The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
Set against the backdrop of post-war Britain, John Osborne’s modern classic THE ENTERTAINER conjures the seedy glamour of the old music halls for an explosive examination of public masks and private torment. Rob Ashford directs Kenneth Branagh as Archie Rice in the final production of the Plays at the Garrick season.
“Branagh rises to the occasion with a performance that is never less than thoroughly arresting. [Four out of five stars.]” (Paul Taylor, Independent)
Recent events being what they are, we welcome several upcoming films that look deeply and well at our country and its underrepresented groups in drastically changing and challenging times.
A precursor to the marriage equality movement, the fight to legalize interracial marriage culminated in the story depicted in LOVING (opening November 18 at the Playhouse and November 23 at the NoHo, Claremont and Monica Film Center).
Written and directed by gifted young filmmaker Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special), the film celebrates the real-life courage and commitment of an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown.
Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry – and their love story has become an inspiration to couples ever since. The acting is excellent, prompting Michelle Dean to write in the New Republic that “Edgerton is likely to get more attention, though it is Negga’s incredible performance that makes the film so powerfully subtle.”
A tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, MOONLIGHT is told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality. The film has been garnering rave reviews from everyone who see it.
Writing in the Detroit News, Adam Graham called it “a film of rare grace – a tender, compassionate, restrained look at a life lived in the shadows.” Ty Burr of the Boston Globe called MOONLIGHT, “in its quietly radical grace…a cultural watershed – a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths.” We open the film this Friday at the NoHo 7, November 18 at the Playhouse and Monica Film Center, and December 16 at the Claremont 5.
Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced a huge new population of young veterans and their service and experiences are the focus of two new films. We open the documentary NATIONAL BIRD on November 18 at the Monica Film Center. It follows the harrowing journey of three U.S. military veteran whistle-blowers determined to break the silence surrounding America’s secret drone war. Tortured by guilt for their participation in the killing of faceless terror suspects, and despite the threat of being prosecuted, these three veterans offer an unprecedented look inside this secret program to reveal the haunting cost of America’s global drone strikes. Wim Wenders and Errol Morris are the executive producers. Jason Bailey of Flavorwire called the film ” gripping indictment of America’s increasing reliance on drone warfare. Scary, potent, powerful stuff.”
MAN DOWN is a fictionalized account of U.S. Marine Gabriel Drummer (Shia LaBeouf), who returns home from his tour in Afghanistan to find that the place he once called home is no better than the battlefields he fought on overseas. Accompanied by his best friend Devin Roberts (Jai Courtney), a hard-nosed marine whose natural instinct is to shoot first and ask questions later, he searches desperately for the whereabouts of his estranged son, Jonathan (Charlie Shotwell) and wife, Natalie (Kate Mara). We open MAN DOWN December 2 at the Playhouse and Monica Film Center.
Finally, legendary director Ken Loach’s new movie I, DANIEL BLAKE is not a U.S. film but one that does offer a profound look at the issue of income inequality in a way that has a strong bearing on our problems here in the U.S.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, the latest I, DANIEL BLAKE is a gripping, human tale about the impact one man can make. Gruff but goodhearted, Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is a man out of time: a widowed woodworker who’s never owned a computer, he lives according to his own common sense moral code. But after a heart attack leaves him unable to work and the state welfare system fails him, the stubbornly self-reliant Daniel must stand up and fight for his dignity.
In his Variety review, Owen Gleiberman described I, DANIEL BLAKE as “one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.” The film is a reminder that what ails us here at home has parallels abroad.
SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers protecting our 12,000-year-old food legacy. In the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. As biotech chemical companies control the majority of our seeds, farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers fight a David and Goliath battle to defend the future of our food.
Both directors, Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel, will be doing Q & As after the 4:50, 7:20, and 10:00 pm shows Friday, September 30 and September October 1 at the MONICA FILM CENTER.
Jon Betz will be doing a Q & A after the 11:00 am show in PASADENA ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2.
Taggart Siegel will be doing a Q & A after the 11:00 am show in CLAREMONT ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2.
Some of the production company Merchant Ivory’s greatest triumphs are adaptations of E.M. Forster novels. There are three of them: A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1992), which is one of their undisputed masterpieces. Based on Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End is a saga of class relations and changing times in Edwardian England. Margaret Schlegel (Emma Thompson, who won the Best Actress Oscar for this performance) and her sister Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) become involved with two couples: a wealthy, conservative industrialist (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife (Vanessa Redgrave), and a working-class man (Samuel West) and his mistress (Niccola Duffet). The interwoven fates and misfortunes of these three families and the diverging trajectories of the two sisters’ lives are connected to the ownership of Howards End, a beloved country home. A compelling, brilliantly acted study of one woman’s struggle to maintain her ideals and integrity in the face of Edwardian society’s moribund conformity. We played Howards End to packed, rapt houses in 1992 and are thrilled to open this fully restored digital version September 2nd at the Royal, Playhouse, Town Center and Claremont.
We’ll also soon screen two by Michelangelo Antonioni: Blow-Up (1966) and La Notte (1961). The latter, just restored by our friends at Rialto Pictures and opening at the Royal and Playhouse on September 16, takes place during a day and a night in the life of a troubled marriage, set against Milan’s gleaming modern buildings, its gone-to-seed older quarters, and a sleek modern estate, all shot in razor-sharp B&W crispness by the great Gianni di Venanzo. With Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau starring, Antonioni creates his most compassionate examination of the emptiness of the rich and the difficulties of modern relationships. Writing in his book Devotional Cinema, Nathaniel Dorsky said of La Notte, “the real beauty of the film, the real depth of its intelligence, continues to lie in the clarity of the montage — the way the world is revealed to us moment by moment. The camera’s delicate interactive grace, participating with the fluidity of the characters’ changing points of view, is profound in itself.”
Blow-Up, Antonioni’s first English-language production, is widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod swinging London. Filled with ennui, bored with his “fab” but oddly desultory life of casual sex and drugs, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images believes that he has photographed a murder. Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles co-star. In his review at the time, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times recognized just the film’s prescience, calling it “a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.” Blow-Up came out 50 years ago, so we are celebrating it on September 13th at the Monica Film Center as part of our Anniversary Classics series with film critic Stephen Farber.
Beginning September 30th at the Royal we are pleased to screen Chabrol 5 x 5, a series featuring five of Claude Chabrol’s best, all fully restored and digitally remastered: Betty, The Swindle, Torment, Color of Lies and Night Cap. A founding father of French New Wave cinema, Chabrol’s fascination with genre films, and the detective drama in particular, fueled a lengthy and celebrated string of thrillers, which explored the human heart under extreme emotional duress. Chabrol began as a contributor to the celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema alongside such film legends as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before launching his directorial career in 1957. He quickly established himself as a versatile filmmaker whose innate understanding of genre tropes informed the complex triangular relationships at the center of many of his films, which frequently served as a prism through which commentary on class conflict could be obliquely addressed. The talent he displayed in depicting these dark deeds, as well as his status among the pantheon of French New Wave cinema, underscored his significance as one of his native country’s most prolific and wickedly gifted craftsmen.
Set in 1940s New York, Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is the true story of the legendary New York heiress and socialite (Meryl Streep) who obsessively pursued her dream of becoming a great singer. The voice she heard in her head was beautiful, but to everyone else it was hilariously awful. Her “husband” and manager, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), an aristocratic English actor, was determined to protect his beloved Florence from the truth. But when Florence decided to give a public concert at Carnegie Hall, St. Clair knew he faced his greatest challenge.
All of our 7:10 PM screenings on Thursday, August 11 and 1:30 PM screenings on Sunday, August 14 at the NoHo 7, Playhouse 7, Town Center 5 and Claremont 5 will feature a special taped introduction from co-star Simon Helberg and after the screening a pre-taped Q&A with Mr. Helberg and stars Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant plus behind-the-scenes footage. Paramount Pictures will provide programs to audience members (while supplies last).
Directed by the great Mr. Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen), it’s no surprise the film has been getting great reviews. Writing in Slate, Dana Stevens said “Streep … makes the character’s delusional faith in her own talent so infectious that we ache at the thought of Florence’s impending humiliation even as we prepare ourselves to laugh at it.” In the New York Daily News, Stephen Whitty wrote “It’s a pleasure seeing Grant in a great part again, playing the sort of almost-cad he’s best at. And Streep – who, in real life, can belt anything from Broadway to Bruce – is clearly having a ball singing badly.” Jason Solomons of The Wrap said “There’s a deceptively masterful simplicity to Frears’ direction. In this age of blockbusters and superhero face-off mayhem, it reminds us that unfussiness is a virtue.”
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The documentary Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil follows a team of art historians who try to reveal the mystery of the 25 extant paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
Over the course of five years the research team travelled the world, visiting museums such as The Louvre, The Prado and the National Gallery of Art in Washington to make an in-depth analysis of Bosch’s paintings. By using modern techniques, such as X-ray, infrared photography, and multi-spectrum analysis, they allow us to penetrate into the deeper layers of his paintings thus helping the audience to look at the works of Bosch with new eyes.
The research raises the question whether all works are really painted by Bosch. The museum world is waiting anxiously for the results. Is their Bosch a real Bosch? In addition, The Noordbrabants Museum has organized the largest exhibition to date of the medieval painter in 2016 in Den Bosch, The Netherlands to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. The museum plays a political chess game to get as many paintings as possible to the exhibition. The Prado owns several masterpieces
and will organize their own exhibition on El Bosco. Will The Noordbrabants Museum manage to bring the masterpieces home to the Netherlands?
In March the reliably excellent New Yorker Magazine published this piece, HIERONYMUS BOSCH’S FIVE-HUNDREDTH-ANNIVERSARY HOMECOMING, by Becca Rothfeld. It begins:
“The Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch is as unlike Hell as a place could be. A pleasant assemblage of canals, bikeways, and colorful buildings, it often seems to border on the heavenly, at least for a certain brand of bourgie millennial. Earlier this month, on the five-minute walk from the train station to my bright, modernist Airbnb, I encountered not one but two health-food shops, one of which specialized in artisanal yogurts. But quaint appearances notwithstanding, ’s-Hertogenbosch—known colloquially (and much more manageably) as Den Bosch—is also the birthplace and lifelong home of Hieronymus Bosch, the late medieval painter famed for his bloody, sensationalist depictions of Hell and its beastly denizens. Until this year, a bronze statue of the artist looming over the market square was the most visible sign that Bosch had once lived here. But this month, in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of his death, a major exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum and several citywide celebrations of Bosch’s work have studded the innocuous landscape of his home town with tributes to the infernal bacchanals he depicted.
“Biographical details about Bosch’s life are famously scant, but we know that he was born Jeroen van Aken around 1450 and remained in Den Bosch until his death, in 1516. He came from a family of painters based in a workshop on the east side of the Markt, the central city square. (Today a sleepy town of around a hundred and fifty thousand residents, Den Bosch was at that time one of the Duchy of Brabant’s four capitals, and a bustling regional center.) When he wasn’t busy dreaming up abject sinners and vengeful devils, Bosch was performing mundane tasks like designing stained-glass windows, and, though he was one of the first painters in the Low Countries to sign his work, he probably considered himself more of an artisan than an artist.
“Yet despite the modest size of his oeuvre—his confirmed works consist of only two dozen panels and triptychs and a slightly smaller number of drawings—Bosch managed to exert an outsized influence on the religious imagery of his day. His fantastic demons, impossible amalgamations of animals, humans, monsters, and household objects, had little precedent in earlier devotional art, nor in the somewhat formulaic depictions of Heaven and Hell that prevailed among his contemporaries. Bosch’s hellscapes presented palpable pandemonium, and even his more routine works were enlivened by inventive details: a winged fish with an unfriendly expression following Christ across a river; a tottering demon protruding from a funnel. It wasn’t long before Bosch’s idiosyncrasies were incorporated into the medieval mainstream: some of his followers went so far as to work from “model sheets,” which provided stock images of the artist’s demons and ne’er-do-wells for workshops to copy. Centuries later, Bosch’s vision would inspire the nightmarish works of Surrealists like Odilon Redon and Max Ernst.”
It comes as no surprise that DYING TO KNOW, Gay Dillingham’s documentary has been held over at three Laemmle locations (Monica Film Center, Playhouse 7 and Claremont 5). After all, it chronicles the intriguing friendship between TIMOTHY LEARY and RAM DASS, two of the 60s most fascinating luminaries. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the film has been playing to great critical and audience acclaim. To wit, check out this short video clip featuring audience footage from the film’s premiere at the Royal last week.
To celebrate this sleeper hit, we’ve procured a copy of Ram Dass’ seminal book BE HERE NOW signed by the great mystic himself!
ENTER BELOW for your chance to win this singular prize … and don’t forget to catch Dying to Know in theaters this weekend.
Update: Congratulation to BE HERE NOW contest winner Lycia Naff of Los Angeles!
The contest is now closed.
Explore the San Gabriel Valley and celebrate the opening of the Foothill Gold Line extension at 626 Golden Streets, a car-free event on Sunday, June 26th from 8am to 2pm!
Modeled after other “open streets” programs like CicLAvia, 626 Golden Streets will temporarily open stretches of roadway from South Pasadena to Azusa for people to walk, jog, skate, bike, and more.
Communities participating include South Pasadena, San Marino, Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Irwindale, and Azusa. Speaking of Azusa, head one block south of Azusa Downtown Station and you’ll find the future home of a Laemmle theater in Azusa! It’s the lot at the southeast corner of East Foothill Boulevard and North Azusa Avenue.
Seek out Activity Hubs along the 18+ mile route for free fitness classes (Zumba, yoga), activity booths, live music, food trucks, professional chalk artists, drum circles, cyclocross, Gabe the Sasquatch, and more!
Seven Tips for Enjoying 626 Golden Streets:
For more information, visit: http://www.626goldenstreets.com!
