilayered, languorously absorbing feature debut, which explores many of the themes that would recur throughout her work. Returning to the town where she grew up in Cameroon after many years living in France, a white woman (Mireille Perrier) reflects on her relationship with Protée (Isaach De Bankolé), a Black servant with whom she formed a friendship while not fully grasping the racial divides that governed their worlds. We’ll show Chocolat April 24 at the Claremont, Glendale, Newhall and Royal.
REMEMBERING GENE WILDER Q&As
WOMAN IN THE DUNES 60th anniversary screenings March 19.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present this month’s installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad Series: Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Oscar-nominated erotic drama, Woman in the Dunes . Actually, the film was nominated in two separate years. In 1964, when it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it was one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1965, when the film was released in America, Teshigahara earned a nomination for Best Director. This was a milestone because he was the first Asian director ever to win that recognition from the Academy. The great Akira Kurosawa earned his only Best Director nomination a decade later, for his film Ran. Other Asian directors who have earned Oscar nominations and victories in recent years (including Ang Lee and Bong Joon Ho) owe something to Teshigahara for paving the way.
Woman in the Dunes is adapted from a novel by esteemed Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, who also contributed to the screenplay. Eiji Okada (the star of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and of Hollywood movies The Ugly American and The Yakuza) portrays an entomologist searching for a rare species of beetle in the sand dunes of a remote part of Japan. When he misses the bus to return home, he spends the night with a widow living in the dunes, portrayed by Kyoko Kishida. Eventually their relationship evolves into a more meaningful connection that transforms the life of the scientist.
The film was highly praised for the atmospheric cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, which immerses the viewer in the spectacular setting. The film also captivated American audiences because of its frank sexuality, which was a prime attraction of international films during the 1950s and 60s, when Hollywood was still straitjacketed by the censorious Production Code. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington declared, “In stunningly composed images by Teshigahara and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, that eroticism becomes overwhelming.”
Other critics took note of the film’s eroticism as well as its cinematic achievements and sharp characterizations. As Roger Ebert wrote, “Woman in the Dunes retains its power because it is a perfect union of subject, style and idea.” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther concurred that the film contains “a bewitching poetry and power.” Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film “a timeless contemplation of life’s essential mystery and a triumph of bold, innovative style.”
We’ll screen Woman in the Dunes at 7 pm on March 19 at our Claremont, Glendale, Santa Clarita, West L.A. and Encino theaters.
“More than almost any other film I can think of, Woman in the Dunes‘ uses visuals to create a tangible texture — of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature.” ~ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“The camera’s power to turn fact into metaphor catches the intent of Kobo Abe’s book perfectly.” ~ Michael Kustow, Sight & Sound
“The couple’s grimly inescapable dilemma becomes hugely complex and terrifyingly resonant — a sexualised version of the Sisyphus myth, recounted with a distinct touch of Buñuelian absurdism.” ~ Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday
“Teshigahara’s direction and Segawa’s camera-work often render the mundane startling and new, a claim that only good films can make.” ~ Mark Chalon Smith, Los Angeles Times
“Teshigahara’s creative background was in Japan’s avant-garde arts scene, and there’s a powerful expressiveness to the film’s black-and-white cinematography.” ~ Tom Dawson, BBC.com
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- …
- 136
- Next Page »