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Oscar Doc Features – A HOUSE MADE OF SPLINTERS, NAVALNY & ALL THAT BREATHES

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The already formidable 15 films shortlisted for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar have been whittled down to five, and it’s no exaggeration to say they’re all masterpieces that hit about 100 times harder when seen in a theater. People just had a chance to see Fire of Love on Valentine’s Day, and we’ve been playing All the Beauty and the Bloodshed for weeks (but Thursday is the last day!). We are bringing the remaining three to a big screen near you, so now is your chance.
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We’ll have Navalny at the Monica Film Center for 02/24 – 03/02.
A House Made of Splinters plays weekend shows in Glendale (02/25 – 02/26) and at the Royal (03/04 – 03/05).
And we’ll have All that Breathes on March 1 in Glendale and March 2 at the Royal.

“A startling and uneasy wonder,” RETURN TO SEOUL opens at the Royal this Friday, March 3 in Glendale.

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Acclaimed and honored around the world, Return to Seoul follows a young French-Korean woman whose search for her birth parents takes surprising turns. It’s widely acknowledged as “one of the best films of the year.” (Jason Bailey, The Playlist)
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“Brilliantly muses on the impermanence of everything we know — about ourselves, about others and the world — and points to transformation as the only inevitable constant.” ~ Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times
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“Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.” ~ Amy Nicholson, New York Times
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“Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.” ~ Chris Barsanti, Slant Magazine

“Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable Return to Seoul.” ~ David Ehrlich, indieWire

“A stone-cold stunner.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

“Strange, deep, changeable and wise.” ~ Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Davy Chou’s bittersweet comedy of a Korean adoptee searching for her biological parents is powered by a dazzling lead performance.” ~ David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Brevity is the soul of wit: The 2023 Oscar-nominated short films open February 17.

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One good thing about the Oscars is the attention they bring a genre otherwise confined to film festivals: the short. As well as being enjoyable in their own right, they’re cheaper for budding filmmakers to make and so often democratic springboards to feature filmmaking. François Truffaut, Stanley Kubrick, and Christopher Nolan all got their starts making shorts. Some excellent recent features that started out as shorts include Whiplash, The Babadook, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Half Nelson. All of which is to say that for the 18th consecutive year, we’ll start screening the animated and live action Oscar nominees next Friday at the Claremont, Glendale and NoHo and the documentary shorts at the Royal!

The documentary nominees are:

The Elephant Whisperers – India, 41 min. Director: Kartiki Gonsalves
Producers: Guneet Monga, Achin Jain
Synopsis: The Elephant Whisperers follows an indigenous couple as they fall in love with Raghu, an orphaned elephant given into their care, and tirelessly work to ensure his recovery and survival.

The Elephant Whisperers.

Haulout – UK, 25 min. Directors: Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev
Producers: Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev
Synopsis: On a remote coast of the Siberian Arctic in a wind-battered hut, a lonely man waits to witness an ancient gathering. But warming seas and rising temperatures bring an unexpected change, and he soon finds himself overwhelmed.

How Do You Measure a Year? – USA, 29 min. Director: Jay Rosenblatt
Producer: Jay Rosenblatt
Synopsis: For 17 years, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt filmed his daughter Ella on her birthday in the same spot, asking the same questions. What results is a unique chance to watch time, to see a young woman come into focus physically, mentally and emotionally.

The Martha Mitchell Effect – USA, 39 min. Directors: Anne Alvergue, Debra McClutchy
Producers: Beth Levison, Judith Mizrachy
Synopsis: She was once as famous as Jackie O. And then she tried to take down a President. The Martha Mitchell Effect is an archival documentary portrait of the unlikeliest of whistle-blowers: Martha Mitchell, a Republican cabinet wife who was gas-lighted and at one point literally drugged by the Nixon Administration to keep her quiet. It offers a female gaze on Watergate through the voice of the woman herself.

Stranger at the Gate – USA, 30 min. Directors: Joshua Seftel
Producers: Joshua Seftel, Suzanne Hillinger, Conall Jones
Executive Producer: Malala Yousafzai
Cast: Bibi Bahrami, Saber Bahrami, Richard “Mac” McKinney, Emily McKinney, Dana McKinney & Jomo Williams
Synopsis: After 25 years of service, a U.S. Marine filled with hatred for Muslims plots to bomb an Indiana mosque. When he comes face to face with the immigrants he seeks to kill, the story takes a shocking twist toward compassion, grace, and forgiveness.

The animated nominees:

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – UK, 35 min. Directors: Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy
Producers: Cara Speller, Matthew Freud, Hannah Minghella and J.J. Abrams
Executive Producers: Jony Ive and Woody Harrelson
Synopsis: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a story of kindness, courage, and hope in traditional hand-drawn animation, following the unlikely friendship of the title characters as they journey together, in the boy’s search for home. Based on the book of the same name.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

 The Flying Sailor – Canada, 7 min. Directors: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby
Producer: David Christensen
Synopsis: In 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour, causing the largest accidental explosion in history. Among the tragic stories of the disaster is the remarkable account of a sailor who, blown skyward from the docks, flew a distance of two kilometers before landing uphill, naked and unharmed. The Flying Sailor is a contemplation of his journey.

Ice Merchants – Portugal/France/UK, 14 min. Director: João Gonzalez
Producer: Bruno Caetano
Synopsis: Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It – Australia, 11 min. Director: Lachlan Pendragon
Producer: Griffith Film School
Synopsis: When a young telemarketer is confronted by a mysterious talking ostrich, he learns that the universe is in stop motion animation. He must put aside his dwindling toaster sales and focus on convincing his colleagues of his terrifying discovery.

My Year of Dicks – USA, 25 min. Director: Sara Gunnarsdóttir
Writer: Pamela Ribon
Producer: Jeanette Jeanenne, FX PRODUCTIONS
Synopsis: An imaginative fifteen year-old is stubbornly determined to lose her virginity despite the pathetic pickings on the outskirts of Houston in the early ’90s. Created by Pamela Ribon from her critically acclaimed memoir.

The live action nominees:

An Irish Goodbye – UK, 23 min. Directors: Tom Berkeley, Ross White
Producers: Tom Berkeley, Ross White, Pearce Cullen
Synopsis: On a farm in rural Northern Ireland, estranged brothers Turlough and Lorcan are forced to reunite following the untimely death of their mother.

Ivalu– Denmark, 16 min. Director: Anders Walter
Producers: Rebecca Pruzan / Kim Magnusson
Synopsis: Ivalu is gone. Her little sister is desperate to find her. Her father does not care. The vast Greenlandic nature holds secrets. Where is Ivalu?

Le Pupille – Italy, 37 min. Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Producers: Alfonso Cuarón, Carlo Cresto-Dina, Gabriela Rodriguez
Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Melissa Falasconi
Synopsis: From writer and director, Alice Rohrwacher, and Academy Award® winning producer, Alfonso Cuarón, Le Pupille is a tale of innocence, greed and fantasy. This live action short is about desires, pure and selfish, about freedom and devotion, and about the anarchy that is capable of flowering in the minds of girls within the confines of a strict religious boarding school at Christmas.

Le Pupille.

Night Ride – Norway, 15 min. Director: Eirik Tveiten
Producer: Gaute Lid Larssen, Heidi Arnesen
Synopsis: It is a cold night in December. As Ebba waits for the tram, an unexpected turn of events transforms the ride home into something she was not expecting.

The Red Suitcase – Luxembourg, 17 min. Director: Cyrus Neshvad
Producer: Cyrus Neshvad
Synopsis: An Iranian girl decides to remove her hijab in a life-changing situation.

Buoyed by her peers, “spectacular” Andrea Riseborough and TO LESLIE return to theaters.

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Chameleonic English actress Andrea Riseborough earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress this month but got some flack because the campaign to push her over the top was unusual. Rather than rely on a Hollywood studio’s massive publicity and advertising budget, which was unavailable to her because her film To Leslie — which we are returning to our Glendale theater this Friday — was released by the tiny film distributor Momentum Pictures, some of her more famous friends rallied online urging people to see the film and her bravura performance. Surprise! It worked. She now has her first Oscar nomination, something film critics understood she deserved but probably would not get.

“Riseborough’s performance is nothing short of spectacular. She doesn’t compromise, she doesn’t hold back, but she doesn’t endow the character with any sort of fake flamboyance.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety
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“A personal and heartfelt drama with yet another stellar turn from the always-great Andrea Riseborough.” ~ Brian Tallerico,
RogerEbert.com
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“In To Leslie Riseborough presents the rough and tumble of the films eponymous character with a tender and sensitive rawness and authenticity.” ~ Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, AWFJ.org
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“Unglamorous and unflinching, lilting from dive bars to motels across an errant desert wind. So too is Riseborough’s performance as Leslie.” ~ Fran Hoepfner, TheWrap
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“This week’s shocker Oscar nomination for British actress Andrea Riseborough as an alcoholic single mother from West Texas who squanders her $190,000 lottery win on booze turns a movie no one ever heard of into an absolute must-see. Prepare to be wowed!” ~ Peter Travers, ABC News
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“A work of handcrafted beauty,” THE BLUE CAFTAN opens February 10 at the Royal.

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“The blue caftan, both the clothing and the piece of cinema, are crafted like an elegant act of welcome resistance.” ~ Namrata Joshi, New Indian Express
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“Not only about abiding love, but also about a deep, unspoken understanding between two people who are committed to each other.” ~ Shubhra Gupta, Indian Express
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“Touzani has introduced the caftan as a symbol, and it’s touching to see how the film uses it in the end.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety
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“Stunning…working with an intricacy that rivals that of the craftsman at the center of her film, the auteur crafts a surprisingly warm story that subverts expectations at almost every turn.” ~ Christian Zilko, indieWire
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Top Ten Films of 2022 contest ends Sunday: Tell us your favorites for a chance to win free movie passes!

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Keep those Top Ten contest entries coming. You have until this Sunday, January 22 to give it some thought and enter here. So far, unsurprisingly, it looks like many Laemmle moviegoers are kvelling about Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, and RRR. We’ll have final results next week. You can read Greg Laemmle’s list and leading American film critics’ lists if you need inspiration. Personally, my favorite is Jordan Peele’s spectacular Nope. No doubt my reaction was influenced by the fact that I saw it in a packed, sold-out theater on opening night, because movies are better in theaters!

“One of the most visually ravishing pictures of all time,” THE CONFORMIST opens February 3 at the Royal, February 10 at the Laemmle Glendale.

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Never has The Conformist been more timely. The new restoration of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 masterpiece about a repressed Italian who becomes a fascist hitman is inspiring a lot of thoughtful journalism. “It’s not the ideology that attracts people to fascism,” writes Eric Alterman in the American Prospect. “It’s the permission it offers to ordinary people to behave like thugs.” In his recent New York Magazine/Vulture review, headlined “It’s Time to See The Conformist Again,” critic Bilge Ebiri describes the film as “one of the most visually ravishing pictures of all time.” Ebiri’s piece is well worth excerpting at some length:

“All great films, at some point, ask the question: Who am I? The greatest films go beyond asking this on a narrative level; through their very form, they embody the question of identity. And what makes Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) the very greatest of movies isn’t just its staggering, legendary beauty, but its maze-like journey into its protagonist’s — and, by extension, its creator’s — mind.

“The Conformist has just been rereleased in a lovely new 4K restoration, which is certainly cause for celebration given that it’s one of the most visually ravishing pictures of all time. (It’s currently playing New York’s Film Forum, and will soon travel around the country.) There’s no real debate over Bertolucci’s achievement; this is one of those canonical titles whose place in history is a given at this point. You can see its influence in The Godfather series, in Taxi Driver, in movies as varied as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Dick Tracy, Call Me by Your Name, and Clueless — and yet, it remains as startling and revolutionary as it was upon original release, in part because few filmmakers nowadays are willing to embrace the sensuous and the monstrous at the same time. You never quite know what you’re supposed to feel at any given moment of The Conformist, because it asks you to feel everything.”

  

Some praise from past years:

“Bertolucci’s boldest and most expressive film.” – Calum Marsh, Village Voice

“It’s easy to overlook how stark The Conformist‘s political and allegorical message is because it’s just so damn beautiful.” – Aja Romano, Vox

“One of the greatest-looking movies ever made.” – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader

“Bernardo Bertolucci is a master of turning harsh realities into free-flowing dreams and fantasies of sex and power into bracing, often uncomfortable moments of truth…The Conformist is perhaps his richest and most beautiful work.” – Max O’Connell, IndieWire

We are proud to open The Conformist at the Royal on February 3 and the Laemmle Glendale on February 10.

Based on Stefan Zweig’s final novella, CHESS STORY “shows how incredibly quickly a seemingly firmly anchored free world can tip over into a dictatorship.”

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Vienna, 1938: Austria is occupied by the Nazis. Dr. Josef Bartok (Oliver Masucci) is preparing to flee to America with his wife Anna when he is arrested by the Gestapo. As a former notary to the deposed Austrian aristocracy, he is told to help the local Gestapo leader gain access to their private bank accounts in order to fund the Nazi regime. Refusing to cooperate, Bartok is locked in solitary confinement. Just as his mind is beginning to crack, Bartok happens upon a book of famous chess games. To withstand the torture of isolation, Bartok disappears into the world of chess, maintaining his sanity only by memorizing every move. As the action flashes forward to a transatlantic crossing on which he is a passenger, it seems as though Bartok has finally found freedom. But recounting his story to his fellow travelers, it’s clear that his encounters with both the Gestapo and with the royal game itself have not stopped haunting him. Adapted with opulent attention to period detail by filmmaker and opera director Philipp Stölzl, Chess Story brings Stefan Zweig’s stirring final novella to life.

Chess Story opens January 20 at the Monica Film Center.

“Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.” ~ William Repass, Slant Magazine

“The adaptation of Chess Story is one of the rare cases in which the film has not only managed to leave the original behind, but to surpass it. Visually intoxicating.” ~ Süddeutsche Zeitung

“This film…moves because of Oliver Masucci, who acts with fantastic despair. And because of the wonderful Birgit Minichmayr.” ~ Der Spiegel
 

STATEMENT BY DIRECTOR PHILIPP STÖLZL

“I encountered The Royal Game [the alternative title of Chess Story] at a very early age. Zweig’s mysterious and impressive story etched itself into my memory and is one of those stories that have accompanied me in one way or another through my entire life. When Philipp Worm and Tobias Walker told me about their plans to make a new film version, I was delighted, read the screenplay with interest – and loved it.

“Our aim was to make a sensuous, intense feature film that would appeal to a wider audience with a brilliant cast, tight production and powerful visuals that really fill the whole screen. The contrast between claustrophobic imprisonment and the expanse of the ship that pounds across the Atlantic to America through the endless mist creates a field of tension in which Zweig’s literary metaphor can be told as a “big” story.

“The nice thing about the very courageous approach of screenwriter Eldar Grigorian to The Royal Game is that it represents a kind of condensation of the surreal secret that the novella already contains. The Kafkaesque pitch Zweig has chosen for his narrative becomes a decisive inspiration on the journey of the material to the big screen.

“On the one hand there is the intense, restrictive chamber play about the duel between Bartok and Gestapo man Böhm, who interrogates him and has him tortured. Then there is the – seeming – voyage to America and on board the game against the silent and enigmatic world chess champion. The persistent mist gives the journey something surreal, as if the giant ship were a barge of the dead, and the passengers mere ghosts. For this reason, the fact that this all turns out to be a dream in Bartok’s head is not a denouement or a surprise in the traditional sense, but more the final chord of a gloomily poetic tale. And finally, the prisoner’s battle against his own insanity in the solitary confinement cell, which he tries to escape from with his “mental chess” and at the same time achieves the opposite, sliding further in instead. Here, the film is an intense trip, because we are very close to our protagonist and accompany him down into the abyss and mental confusion.

“All these narrative levels are interwoven and initially “make sense.” But the longer Bartok is in solitary confinement and loses touch with reality, the more mysterious things become on the ship, the more the audience also become lost in a labyrinth that resembles an oppressive daydream. To this extent I would say that in this film, Zweig’s more distanced experimental design becomes a cathartic, intense and emotional vexatious game that will hopefully enchain and grip the audience.

“Zweig’s story did not end the way the film does. The bleak, dismal ending of his novella expresses the fear of impending Nazi world rule. We, however, know that it turned out differently, that it became light again after a dark night. And we want the audience to leave the cinema with this meaningful and encouraging certainty.

“The backdrop to all this is the true story about Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. This political level of The Royal Game makes the film timelessly relevant because it shows how incredibly quickly a seemingly firmly anchored free world can tip over into a dictatorship. It tells of how thin the layer of skin of a civilisation is and how close to the surface barbarism lies. And it tells us in this way to be alert.” ~ Philipp Stölzl, 19 October 2020