Monica Film Center Archives – Laemmle Theatres

The Architecture of Influence: Assayas’ ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

May 5, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Power rarely announces itself outright; more often, it is constructed—carefully, incrementally, and just out of view. In The Wizard of the Kremlin, director Olivier Assayas turns to the machinery behind modern political mythmaking, tracing how influence is shaped not only through force, but through narrative. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s widely discussed novel, the film approaches recent Russian history less as a fixed record than as something actively being authored, revised, and performed. The result is a work that peers behind the curtain to examine the uneasy relationship between image and authority.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Assayas dissect his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning May 15th at the Monica, Town Center, and NoHo 7.

At the center of the film’s world is Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former artist whose creative instincts find an unexpected outlet in the realm of political strategy. Through his eyes, the film moves from the cultural upheavals of the late Soviet period into the consolidating power structures of the Putin era. Baranov is less an ideologue than an architect, someone who understands that, in a media-saturated age, perception can be even more decisive than policy.

If Baranov provides the film’s perspective, it is Jude Law’s Vladimir Putin who supplies its gravitational pull. Eschewing caricature, Law delivers a performance that captures the controlled, often inscrutable presence of a leader who communicates as much through restraint as through declaration. Small gestures—a pause, a glance, the measured calibration of distance—become telling indicators of authority. Rather than attempting to decode the man entirely, the film uses these moments to suggest how power can be projected through absence as much as through expression.

Assayas, whose previous films—from Clouds of Sils Maria to Personal Shopper—have explored identity and performance in more intimate contexts, here scales those concerns up to the level of geopolitics. His collaboration with writer Emmanuel Carrère foregrounds dialogue and ideas, particularly in the film’s extended exchanges between Baranov and the many oligarchs, financiers, and political operatives who orbit him. These conversations, often laced with dark humor, become the film’s engine, illustrating how competing ambitions gradually coalesce into a singular, rigid system.

In this sense, The Wizard of the Kremlin positions itself less as a definitive account than as an inquiry into how such accounts are formed. It suggests that the real story lies not only in what happened, but in how those events were framed, disseminated, and ultimately absorbed. For viewers drawn to political dramas that prioritize ideas alongside performance, the film offers a dense, thought-provoking exploration of power that resonates beyond its immediate setting.

“A sharply-written, and often surprisingly funny, look at power in one of the most unique nation-states in the world.” – Chris Harrison, Shifter Magazine

“Essential viewing for understanding the highly sophisticated workings of a totalitarian propaganda state.” – Travis Jeppesen, BFI

Modern Love, Unfiltered: The Bold Charm of ‘Two Women’

April 28, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There’s a mischievous spark at the heart of Two Women, a film that takes a familiar setup—restless relationships, suburban routines—and flips it into something unexpectedly playful, warm, and quietly subversive. Directed with a light but assured touch by Chloé Robichaud, this Montreal-set comedy finds humor and honesty in the messiness of modern love.

Catch Two Women in theaters beginning May 1st at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center, followed by a special screening and Q&A hosted by Not Your Daddy’s Films following the 7:10 p.m. show on May 2nd at the Monica.

The story centers on two neighbors, Violette and Florence, who form an unspoken bond over their shared dissatisfaction at home. Violette, adjusting to new motherhood, finds herself adrift in a marriage that has lost all sense of intimacy, while Florence, navigating her own partner’s lack of libido, feels similarly disconnected. Their apartments may only be a balcony apart, but emotionally, they’ve both been stranded for some time.

What follows isn’t subtle: both women begin having affairs, embarking on a string of clandestine hookups that quickly spiral into something both comedic and unexpectedly revealing. Yet what might sound like a setup for moralizing instead plays out with a surprising lightness, for rather than framing this infidelity as purely destructive, Two Women treats it as a catalyst—messy, impulsive, and often funny—for the characters to confront what’s missing in their lives and to begin to discover what they actually want.

At the center of it all are two standout performances. Karine Gonthier-Hyndman brings a subtle emotional evolution to Florence, charting her journey from quiet detachment to a more awakened, self-assured presence. Opposite her, Laurence Leboeuf gives Violette a lively, layered warmth, balancing the character’s natural humor with an undercurrent of vulnerability. Together, they create a dynamic that feels genuinely lived-in, less like a traditional movie friendship and more like something instinctive and real.

Robichaud’s direction keeps the tone buoyant even as the film brushes up against larger questions about relationships, expectations, and autonomy. There’s a sense that Two Women is less interested in offering definitive answers than in simply letting its characters explore the questions themselves. That openness extends to the film’s humor, which leans into awkwardness and absurdity without ever losing sight of its characters’ humanity.

Ultimately, Two Women is a film about connection: between friends, between partners, and (perhaps most importantly) with oneself. It’s playful without being trivial, thoughtful without being heavy, and anchored by performances that make every twist feel earned. In a landscape where stories about relationships often follow well-worn paths, this one finds its own rhythm—and invites audiences to enjoy the ride.

“[The film’s] reflections on modern relationships are engagingly comical, cynical and ultimately tender. ” – Allan Hunter, Screen Daily

“[Two Women is] unafraid of sex and female pleasure in a way that feels so rare in modern films.” – Jesse Saunders, Movie Jawn

‘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

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

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!

Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s Quiet Meditation on Family Ties

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, winner of the coveted Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, offers a signature turn from one of independent cinema’s most distinctive voices, culminating in a gentle, contemplative triptych that quietly observes the tangled, often unspoken dynamics between children and their parents. Opening January 9th at the Laemmle Monica, Claremont, NoHo, and Glendale theaters, the film invites audiences into three subtly interconnected stories about siblings, aging, and legacy, all rendered with the iconoclastic filmmaker’s characteristic blend of wit, understatement, and emotional precision. Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Jarmusch discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut.

Structured in three chapters set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, Father Mother Sister Brother foregrounds ordinary domestic encounters over flashy, overt drama. In the first story, adult siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) make a quiet, tentative journey to visit their widowed father (Tom Waits) at his remote home, negotiating the awkwardness and muted affection that define long years of estrangement. Jarmusch’s direction attends closely to how the three characters move and speak around one another, revealing a lifetime of shared history through pauses, glances, and half-finished thoughts.

The second segment moves to Dublin, where an accomplished novelist (Charlotte Rampling) receives her rarely-seen daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) for an annual tea. Here, the emotional choreography is just as rife: politeness, competition, and unspoken disappointment circulate beneath measured exchanges, offering a quietly sharp exploration of how adult relationships with parents can continue to bear the marks of youth.

In the final story, set in Paris, twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) sift through their deceased parents’ belongings, reminiscing and confronting the traces of the lives that shaped them. Minimalist but resonant, this segment emphasizes memory, loss, and the ways shared history lingers in objects and quiet conversations.

While some viewers may find Jarmusch’s pared-back rhythms and emphasis on silence challenging, the film’s rewards lie in its textured, patient observation of ordinary life and its capacity to reflect shared human experience without forcing tidy resolutions. The cast—a blend of longtime Jarmusch collaborators and fresh faces—brings this world to life with subtle (yet thematically crucial) commonalities, underscoring the film’s unstated hypothesis that, whatever differences may exist between us, family dynamics follow a universal language.

In a cinematic landscape that often equates drama with spectacle, Jarmusch’s latest anthology stands apart as a humane, reflective study of the ties that bind us—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes silently, but always with a strange, persistent tenderness.

“What makes the triptych of thematically connected snapshots memorable is its deftly unfussy observation of the unknowability that can endure among people who share the same bloodlines.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The film’s] laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Bearing Witness: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

November 11, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona craft a documentary of haunting immediacy. Through more than 200 days of video calls, the film charts Hassona’s life under siege in Gaza from 2024–25, capturing the everyday resilience of a young photojournalist who insists on maintaining her ideals even as bombs fall and hope frays.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Farsi discuss her revolutionary project with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its impending run at the Laemmle Monica and Glendale theaters beginning November 14th.

The filmmaking is itself quietly radical. Farsi, barred from Gaza, connects remotely via smartphone, creating a frame-within-a-frame aesthetic that reflects the imposed distances and filtered visibility of war. Critics have noted the film’s stripped-back style (mostly buffer-laden FaceTime footage, interrupted calls, and pixelated images) that tastes of unmediated reality and sorrow, making the viewer feel even more intimately involved in the events being depicted on the screen.

Through it all, Fatma Hassona emerges as the film’s beating heart: always cheerful, even when surrounded by rubble, shortage, and grief. She shares her world with a quiet strength and surprising humor, discussing photography, music, and the simple joy of eating chips while bombs echo outside. Yet in April 2025, mere weeks after the film was selected for Cannes’ prestigious ACID sidebar, Hassona and several members of her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Her death casts a permanent shadow over the documentary, leaving behind a chilling statement about what it costs to look.

For all its opportunity, the documentary refuses easy distance or objective coldness. Instead, it lingers on the interruptions—the frozen frames, the dropped calls, the unedited glitches—so that viewers can feel even a shred of what it means to live under siege. It asks what form seeing takes when the camera, the connection, and even one’s body are all vulnerable. And though the film documents devastation, it refuses to devolve into either reductionism or the fetishization of victimhood; after all, Hassona is not a number. She is smiling, stubbornly alive, a human face among many, and the film dutifully preserves her voice.

For viewers drawn to documentaries that fuse intimacy and urgency, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk stands as a testament not just to loss, but to persistence. Perhaps its greatest superpower lies in juxtaposing life’s ordinary moments—calls about electricity, photos shared with friends abroad—with the extraordinary circumstances that turn them into daring acts.

“A moving monument to this young woman and countless others like her—lovers of life who refused to be quiet as they were swept into the dehumanizing machinery of war.” – Eli Friedberg, Slant Magazine

“Farsi’s film does not necessarily expose the morbid reality of Gaza as much as it reveals what it would be like to survive through it.” – Akash Despande, High On Films

“[The film] exudes character from every frame.” – Landon Defever, In Session Film