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“The intoxicating sensory experience” BEFORE, NOW & THEN opens Friday at the Royal.

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Winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Supporting Performance by Laura Basuki and and a nominee for the Golden Berlin Bear for Best Film for filmmaker Kamila Andini at the Berlin International Film Festival, Before, Now & Then is about a plantation owner’s wife who makes an unusual connection with her husband’s younger mistress in 1960s Indonesia. “It’s a handsomely mounted period piece,” wrote Wendy Ide in Screen International, “which acknowledges the strength required by previous generations of Indonesian women to rise above the patriarchal demands of a restrictive society.” We’re very pleased to open the film this Friday at the Royal.
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“A precisely calibrated, emotionally nuanced exploration of one woman going through a mid-life crisis in rural Indonesia during the 1960s that both looks and sounds stunning thanks to above-and-beyond craft contributions.” ~ Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter
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“Beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.” ~ Bobby LePire, Film Threat

“It’s a daring narrative mix of the personal and the political.” ~ Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times

“Aesthetic flourishes… betray Wong Kar-Wai’s influence on Before, Now & Then and elevate it…to the intoxicating sensory experience it is.” ~ Michael Nordine, Variety
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“’Why is it that guilt always follows women?’ Before, Now & Then is a film that dares to ask this question and forces us to wrestle with the painful truth at the core of the answer.” ~ Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry
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“Before, Now & Then is a very carefully wrought arthouse film… wreathed in poetic melancholy and never less than beautiful; Batara Goempar’s cinematography belongs to another era of soft lamplight, rich shadows and glowing fabrics.” ~ Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline
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“Writer/director Kamila Andini adapts Ahda Imran’s biographical Jais Darga Namaku into a stirring vignette of a woman’s crossroaded, multifaceted existence as a survivor, mother, wife and businesswoman…through Salma’s masterful performance, Nana’s psychological discomfort is inviting and empathetic.” ~ Jacob Oller , Paste Magazine
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“Andini captures complex female emotions and relationships in nuanced and fascinating detail, as well as the secrets we all keep, whether in knotted buns or not. Subtly stirring, it’s a sensitively crafted, immersive cinematic experience that lingers on the senses well after the credits roll.” ~ Sarah Bradbury, The Upcoming
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“Drawing a number of deeply felt performances from her cast, it is an aching period piece.” ~ Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage
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“A revenge film like none you have seen,” Park Chan-Wook’s OLDBOY is restored, remastered and back in theaters today with a post-screening filmmaker conversation.

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Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Park Chan-Wook’s cinematic masterpiece, Oldboy has been restored and remastered in stunning 4K. After being mysteriously kidnapped and imprisoned with no human contact for fifteen years, Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) is suddenly released without any explanation. In a twisted game of cat and mouse, he has only five days to retrace his past, track down his captors, and get his revenge.

Oldboy, which remains a cult classic and has served as inspiration for auteurs for nearly two decades, will return to theaters for the first time in 20 years. Now playing at the Laemmle Glendale and NoHo.

All screenings of Oldboy will feature a new post-screening bonus conversation about the film with director Park and filmmaker Nicolas Refn (in English and Korean with English subtitles; running time: 12 minutes).

“A revenge film like none you have seen.” ~ Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

“Oldboy is a delirious, confronting ride, a movie full of visceral shocks and aesthetic pleasures: it has an explosive immediacy and a persistent afterlife, a lingering impact that is hard to shake.” ~ Philippa Hawker, The Age (Australia)

“Both brutal and lyrical, writer-director Park Chan-wook’s existential nail-biter has torture scenes that will have you avoiding dentists, sushi bars and badly appointed hotel rooms.” ~ Jami Bernard, New York Daily News

“A dark and thrillingly horrible adventure into the realms of the unthinkable.” ~ Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“It’s mesmerizing and discomfiting, engaging the viewer on a visceral and an intellectual level.” ~ Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel
“A visually beguiling trip that keeps pulling you along and keeps you wondering what fresh hell could possibly come next.” ~ Bob Townsend, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The intimate, moving documentary love story THE ETERNAL MEMORY, a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, opens August 18 at the Royal and Town Center.

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The new Chilean documentary The Eternal Memory [La memoria infinita] follows Augusto and Paulina, who have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and his wife has since become his caretaker. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory, having been responsible for that Herculean task following the Pinochet dictatorship and its systematic erasure of collective consciousness. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved. Day by day, the couple face this challenge head-on, adapting to the disruptions brought on by the taxing disease while relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains intact. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for international documentary at Sundance and the Panorama Audience Award for documentary film at the Berlin Film Festival, we open The Eternal Memory next Friday, August 18 at the Royal and Town Center.

“Get tissues ready to witness one of the most selfless and patient forms of love that graced our screens, shared and magnified through pockets of joy that Alberdi’s camera celebrates with a generous side of empathy and sense of humor.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar

“A portrait that’s powerfully emotional and warmly romantic…Alberdi makes her directorial hand virtually invisible, observing her subjects from a discreet distance that allows them to be narrators of their own story while never speaking directly to the camera.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

 

“A Deeply Human Experience You’ll Never Have on Your Couch” ~ The New York Times on BARBENHEIMER and the power and importance of the theatrical experience.

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Seeing a movie from your sofa is convenient and pleasant but watching the same film in public takes it from passive consumption to active experience. Funny, frightening, sexy, exciting, awesome movies are 100 times funnier, scarier, sexier and more exciting when seen in public. Being in a theater with strangers allow a frisson that you just do not get at home. The laughter that Barbie elicits and the awe, fear and terror that Oppenheimer elicits make this perfectly clear.

The New York Times just posted a terrific piece about this that articulates this beautifully. It’s by the writer Mark Jacobson.

“For a moment, at least, the Barbenheimer phenomenon brought back the sensation of the movie theater as a semi-sacred public place, a space where we congregate to have an experience, made all the more transcendent by having it together.”

Here’s how it starts:

“It seemed like a miracle. The Cobble Hill Cinemas, a neighborhood joint that opened in the 1920s as the Lido and that served for decades as a venue for B-movie action films, was packed on what would ordinarily be a dead Monday night — and without a single La-Z-Boy recliner, goat cheese pizza or other modern enticement in sight. I was there with 200 or so other patrons, a gloriously mixed crowd, to see Oppenheimer, one-half of the Barbenheimer cultural moment. When the bomb finally went off in the New Mexico desert — this fulcrumatic moment in our species’ history — it was beheld simultaneously, an exhilarating common experience, which is exactly what the movie house is supposed to deliver. In the end, it didn’t matter if you liked the picture or not. What mattered is that we’d seen it together.

“After a few years in which the pandemic and streaming platforms combined to break Americans of their movie theatergoing habits, we’d surged back joyfully, triumphantly, to theaters, producing the fourth biggest domestic weekend of all time. For a moment, it was possible to forget the grim realities that still linger for the cinema business, circling like vultures. The actors’ and writers’ unions (I am a member of the latter) are still on strike with no end in sight. With far fewer products in the pipeline, there won’t be many Barbenheimer-shaped rabbits to pull out of the hat anytime soon. AMC is in trouble. So is Regal, which narrowly avoided having to close its theater in Union Square. On the day before the blockbuster weekend, the Regal UA in Staten Island, one of the last remaining theaters in that borough, closed its doors for good. The 2016 demise of the Ziegfeld means that the largest single-screen theater in Manhattan is now the relatively diminutive 571-seat Paris — which tellingly was saved by and is run by Netflix.

“In the time of streaming and 146-inch TV screens, the simple act of going out to the movies feels contrarian, even subversive. It also feels endangered. That’s grim news, because the beauty of going to the movies was never just about the films on the screens; it was about the way we all gathered to watch them.”

Click here to read the full piece.

The “fresh-faced, funny” SHORTCOMINGS opens at the NoHo, Town Center and Monica Film Center August 4.

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For his directorial debut, actor Randall Park chose the screenplay Adrian Tomine based on his graphic novel of the same name, Shortcomings. It follows Ben, a struggling filmmaker who lives in Berkeley with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film festival. When he’s not managing an arthouse movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blonde women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his best friend Alice, a queer grad student with a serial dating habit. When Miko moves to New York for an internship, Ben is left to his own devices, and begins to explore what he thinks he might want.
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“A fresh-faced, funny directorial debut from the ever-engaging Park.” ~ Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Shortcomings takes some bruising blows at cultural expectations… it’s also about growing up a little too late and having to reckon with your own rotten self. Oh, and it’s hilarious.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
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Christian Petzold’s AFIRE opens this weekend at the Royal with the filmmaker in person for a Q&A.

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Afire, German director Christian Petzold’s latest movie is, among other things, extremely funny. This comes as a delightful surprise, because his previous work — like Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), Transit (2018) and Undine (2020) — was, as Tim Grierson writes in his just-posted L.A. Times piece, noted for its “incisive character studies [with] drum-tight narratives, thematic complexity and investigations of identity,” but not overt humor. Afire is set at a vacation home by the Baltic Sea, where a pretentious novelist (a terrific Thomas Schubert) mixes awkwardly with a group of old and new friends. From the Times piece: “When we did the table read, there was just nonstop laughter,” actor Schubert says during a separate interview. “He was really surprised by that, because he didn’t necessarily see it that way. At the same time, he was relieved because we’d found the right tonality for the story.”

We open Afire this Friday at the Royal and July 21 at the Laemmle Glendale and Town Center in Encino. Petzold will participate in a Q&A after the 7:10 pm, July 15 screening at the Royal. The Los Angeles engagement is co-presented by the Goethe-Institut.

“Another masterwork about characters who are trapped by internal and external circumstances from which they find it intensely difficult to escape.” ~ Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“In depicting a novice artist forced to unwrite everything to move forward, “Afire” also shows a veteran one open to self-editing, and vigorous self-renewal.” ~ Guy Lodge, Variety

“Deceptive simplicity makes way for illuminating depths.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“[Adds] another compelling and precise layer of texture to Petzold’s multifaceted oeuvre.” ~ Marina Ashioti, Little White Lies

Fritz Lang: “One must suffer.” Paul Javal: “That’s for sure.” Godard’s CONTEMPT 60th anniversary screenings at the Royal starting July 7.

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Rialto Pictures’ new 60th anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), the director’s look at a crumbling marriage stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, and, as a veteran European director, Fritz Lang. “One of the masterworks of modern cinema, a singular viewing experience… a seductive bouquite of enchantments… a many-layered odyssey of intelligence and sensuality.” (Phillip Lopate, New York Times) “Bardot + Godard = Movie Greatness.” (Time Out New York)

Contempt: That’s what ex-typist Brigitte Bardot has for husband playwright/screenwriter Michel Piccoli—but why? Does she think he used her to get that lucrative assignment (to rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey) from overbearing American producer Jack Palance (“I like gods. I know exactly how they feel.”)? Was it that (innocent) fanny pat to multilingual interpreter Giorgia Moll? Or does she just “not love him anymore?” New Wave wild man Godard, given international stars, a best-selling novel by Alberto Moravia, two high-maintenance producers (Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti), and the biggest budget of his career, still succeeded, as usual, in overturning the conventions of mainstream filmmaking, while producing a meditation on post-Hollywood filmmaking; the pitfalls of international productions; CinemaScope (“only for snakes and funerals,” chortles Lang); imposing modern psychological interpretations on classical themes; and Bardot’s derrière. From the beginning, as Godard’s voiceover recites the credits and his cameraman Raoul Coutard films at Rome’s Cinecittà; Piccoli meets Palance amid endless side-tracking shots; Lang (playing “Fritz Lang”), in the screening room, casually switches from English to French to German—with a Prego thrown in—as Giorgia Moll simultaneously translates (sometimes with a twist) for monoglots Palance and Piccoli; and a studiedly fake death scene; we’re obviously in Godardland. But a tour de force 30-minute sequence that never strays from the Bardot/Piccoli apartment, with the couple hashing over their problems in seeming “real time” amid carefully complex mise en scène, could fit easily into a Bergman heart-searcher. (Although Piccoli also sports a cigar and hat in his bath in homage to Dean Martin in Some Came Running.) Godard’s most sun-splashed production, unfolding amid the airiest and most fabulous of apartments and villas, and against dazzling seascapes, with a complex color scheme featuring a retina-searing red – always the same shade – on robes, railings, convertibles, etc. And with Godard himself as Lang’s Assistant Director in the final scene.

“One of the masterworks of modern cinema that has influenced a generation of filmmakers… What makes Contempt so unique a viewing experience, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience’s attention as well as its senses… Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master’s most ‘orthodox’ movie. The paradox is that it may also be his finest…with Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords.” – Phillip Lopate, The New York Times

“It seems like an elegy for European art cinema, at once tragic and serene. This myth of baleful movie gods is also the story of Godard’s victory over temptation. Lashed to the mast of irascible genius, he heard the song of the sirens and lived to tell the tale.” – J. Hoberman

“Possibly Godard’s most melancholy film and probably his most beautiful.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice

“What’s the price of selling out? Contempt asks the question of its characters, its audience, and its own director.” ~ Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“It takes its artistic agenda seriously, but also luxuriates in the sensuality and plasticity of film images.” ~ Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

https://vimeo.com/829877975

ONLY IN THEATERS screening with Q&A this Saturday, July 8 at Vidiots in Eagle Rock.

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July 5 Update: Tickets are now on sale for this Saturday’s Vidiots screening of Only in Theaters. In addition to the film, this is one more, possibly last chance to catch an in-person Q&A with subjects Greg and Tish Laemmle and filmmaker Raphael Sbarge.

Original post from June 14: Vidiots, welcome to the L.A. exhibition scene! ONLY IN THEATERS screening w/Q&A July 8.

Los Angeles’ world class movie theater culture just got classier. By reopening the 271-seat Eagle Theatre in Eagle Rock, Vidiots has joined major venues of film exhibition like the Academy Museum, the American Cinematheque, the Alamo Drafthouse, the New Beverly, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (in 2025), and REDCAT, to grassroots sites like Braindead Studios, Secret Movie Club, and Cinespia, plus, ahem, yours truly, Laemmle Theatres to further get Angelenos off their lonesome sofas and out into our one-of-a-kind megalopolis. We are in Hollywood, after all, the movie capital of the world, and it’s only fitting we have a plethora of ways to see movies the way they are meant to be seen: in public, with an audience, on big screens. Yes, home viewing is convenient. And for episodic stuff that is meant to be seen on TV, we are all for it. But comparing the experience of watching a “movie” via VOD with the act of actually seeing the same film in a movie theatre is like the debate between masturbation and sex …or a frozen meal versus a meal at your favorite restaurant. In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, Baby.”

We’re pleased the documentary about Laemmle, Only in Theaters, is among Vidiot’s first screenings. Join filmmaker Raphael Sbarge and subjects Greg and Tish Laemmle for a post-screening Q&A on July 8.

Mark Olsen of the L.A. Times has been covering Vidiot’s long road from funky, adored Santa Monica video store to Eagle Rock movie theater/cafe/video store/event space. Here’s the beginning of his latest dispatch:

When the Santa Monica video store Vidiots, which had become a local cultural institution, closed in February 2017, founders Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber had their doubts as to whether the store would ever rebound. Opened in 1985, the beloved rental shop had a collection of more than 50,000 titles on various media formats that was put into storage, potentially never to be publicly available again.

“I didn’t really think it would,” said Tauber, reflecting on whether the store could bounce back after years of financial struggle with the rise of emerging streaming services. “I know that was the plan from the beginning, but I think by the time we shut down, I was so worn out and exhausted from trying to keep the business going and all the negativity and struggle. It was really hard to imagine this was really going to happen. Of course I hoped it would, but we were just way burnt out by the time we were closing down.”

Tauber sat recently with Polinger in the comfy and inviting theater space of the revived Vidiots, which just reopened. Besides a video store, the newly renovated complex at the Eagle Theatre in Eagle Rock includes a 271-seat movie theater, a beer and wine bar, and a smaller micro-cinema space that can also be used for community and educational programs.

“It has been such a transformation and such a huge endeavor, with so many obstacles along the way,” said Polinger. “It’s really a miracle that we’re here.”

Click here to read Olsen’s full article.