Theater Buzz Archives – Laemmle Theatres

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

‘The Love That Remains’: Comedy, Melancholy, and the Strange Work of Letting Go

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

With The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason shifts gears from the icy severity of Godland and the simmering grief of A White, White Day to deliver a warm yet quietly devastating portrait of a family learning how to (co-)exist after a marriage ends. Set against Iceland’s imposing yet luminous landscapes, the film follows a separated couple and their three children across the uneasy months following their split, blending domestic realism with eccentric surrealism to capture the strange emotional limbo that follows love’s collapse. Both gently comic and deeply melancholic, the film becomes less about the breakup itself than about what persists in the wake of its dissolution: habit, tenderness, resentment, and the stubborn bonds that refuse to vanish on schedule.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse on February 4th to hear Pálmason discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale theaters beginning February 6th.

Rather than tracing a traditional narrative arc, Pálmason presents a series of vignettes that drift between everyday routine and flights of imagination. Magnus, or Maggi (Sverrir Gudnason), works long stretches aboard a fishing trawler, returning home to a family life that no longer fully includes him. His estranged wife Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), an artist attempting to push her work into larger spaces, appears steadier but no less burdened, balancing her creative ambitions with the emotional labor of parenting children still adjusting to their new reality.

Their interactions carry an awkward familiarity: shared meals, casual conversations, lingering frustrations, and moments when their prior intimacy briefly resurfaces. But Pálmason repeatedly interrupts these naturalistic scenes with flashes of surreal humor and dreamlike invention: a monstrous rooster stalks Magnus’s nightmares, an art-world charlatan meets an exaggerated fate, and a medieval sword drops inexplicably from the sky beside the children’s play area. These moments lighten the film’s tone while also underscoring the emotional chaos lurking beneath its surface, reflecting how heartbreak rarely unfolds in tidy, realistic beats.

Shot by Pálmason himself on richly textured film stock, the Icelandic landscapes become more than mere scenic backdrops, but dynamic entities that mirror the characters’ emotional isolation while offering tantalizing glimpses of calm and continuity. Everyday play, family pets, and the rhythms of work and weather continue even as adult relationships falter.

What makes The Love That Remains so affecting is its refusal to offer easy resolution. Instead, Pálmason captures the uncomfortable truth that love does not simply disappear—It mutates, lingers, and occasionally resurfaces in unexpected forms. The result is a film that is tender, odd, and quietly profound, finding humor and grace in the messy process of learning how to live with the fractured pieces of our best-laid plans.

“There’s a deceptive sweetness to [its] simple, hypnotic rhythms.” – Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com

“Pálmason’s fourth feature is an album of achingly felt, morbidly funny and increasingly haywire scenes from a marriage.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

A Fond Farewell to the Claremont 5

January 27, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 11 Comments

After 18 years in downtown Claremont, Laemmle Theatres will soon be closing the doors to our beloved Claremont 5 location.

This decision did not come easily. The Claremont 5 has been a meaningful part of our company’s history and, more importantly, of a community that showed up again and again for independent, foreign, and specialty films.

When the Claremont 5 first opened in 2007 as part of the city’s expanded downtown, our goal was simple: to create a home for movies that might not otherwise have a screen in the Inland Empire. Over the years, this theater has become a gathering place for cinephiles, students, families, and neighbors who valued discovery, conversation, and the shared experience of watching films together.

Like many independent theaters, the Claremont 5 faced significant challenges in the years following the pandemic. While we saw encouraging energy around special events and programs aimed at students and younger audiences, overall attendance did not rebound to a level that would allow the theater to remain financially sustainable. Following our almost-sale (and subsequent call to action) back in 2023, ticket sales improved only modestly, with much of the regular programming struggling to find the audience it deserved.

In that context, when Regency Theatres approached us with a fair offer to purchase the Claremont 5, we made the difficult decision to move forward with the sale. While the theater was not actively on the market, it quickly became clear that such a transition could offer the venue a new opportunity to evolve under different stewardship. We genuinely hope that Regency’s fresh perspective will allow the space to thrive in new ways.

“What I’ll miss most isn’t just the theater—it’s sharing great films with incredible people,” commented Guy Valdez, Claremont’s general manager of 8+ years. “Thank you for supporting independent film and for making this place feel like home. I’m deeply grateful.”

For now, we will continue operating the Claremont 5 through the end of January, programming films as usual until our final days.

Above all, we want to thank the audience members who supported the Claremont 5 over the past 18 years. You showed up for small films, challenging films, and films that sparked discussion long after the credits rolled. Together, you made this theater more than a building—You made it a gathering place.

While this chapter is ending, our gratitude endures. So thank you, Claremont, for your curiosity, your loyalty, and for allowing us to be part of your moviegoing lives.

Gratefully yours,

Laemmle Theatres

A Poet: A Darkly Comic Fable About Art, Failure, and the Cost of Belief

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet is a caustic, unexpectedly tender portrait of artistic failure and the uneasy hope that comes with believing in someone else. Set in Medellín, the film follows a middle-aged, alcoholic poet whose early promise has long since calcified into bitterness and artistic paralysis. When he encounters a gifted teenage student from a working-class background, he seizes the chance to reinvent himself as a mentor, projecting his lost ambitions onto her raw natural talent. What unfolds is a sharply observed fable about ego, exploitation, and the uneasy line between nurturing one’s art and using it as a lifeline.

Catch A Poet in theaters beginning January 30th at the Laemmle Royal, or at Glendale beginning February 6th.

Oscar Restrepo (portrayed by newcomer Ubeimar Rios with remarkable authenticity) is introduced as a man at war with the world and himself. He drinks too much, picks arguments about poetry with strangers, and torpedoes rare professional opportunities through self-sabotage and disdain. Yet Soto never treats Oscar as a punchline alone. His failures are rendered with specificity and compassion, revealing a man who grasps the general shape of the life he wanted, even as he proves incapable of living it. Oscar’s volatility is inseparable from his sincerity; his tragedy is not that he lacks talent, but that he cannot reconcile art with adulthood.

The film’s emotional axis shifts when Oscar begins teaching at a public high school and encounters a student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), whose writing displays clarity, intelligence, and an unvarnished sense of voice. Unlike Oscar, she approaches art pragmatically, weighing its value against economic reality and familial obligations. Their relationship is neither inspirational nor redemptive in the traditional sense: Oscar is an erratic, often irresponsible guide, while his protégée resists being molded into a passive, yielding symbol. Their bond is defined less by uplift than by friction, an uneasy negotiation between belief and self-preservation.

A Poet sharpens its satire as the pair enter elite literary spaces, where well-funded institutions eagerly embrace the young writer as a marketable emblem of authenticity. Here, Soto skewers the art world’s hunger for narratives that flatter its own virtue, exposing a system in which mentorship, patronage, and diversity often function as performance. The film’s critique is pointed but never smug, grounded in lived contradiction rather than broad caricature.

Shot on grainy 16mm, A Poet has a tactile, slightly unmoored quality that suits its blend of farce and melancholy. Bursts of music heighten the absurdity of Oscar’s misadventures while allowing moments of genuine tenderness to land unforced. In charting the gap between artistic idealism and material reality, Soto delivers a film that is funny, bruising, and quietly devastating—a story not about succeeding in art, but about what it costs to keep believing in it at all.

“Rios is so believable as Oscar, you’d think this film was a documentary of his life.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

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!

A Private Life: Rebecca Zlotowsky’s Unlikely Psychological ‘Whodunit’

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a delightfully hard-to-classify mystery-thriller starring actress Jodie Foster in her most significant French-language role in decades, offers a uniquely human story of doubt, memory, and emotional reckoning. Set largely in Paris, the movie follows Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst whose ordered professional life begins to unravel after the unexpected death of one of her long-term patients. What unfolds is less a conventional mystery than a richly layered exploration of how we process loss, guilt, identity, and the private truths we carry inside us.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Zlotowski discuss her latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its opening at the Laemmle Royal on January 16th.

The narrative begins with Lilian’s professional and personal worlds colliding when her patient is pronounced dead by suicide. Convinced that there’s more to the story, she launches an investigation that moves from psychological inquiry to sleuthing through records, recordings, and personal interactions.

Foster’s performance is central to the film’s distinctive tone. While A Private Life marks her first French-language leading role, it builds on a long (if intermittent) history of working in French cinema, including smaller but memorable appearances in the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004). That experience shows in the ease and precision of her delivery here, grounding Lilian’s twitchy intelligence, emotional restraint, and gradual unraveling in a performance that feels fully at home in its Parisian setting. Daniel Auteuil complements her with a weathered, effortless presence as Gabriel, a foil and ex-partner whose familiarity with Lilian underscores the film’s thematic interests in memory, connection, and the stories we tell ourselves about the people we once loved.

Zlotowski’s direction embraces a playful ambiguity: flirting with Hitchcockian suspense, nodding at noir tropes, and even indulging in quirky dreamlike sequences that blur the boundary between reality and invention. Yet the heart of the film remains firmly in the relationships at its core, particularly the tentative reconnection between Lilian and Gabriel, as well as Lilian’s growing self-awareness as she interrogates what motivates her own desperate search for truth.

Both visually and tonally, the film feels Parisian in spirit: elegant stairwells, warm café interiors, and a palette that supports both the introspective melancholy and the lighter, more compassionate moments shared between its characters. With its distinctive blend of mystery, comedy, drama, and character study, A Private Life offers audiences something all-too-uncommon: a story that entertains while inviting reflection on how the inner lives we guard shape the lives we live.

“A throwback to the sort of character-driven dramas that defined Foster’s early career.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“A genial, preposterous psychological mystery caper.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Weight of History: Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In All That’s Left of You, writer-director Cherien Dabis crafts an expansive, emotionally grounded portrait of a Palestinian family shaped by decades of displacement, political upheaval, and inherited memory. Spanning more than seventy years, the film situates an intimate domestic story within the broader arc of Palestinian history, tracing how the consequences of one violent moment ripple backward and forward across generational lines.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Cherien Dabis discuss her latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its return to Laemmle Theatres beginning January 8th at the Royal, kicked off by a series of live Q&A sessions with Dabis moderated by actors Mark Ruffalo, Tatiana Maslany, and Diego Luna over its first three days, before expanding to the Town Center on January 16th.

The narrative begins with a Palestinian teenager living in the Occupied West Bank who is swept into a protest that turns suddenly and irrevocably violent. Yet rather than centering on the incident itself, the film unfolds through the voice of the boy’s mother, who recounts the personal and political forces that brought her family to this precise moment in time. From there, All That’s Left of You moves fluidly across the generations, returning to earlier chapters of family life—the loss of a home, the pressures of occupation, the persistence of love and routine—while showing how each generation carries both the scars and the hopes of those who came before.

Dabis approaches this sweeping material with a focus on the textures of daily life. Weddings, meals, schooldays, and quiet conversations are given as much weight as moments of historical rupture. The effect is cumulative and deeply affecting: history presented not as abstraction, but as something that fundamentally reshapes families from the inside out.

Visually, All That’s Left of You balances intimacy with scope, grounding its political context in faces, gestures, and lived-in spaces. The performances, including masterful contributions from members of the Bakri acting family, bring an intergenerational authenticity to the story, emphasizing continuity as much as loss.

At once a family chronicle and a political testimony, All That’s Left of You refuses simplification. It does not ask viewers to look away from pain, nor does it reduce its characters to symbols. Instead, it offers a sustained act of bearing witness: to a family, to a history, and to the enduring emotional cost of dispossession. By the time the film returns to its opening moment, that act of violence is no longer isolated, but has been integrated as part of a long, unfinished story whose consequences are still unfolding.

“A moving and intimate narrative about the toll displacement takes on generations of people.” – Lovia Gyarke, The Hollywood Reporter

“[A] considered, moving tale that effectively blends the personal and the political.” – Allan Hunter, Screen Daily