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Todd Haynes’ MAY DECEMBER and the 35th Anniversary of the Mighty Zeitgeist Films.

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 After a couple disappointing features, it was great to see Todd Haynes, one of our finest filmmakers, return to his indie roots with the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  And now with May December — which we open May 17 at the Glendale, Monica Film Center, NoHo and Town Center — we have another feature that can stand alongside his masterpieces like Safe, Far from Heaven, I’m Not There and Carol.  This is also a moment to remember his first feature, Poison, and the use this as an opportunity to honor New York-based boutique distributor Zeitgeist Films (the distributor of Poison) on their 35th anniversary. Long and successful careers require talent, to be sure.  But the role of early supporters is also key. And from Todd Haynes to Atom Egoyan and Francois Ozo to Christopher Nolan, Zeitgeist has championed so many amazing talents.  ~ Greg Laemmle
Stephen Saito of The Movable Fest recently spoke with Zeitgeist founders Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo about their company, the ingenuity and drive it took to make it a success, their favorite films, and much more. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the changing world of independent film distribution from two experts. Saito introducers the interview like this:

For much of cinema history, the sight of a big Z slashing across the screen promised the fictional adventures of a sword-wielding caped crusader, but starting in 1988, that big red Z started to stand for something else amongst discerning cinephiles, as real life heroes Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo believed there was a better way forward for the films they loved. Starting Zeitgeist Films out of a small West Village apartment after working a variety of jobs in film distribution, the two have played an outsized role in shaping film culture in the decades since, taking a quality over quantity approach to making room in a crowded American theatrical marketplace for some of the most daring work from around the world. Limiting their acquisitions to a manageable slate of four to five releases a year where each one would receive their undivided attention, a necessity when championing artists such as Bruce Weber (“Let’s Get Lost”), Peter Greenaway (“The Draughtman’s Contract”), Derek Jarman (“Blue”) and Guy Maddin (“Cowards Bend at the Knee”) without deep pockets, the duo has not only had the foresight to see the enduring nature of the films themselves that they release, but the value of time in how much they put into each film and how it has afforded them the sustainability to keep going.

“We noticed that there were companies that started that spent a lot of money on films and would acquire a lot and those companies went out of business extremely quickly,” Gerstman said recently on the occasion of the company’s 35th anniversary. “And we wanted to stay in business and we were able to.”

Their latest milestone has led the Metrograph in New York to pay Zeitgeist a much-deserved month-long tribute with an in-theater 13-film retrospective, kicking off this Friday with Gerstman and Russo introducing a newly spiffed up 4K restoration of “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” Marc Rohemund’s unfortunately all-too-relevant WWII tale of the Munich University student who stood up against the infiltration of Nazi thought at school, and an additional 20 films being made available on the theater’s streaming service Metrograph-At-Home, tilting towards the visionary meta-fiction works from Yvonne Rainer, Atom Egoyan and Jennifer Baichwal that the distributor pushed long before such playful documentaries were in fashion. Guests of the series such as Raoul Peck (“Lumumba”), Christine Vachon (“Poison”) and Astra Taylor (“Examined Life”) reflect the range of Gerstman and Russo’s belief in taking advantage of the big screen’s ability to hold a variety of perspectives, yielding a catalog deep with films where the ordinary becomes extraordinary simply by telling stories that have been overlooked, particularly when it comes to the hidden histories of women and gay life in the 20th century.

With the machinery they’ve built over the years, Gerstman and Russo have celebrated the careers of free-thinking artists and activists as a home to documentary profiles of filmmakers such as Maya Deren (“In the Mirror of Maya Deren”) and Alice Guy Blache (“Be Natural”), photographers Cecil Beaton (“Love Cecil”) and Bill Cunningham (“Bill Cunningham: New York”) and intellectuals Noam Chomsky (“Manufacturing Consent”), Hannah Arendt (“Vita Activa”) and Slavoj Zizek (“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”) while helping launch so many others, picking up on the early promise in the work of Todd Haynes (“Dottie Got Spanked”), Laura Poitras (“The Oath”), Chaitanya Tamhane (“Court”), Talya Lavie (“Zero Motivation”), and Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Elena”). (Only they could arrange for a documentary to be made about the stop-motion animation maestros the Brothers Quay made by Christopher Nolan, whose first film “Following” they shepherded to theaters.)

As Gerstman and Russo readily acknowledge, the work has only gotten more difficult as time has gone on, but leaning on good taste and institutional knowledge, they have beaten the odds to become a pillar of arthouse cinema and in having such a hand in bringing important voices into those sacred spaces, it was truly an honor to get to speak to them on the eve of their retrospective at the Metrograph, which may be a short distance from their offices, but involves a journey that cuts across multiple countries and decades as they’ve brought global cinema to the city and beyond.

Click here to read the interview.

The beautifully acted late-life romance MY SAILOR, MY LOVE opens Friday.

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This Friday we’re pleased to open a touching and charming Irish indie film My Sailor, My Love. It follows Howard (James Cosmo), a widowed sailor living alone on the coast of Ireland and struggling to care for himself. His daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), hires Annie (Bríd Brennan) to help out around the house. Though Howard initially rejects this imposition, Annie’s charm and gentle care win him over, and the two fall in love. Annie’s large and loving family welcomes Howard into their lives, but these new relationships only serve to illuminate the depth of pain and hurt between Howard and Grace, who is facing challenges of her own. Grace’s resentment tears at Howard and Annie’s otherwise idyllic seaside love story. This windswept drama deftly balances a universal family saga with a tender and timeless romance. We open My Sailor, My Love this Friday at the Town Center, Monica Film Center and Claremont with Saturday and Sunday morning screenings at our Newhall theater.

Critics around the world have been writing about the acting. The film’s director, acclaimed Finnish filmmaker Klaus Härö, said this about his experiences working with the actors:

“The cast has been an immense joy, from the moment the roles were confirmed and when we first went on set. I would often sit very close by to the actors and get to witness what goes into their work, which left me very impressed. Sometimes when I looked around, I could see the emotions brought to surface after a take. Someone might have tears in their eyes, or the crew might burst into applause after a scene. This isn’t very common on a movie set, and it might even seem unprofessional in a way. The atmosphere at the set has been exceptional, and the actors left a very strong imprint on the whole crew.”

“Sharp writing, subtle acting, and a winning Irish setting. My Sailor, My Love will play to any nation where humans struggle to make themselves understood.” – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times

“A quiet yet profoundly powerful feature, aching in emotional sophistication and depth. Cosmo and Brennan are divine.” – Andrew Murray, The Upcoming

“A lovely indie. Klaus Härö’s gentle and special family drama has much more at play than rote tear-jerking. Magnificently shot and acted. Sailor is filled with sage wisdom and vulnerable people struggling to do the best that they can even when they are at their worst.” – Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“Prepare to be moved.” – Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer to Nail

“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