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The delicately crafted queer Hong Kong drama ALL SHALL BE WELL opens Friday at the Royal.

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This Friday we’re proud to open the terrific Hong Kong drama All Shall Be Well at the Royal. Written and directed by Ray Yeung, it’s about the aftermath of a death in a gay couple. It’s currently rated 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. A sampling of top critics’ reactions:
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“The indignity of being someone’s spouse while they are alive and merely a friend after their death is the theme of this moving film, which brims with compassion and uses a silky light touch.” ~ Natalia Winkelman, New York Times
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“A picture of cruel realities. It’s a deliberate, nimble drama, one about major slights, class imbalance, and rampant homophobia.” ~ Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

The delicately crafted queer Hong Kong drama ALL SHALL BE WELL opens Friday at the Royal.

“Anger is alien to Yeung’s style but it is sometimes justified, and without it, All Shall Be Well is a plea for understanding that should by now, by rights, be a demand.” ~ Jessica Kiang, Variety

“All Shall Be Well is undoubtedly an old-fashioned drama, but it is no less effective for that classic structure.” ~ Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

The delicately crafted queer Hong Kong drama ALL SHALL BE WELL opens Friday at the Royal.

“All Shall Be Well illustrates Yeung’s keen eye for the nuances of social dynamics, especially regarding matters of wealth and class that many may prefer to skirt around when it comes to family.” ~ Josh Slater-Williams indieWire

“Yeung’s latest feature is generous but never indulgent, taking the approachable genre of the family drama and placing it in the context of topical issues in today’s queer Hong Kong.” – Olivia Pope, Asian Movie Pulse

 

The “spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy” BETWEEN THE TEMPLES is charming critics and audiences.

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The new comedy Between the Temples, starring Jason Schwartzman as a troubled cantor who finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher (a never-better Carol Kane) re-enters his life as his adult Bat Mitzvah student, is living up to the hype and bringing audiences into theaters. Peruse this sampling of the catalyst for the film’s success, critics’ reviews:

“A spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy about a grief-stricken cantor who loses his voice, only to find that he’s surrounded by a chorus of well-intentioned people who are happy to speak for him.” ~ David Ehrlich, indieWire

“We get the sense that Silver would be perfectly happy just sitting there and watching these people forever, story and conflict and resolution be damned. And it really is in these characters’ close exchanges that the movie comes to life.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

“Both stars — romantic leads with character actor cred — have the power to be funny and heartbreaking simultaneously, and their unique chemistry drives the film’s craziness and humanity.” ~ Thelma Adams, AARP Movies for Grownups

“Between the Temples emerges as a quirky and effective showcase for two actors known for playing oddball characters. Kane and Schwartzman bounce off each other so well that their work alone makes the film worth seeing.” ~ Odie Henderson, Boston Globe

“The relationship that unfolds, with shades of Harold and Maude, is honest and unsparing, as well as being blatantly Freudian.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times

“The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Schwartzman is very affecting as a perplexed, tragicomic galoot and Kane is a marvel.” ~ Jonathan Romney, Financial Times

“Shot wanly on film in wintertime, Between the Temples takes a while to reveal its depths – its linguistic wit, its cockeyed humor and compassion, how it can modulate from deadpan-slapstick to achingly poignant and still feel authentic in both keys.” ~ Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle

“With both misery and comedy, director Nathan Silver satisfyingly captures the Jewish experience.” ~ Joey Shapiro, Chicago Reader

“The real attraction here is the interplay between the two leads, which makes Between the Temples sing.” ~ Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge Launch New Video Podcast INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

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Greg Laemmle, President of Laemmle Theaters, along with actor and Emmy Award-winning director Raphael Sbarge, are launching a new  Video Podcast called INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE. The show is dedicated to highlighting new  releases, repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and the key personalities who bring movies to the big screen. INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will be filmed and recorded at the Laemmle Royal Theatre, the 100-year-old theater that has been operated by three generations of Laemmles for the past half century.  

Laemmle says, “My family has been dedicated to providing a home for independent, foreign and documentary film for almost a century, and we have decided to launch INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE in order to promote the release of new films that will ultimately play in arthouses all across the country.” 

“Our interviews will be recorded in person or via Zoom, with filmmakers appearing large on  the screen,” says Sbarge, an independent filmmaker himself. “Opening a movie in theaters requires all the support they can get, and INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, is dedicated to the  celebration of seeing films in theaters.” 

Their first guests include Stephen Soucy, the director of MERCHANT IVORY, a documentary about art house mainstays Ismail Merchant and James Ivory; the Golden Lion-winning director of the Swedish film PARADISE IS BURNING, Mika Gustafson; the writer and director  of PREY FOR ROCK AND ROLL, Cheri Lovedog and Alex Steyermark, re-released in theaters via Kino Lorber, for their 20th anniversary; and the co-directors of the new documentary UNION, out of the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals, Brett Story and Steven Main.

In subsequent episodes – initially to be released every two weeks – INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will focus on new releases and repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and  personalities who are responsible for bringing movies to the big screen. The first episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will premiere on August 28, 2024. The show can be found on  YouTube and all major podcast platforms. For more information, visit www.insidethearthouse.com!

“I just wanted to look at that moment of girlhood where you are shifting away from being ostensibly under the protection of your parents, but also realizing like, ‘Oh, I’m actually not protected by the world. I have to figure out my own, my own way forward.’” India Donaldson on her new film GOOD ONE.

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In India Donaldson’s fantastic debut film Good One, 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) embarks on a three-day backpacking trip in the Catskills with her dad, Chris (James Le Gros) and his oldest friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). As the two men quickly settle into a gently quarrelsome, brotherly dynamic, airing long-held grievances, Sam, wise beyond her years, tries to mediate. But when lines are crossed and Sam’s trust is betrayed, tensions reach a fever pitch, as Sam struggles with her dad’s emotional limitations and experiences the universal moment when the parental bond is tested. Selected for both Sundance and Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Good One is an emotionally expansive work that probes the limits of familial trust, understanding, and ultimately, forgiveness.

We open Good One this Friday in Santa Monica and a week from Friday in North Hollywood.

The nation’s film critics are not holding back. A small sample:

“Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight. She’s the new moon, ready to emerge. But unlike the moon, she makes her own light.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

“In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“Its most distinctive quality is how much Donaldson and her trio of actors … trust the subterranean, and allow it to do its work far beneath the surface, between the words.” ~ Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com

“So much of the grace and, ultimately, the emotional resonance of Good One lies in Collias’ performance, and how she turns a symphony of reaction shots into a portrait of a woman caught in a crossfire of middle-aged male malaise.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“Subtly dark, humorous, and wise, Good One leans into its wilderness backdrop in all of its liberating (and, sometimes, paradoxically claustrophobic) properties.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar

Donaldson has sat for several recent interviews to talk about her film. Here’s an excerpt from one with Jordan Raup of The Film Stage:

The best directorial debut of the year, India Donaldson’s Good One, is a carefully-observed portrait of both womanhood and fatherhood, capturing the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias, in a revelatory breakthrough performance) who embarks on a camping trip in the Catskills with her father (James Le Gros) and his best friend (Danny McCarthy). As the men are in the middle of a midlife crisis of sorts, Sam is witness to their mindless banter and subtle indecencies, culminating in a piercing point of no return.

Ahead of the film’s limited release beginning this Friday, I spoke with Donaldson about the character dynamics, the film’s subtle accumulation of details, the Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Kelly Reichardt films she watched as inspiration, and the journey from Sundance to New Directors/New Films to the Cannes Film Festival.

The Film Stage: Can you talk about how you initially formed the dynamic between these three characters? In some ways, it feels like an update on Old Joy but with an entirely new perspective.

India Donaldson: When I wrote the script, it was like deep COVID, and I was living back at home for the first time since high school, basically. And I have two half-siblings who at the time were in high school and I was kind of reflecting. I never thought about, before this moment, exploring that moment in film or writing. But through them this triangulation happened where I was reflecting on my own teen years and memories, of the ways that I dealt with conflict, the ways that I was avoidant of conflict, just my qualities of being in the world as a teenager. And how I felt like I had spent my 20s kind of trying to beat back certain instincts I had––to please or this kind of thing that had worked for me as a teenage girl, I feel like it wasn’t working for me in my professional life. I felt like I didn’t have the confidence to really pursue what I wanted to pursue, all these things. I just wanted to look at that moment of girlhood where you are shifting away from being ostensibly under the protection of your parents, but also realizing like, “Oh, I’m actually not protected by the world. I have to figure out my own, my own way forward.”

If you just look at the logline you could think it’s like a coming-of-age movie, but I feel like throughout the movie you learn she’s actually more mature in some ways, and level of maturity is not defined by age. She’s picking up on different social cues. What was it like writing her character and after you met Lily, did her character expand? 

The character was on the page for sure, but the moment I met Lily and saw her audition, she just had added this edge to the character. I was always kind of nervous about the character that she would come across as too much of a doormat. That it would be sort of unsatisfying to watch somebody repeatedly act kind of in service of these men and their needs and struggle with that. Lily just had this quality where even when the character’s at her most obedient, I could always feel her pushing against it. Because I think Lily herself has a natural kind of rebellious [spirit]. She’s a real freethinker and has this incredible confidence that the character doesn’t have. But I think it bleeds into the performance and so it evolved in that sense. As soon as it was sort of in her hands, the character became more powerful to me. Which was a cool thing to discover.

I USED TO BE FUNNY starring Rachel Sennott opens Friday.

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Actress Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby, Bottoms) returns to Laemmle screens this Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo 7 and Town Center 5 with I Used to Be Funny. She plays an aspiring stand-up comedian and au pair struggling with PTSD as she decides whether or not to join the search for Brooke (Olga Petsa), a missing teenage girl she used to nanny.
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“Rachel Sennott has the greatest face. It cannot lie, no matter what her characters are saying. That honesty makes her ideal for films with tricky tones… And it’s essential to I Used to Be Funny.” – Johanna Schneller, Globe and Mail
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“In her film debut, [writer-director Ally Pankiw] delivers a full and fulfilling narrative arc that is anchored by a surprisingly complex performance from Sennott.” – Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

“Pankiw and Sennott bring Sam’s story to life with an inventive yet sensitive approach, creating a sympathetic portrait of someone learning to cope with the tragedies of life and embrace their funny side despite it all.” – Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com

“A former stand-up herself, Sennott holds a stage with command.” – Amy Nicholson, New York Times

“Healing is not linear, and I Used to Be Funny adeptly displays that process, exploring Sam’s pain without making the experience of watching the film painful, and honestly refreshing exploration of a subject that’s so often brutal to witness.” – Jenny Nulf, Austin Chronicle

“Sennott is perfectly cast, portraying Sam as simultaneously lifeless and hilarious with her default blasé attitude and dry-wit humor.” – Weiting Liu, Little White Lies

GREEN BORDER + THE SECRET GARDEN – get ready for a weekend with Agnieszka Holland.

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Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland will be in town later this month for her latest film, the powerful Green Border. She’ll participate in Q&As after the evening screenings at the Royal on Friday and Saturday, June 28 and 29 and for good measure join us for a Q&A after the June 29 screening of her 1993 family film The Secret Garden, which we’re screening as part of our Anniversary Classics series. One moviegoer might want to ask her how she manages such range, because the movies are quite different.

Thirty years after her Oscar-nominated film Europa Europa, Holland’s poignant and essential Green Border is set in the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called “green border” between Belarus and Poland. Here refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Finding themselves pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life; Jan, a young border guard; and a Syrian family intertwine.

“A heart-in-mouth thriller… Agnieszka Holland‘s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

GREEN BORDER + THE SECRET GARDEN - get ready for a weekend with Agnieszka Holland.

“A righteous, infuriating and woefully compelling watch.” – Laura Bobiak, Observer

“Profoundly moving, flawlessly executed… if cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland‘s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter

“A humanitarian masterpiece.” – Damon Wise, Deadline

The Secret Garden follows a young British girl born and reared in India who is returned to her uncle’s English castle after becoming an orphan. She begins exploring the estate and discovers a garden that has been locked and forgotten. Aided by one of the servants’ boys, she begins restoring the garden, and eventually discovers some other secrets of the manor. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin began her review of The Secret Garden this way: “A fawn, a bunny, a lamb: these are among the last things anyone might expect to see in a film directed by Agnieszka Holland, whose other work (including Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier) had not a trace of sugarplums in its makeup. Yet Ms. Holland’s film of The Secret Garden is elegantly expressive, a discreet and lovely rendering of the children’s classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett. That book is a paean to the restorative powers of the natural world, and Ms. Holland succeeds in conveying much of its delicate beauty.”

THE LOVERS (LES AMANTS) 65th Anniversary Screenings June 19.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present 65th anniversary screenings of Louis Malle’s ‘The Lovers‘ (‘Les Amants’) starring Jeanne Moreau, on June 19 for one night only at 7:00 PM in West Los Angeles, Encino, Glendale, Claremont, and Santa Clarita. When first released in the United States in 1959, the film became an art house sensation with frank sexuality and nudity that inflamed the prudish American censors. Those censors, the Catholic Legion of Decency, and the repressive Hollywood Production Code wielded considerable influence at that time, preventing American films from exploring adult themes in a provocative manner.

 THE LOVERS (LES AMANTS) 65th Anniversary Screenings June 19.

The film tells the story of a bored and neglected French upper-middle-class wife and mother (Moreau) who falls for a young archaeologist (Jean-Marc Bory), commencing an affair just hours after their initial meeting. Their extended seminude lovemaking scene was the incendiary element that sparked conservative outrage and crackdowns on theaters showing the film. In one notorious case that was later resolved by the Supreme Court, a suburban Cleveland theater manager was arrested on obscenity charges. When other Ohio communities also banned the film, Variety reported, “It looked like Ohio, for a time, might declare war on France.”

Louis Malle made his feature directorial debut with the crime thriller ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ in 1958, also starring Moreau, so the sensual drama ‘The Lovers‘ as his second film “marked the stylistically conscious Malle apart from his tear-away Nouvelle Vague colleagues” according to Time Out. In ‘The Lovers,’ adapted by novelist Louise de Vilmorin from a 19th century short story, Malle presents a study of “bourgeois emptiness and sexual yearnings,” illuminated by the deft black-and-white cinematography of Henri Decae. Malle would go onto an esteemed career that included such notable films as ‘Murmur of the Heart,’ ‘Lacombe Lucien,’ ‘Atlantic City,’ and ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ over the next three decades.

Although she had been acting in films for a decade, ‘The Lovers‘ established Moreau’s screen persona as a “commanding, willful, and sultry presence,” propelling her to international stardom. Her career highlights in the 1960s include memorable performances in ‘Jules and Jim,’ ‘La Notte,’ ‘Diary of a Chambermaid’ and ‘The Bride Wore Black.’ As a legacy, the commercial success of ‘The Lovers’ helped popularize foreign language films in the United States in that era, now regarded as the golden age of the art house.

“It is incredible to think that Malle was only 25 years old when he made ‘The Lovers,’ as it seems to hold the wisdom and erotic impulses of a much older man.” ~ Justine Smith, Vague Visages

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes:” MACBETH with Ralph Fiennes & Indira Varma

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We’re thrilled to screen Shakespeare’s leanest, meanest tragedy, Macbeth with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, May 2 and 5 only, following its highly acclaimed U.K. tour. It was filmed live at Dock X in London especially for cinemas. Tony and BAFTA Award-winner Fiennes (Antony & Cleopatra, Schindler’s List, Coriolanus) and Olivier Award-winner Indira Varma (Present Laughter, Game of Thrones, Luther) star in this brand-new ‘full-voltage visceral’ (★★★★ Daily Telegraph) production of the Scottish play. Designed for a custom-built space, this gripping and breathtaking play about the couple utterly corrupted by their relentless lust for power is unmissable on the big screen. By the end of the run in London and following seasons in Liverpool and Edinburgh, this production played to sell-out audiences of over 100,000 people at 110 performances. We’ll show Macbeth at our Claremont, Glendale, Santa Monica, Newhall and Encino theaters.

Directed by Simon Godwin (Antony & Cleopatra, Romeo & Juliet, Hansard) with set and costume design by Frankie Bradshaw (Jerusalem, Blues for an Alabama Sky), this stunning production brings ‘Shakespeare’s tragedy pulsing into the present day’ (★★★★★ The I).

Regard this clip. It really gives one a (bloody) taste of what awaits:

Joining Ralph Fiennes as Macbeth and Indira Varma as Lady Macbeth are Ben Allen as Ross, Ewan Black as Malcolm, Levi Brown as Angus, Jonathon Case as Seyton, Danielle Fiamanya as Second Witch, Keith Fleming as King Duncan/Siward, Michael Hodgson as Second Murderer, Lucy Mangan as First Witch, Jake Neads as First Murderer/Donalbain, Richard Pepper as Lennox, Steffan Rhodri as Banquo, Rose Riley as Menteith, Lola Shalam as Third Witch, Rebecca Scroggs as Lady Macduff/Doctor, Ethan Thomas as Fleance, and Ben Turner as Macduff.