Glendale Archives – Laemmle Theatres

It’s Identity vs. Politics in Chase Joynt’s ‘State of Firsts’

June 29, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

“Transgender for everyone” is a dog-whistle phrase the current administration frequently uses to scare conservative parents. Yet with additional punctuation, “transgender, for everyone,” it could sum up the campaign of Sarah McBride, the first transwoman elected to Congress. Chase Joynt’s new documentary State of Firsts follows her campaign, its immediate aftermath, and how it changes her along the way.

Catch State of Firsts at the Laemmle Glendale beginning July 2^nd. Director Chase Joynt will participate in Q&As following the 7:30 PM shows on Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, as well as the 3:10 PM show on Sunday, July 5.

Joynt, a professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria, is also an acclaimed documentarian usually focusing on transgender history, in films like No Ordinary Man and Framing Agnes. Here, he gets to chronicle history in real-time: a personal “first” like the others implied in the title. Sarah McBride looked to be the first trans woman elected to Congress in the same year – 2024 – in which she also anticipated the first Black female president, who would have been the first president of South Asian descent as well. That McBride won while Kamala Harris lost reveals an electorate more complex than some pundits might have it.

On his official university faculty page, Joynt states that he is often asked, “Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?” He evidently saw a similar dichotomy in McBride, who wanted to run to represent her constituents primarily, but constantly found herself being pushed into representing every transgender American. For her, politics and the personal are intertwined more in her advocacy for affordable health care than her gender – her husband, a trans man, died of cancer at the age of 28, mere days after they got married.

Through much of the film Joynt’s cameras focus closely on McBride’s face as she’s driving her car. The road trips between campaign stops offer a convenient place to talk, but they also capture emotional nuance and convey the sense that she is very much in control of her path and message. Once she is elected, she notably starts taking the train like her mentor Joe Biden, and the visual metaphor is immediate – now she’s being swept along by the currents of government, forced to be one of many passengers rather than a lone driver.

McBride’s home state of Delaware in 2024 already seems like a time and place far removed from our own, a mere two years later. At least from what we see, McBride receives a mostly positive reception as she goes door to door and talks to ordinary people in public. The menace represented by her opponents, pre-election, mostly comes through in threatening signs, and Joynt periodically narrows the aspect ratio, pointedly boxing McBride’s image in, when he intersperses national news footage.

Once she is elected – hardy a spoiler, since she’s in Congress now – a far more deranged response ensues. In the face of such opposition, can McBride maintain her stance of being the patient listener who’ll talk nicely to her political opponents, or become more confrontational as the situation dictates? The movie offers hints, but you can follow along in real life too.

This July 4^th, State of Firsts reminds us that independence is for everyone.

“In following McBride’s campaign, Joynt confidently transitions from the highly stylised modes of his previous works. “ – Pat Mullen, POV.

“McBride’s grace, steadfastness, and perseverance are the stuff of true heroism. Joynt captures this essential moment of LGBTQ+ history with dignity and respect.” – Frank J. Avella, Edge Media Network.

‘Romería’: Carla Simón’s Moving Portrait of Loss, Identity, and Belonging

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the course of three features, Carla Simón has quietly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European cinema. Following her acclaimed debut Summer 1993 and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, the Spanish filmmaker returns with Romería, a deeply personal coming-of-age drama that continues her exploration of family, memory, and the lingering impact of loss.

Catch Romeria in theaters beginning July 1st at the Laemmle Glendale.

The title translates roughly to “pilgrimage,” an apt description for the journey undertaken by Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave home to study filmmaking. Before she can begin that next chapter, however, she must travel to the Galician city of Vigo in search of documents connected to her late father, whose death years earlier left crucial gaps in her understanding of both her family history and herself.

Raised apart from her father’s relatives, Marina arrives as both an outsider and a blood relation. Her extended family welcomes her warmly enough on the surface, inviting her on boat trips, beach outings, and sprawling family gatherings, yet beneath the hospitality lies a more complicated reality. Old wounds remain unhealed, uncomfortable truths have been buried, and differing accounts of the past begin to challenge everything Marina thought she knew about her parents.

Like Simón’s previous work, Romería unfolds through intimate observations rather than dramatic confrontations. The filmmaker has a remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of family life: overlapping conversations around crowded tables, casual moments of affection, and the subtle tensions that emerge when multiple generations inhabit the same space. Yet as Marina pieces together fragments of her family’s history, Romería expands beyond a straightforward search for answers. Her mother’s diaries, camcorder recordings, and the stories told by her relatives create a layered portrait of two people she barely knew, as what begins as a realistic family drama gradually opens into something more lyrical and impressionistic. Simón incorporates dreamlike passages and flashes of imagined memory, allowing the boundaries between history, recollection, and personal mythology to blur. These touches of magical realism give emotional shape to experiences that can never be fully recovered, only reimagined.

Both tender and quietly heartbreaking, Romería confirms Simón’s status as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Drawing from deeply personal material while touching on universal questions of identity and belonging, she has created a film that is at once a family portrait, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the subtle ways that each of us carries the residue of our forebearers.

“Carla Simón’s story of a young woman untangling a web of family secrets cements the filmmaker’s aptitude for naturalism while also marking a bold new step towards magical realism.” – Sophia Satchell-Baeza, British Film Institute

“A kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

The First Artists: Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There are few filmmakers better suited than Werner Herzog to stand before humanity’s oldest known artworks and ask what, exactly, they mean. Across documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog has spent decades pursuing people and places that seem to exist at the fringes of ordinary experience. With Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), he turns his attention backward across tens of thousands of years, descending into the Chauvet Cave in southern France to confront some of the earliest surviving expressions of human imagination.

Catch Cave of Forgotten Dreams in its triumphant return to theaters, shown in 3D from June 5-11th at the Laemmle Glendale.

Discovered in 1994 and ordinarily closed to the public, the Chauvet Cave contains paintings estimated to be more than 30,000 years old: rhinoceroses, horses, lions, bison, mammoths, and other animals sketched across stone walls with astonishing sophistication. Herzog and a tiny film crew were granted rare access to the cave, resulting in a documentary that feels less like a conventional history lesson than an encounter with something profoundly uncanny. The cave becomes, in Herzog’s hands, not merely an archaeological site but a kind of lost cathedral, suspended outside ordinary time.

The decision to film in 3D proves especially inspired. Rather than using the format for spectacle, Herzog employs it to emphasize the contours and textures of the cave walls themselves, revealing how the ancient artists incorporated the natural curvature of the rock into their drawings. The paintings seem almost to move as the camera glides past them, lending weight to Herzog’s suggestion that these images function as a kind of “proto-cinema,” like an attempt to capture motion long before the invention of film itself.

As always, Herzog’s unmistakable narration hovers somewhere between philosophical inquiry, deadpan comedy, and cosmic bewilderment. He approaches the cave with genuine awe, but also with the peculiar curiosity that has long defined his documentaries. As archaeologists, paleontologists, and art historians offer technical insights into the methods and possible meanings behind the paintings, Herzog repeatedly nudges the discussion toward stranger and more existential territory. What does it mean that human beings, so early in recorded history, already felt compelled to create images like these? Were the paintings artistic, spiritual, communal, or something else entirely that modern language cannot adequately describe?

What emerges is not a film interested in providing definitive answers so much as one fascinated by the persistence of mystery itself. Herzog treats the cave less as a puzzle to be solved than as a prototype of that same inclination toward storytelling, symbolism, and image-making that still defines human culture today.

Few documentaries inspire awe quite this naturally. Seen in 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams becomes something increasingly rare: a film that genuinely expands one’s sense of human history, while quietly reminding us how much remains unknowable.

“As usual, human progress gets the sublimely absurd Herzogian treatment.” – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

“The Chauvet cave is a lost cathedral, and Herzog’s film responds with subdued passion to its profound mystery.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Needle, the Noise, the Nineties: ‘Trainspotting’ Turns 30

May 19, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Three decades after its original release, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting remains one of the most electrifying cinematic gut-punches of the 1990s, a film that somehow manages to be hilarious, horrifying, exhilarating, and deeply sad often within the same scene. Returning to theaters for its 30th anniversary fresh off a new 4k restoration, Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s cult novel still feels startlingly alive, retaining the same manic energy and confrontational honesty that made it an instant cultural landmark upon its release in 1996.

Catch Trainspotting on its 30th anniversary tour beginning June 4th at the Laemmle Glendale, Newhall, and NoHo 7.

Set amid the economic stagnation and restless youth culture of Edinburgh, Trainspotting follows Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his circle of friends as they drift through heroin addiction, petty crime, self-destruction, and fleeting attempts at escape. Yet what distinguished the film then, and what continues to distinguish it now, is its refusal to settle into easy moralism. Boyle never romanticizes addiction, but neither does he flatten it into a simple cautionary tale. The film understands the seductive pull of oblivion just as clearly as it does the devastation left in its wake.

Much of that awareness comes from Boyle’s direction, which exploded onto screens with a style that felt entirely novel for its time. Hyperactive editing, surreal visual detours, needle-drop music cues, and fourth-wall-breaking narration combine to plunge viewers directly into Renton’s fractured state of mind. The now-iconic soundtrack, ranging from Iggy Pop to Underworld, became inseparable from the film’s identity, helping transform Trainspotting into not merely a movie but a full-fledged cultural phenomenon.

Watching it today, it is striking how much of Boyle’s later career already seems present here in embryonic form: the propulsive momentum of Slumdog Millionaire, the visceral intensity of 127 Hours, and the restless experimentation that would come to define one of the most eclectic directing careers of the last thirty years. Since Trainspotting, Boyle has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Director, helm the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, and cement himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most energetic and unpredictable filmmakers. But Trainspotting remains, for many, the film most inseparable from his singular artistic identity.

The anniversary arrives at a moment when the story itself is once again evolving, with a stage musical adaptation of Trainspotting set to launch this July in London’s West End, bringing Renton and company back to the city where their story began. That continued reinvention speaks to the film’s enduring resonance across generations. What once felt shocking and immediate has now also become historical: a snapshot of 1990s disaffection that somehow never lost its pulse.

For all its stylization and dark humor, Trainspotting endures because beneath the bravado lies something painfully human. Renton’s famous “Choose Life” monologue lands differently at 30 than it did at 20—not merely as satire, but as the exhausted cry of someone trying, however imperfectly, to imagine the possibility of another kind of existence. So whether it’s your first-ever viewing or a stroll down memory lane, get your tickets now and prepare to be entertained.

The Last Great Maestro: Inside ‘Bernstein’s Wall’

May 19, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There was a time in American culture when a conductor could become something close to a national celebrity: part educator, part activist, part showman, and part mystic. Few embodied that role more completely than Leonard Bernstein, whose larger-than-life presence animated concert halls, television screens, political movements, and Broadway stages alike. Douglas Tirola’s Bernstein’s Wall revisits that extraordinary life not through conventional talking-head retrospection, but almost entirely through archival footage, home movies, and Bernstein’s own words, allowing the composer and conductor to narrate his story at his own impeccable tempo.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Douglas Tirola discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch one of his live post-screening Q&As running May 21-23rd at the Laemmle Glendale, Royal, and Town Center theaters.

Rather than unfolding as a straightforward cradle-to-grave biography, Bernstein’s Wall assembles an impressionistic portrait of a man whose myriad passions—for music, politics, teaching, sociology, and more—were inseparably intertwined. The result feels less like a summary than an attempt to capture the restless energy that made Bernstein such a singular public figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

For audiences primarily familiar with Bernstein as the composer of West Side Story, the film offers a broader look at the figure who became one of the defining cultural personalities of postwar America. Bernstein was not merely a conductor but a communicator, someone who approached classical music with evangelical enthusiasm and a rare ability to make it feel accessible without diminishing its complexity. The documentary’s many clips from his televised lectures and Young People’s Concerts reveal his innate talent for speaking about music with warmth, humor, and genuine conviction, treating audiences not as passive listeners but as treasured participants in something emotionally and spiritually vital.

The film also captures the sheer physical electricity of Bernstein as a performer. Watching him conduct, drenched in sweat and completely consumed by the music, one understands why he inspired such devotion. Tirola repeatedly emphasizes Bernstein’s ability to embody music rather than simply direct it, transforming orchestral performance into a kind of emotional theater all its own.

Bernstein’s Wall also thoughtfully explores the tensions that shaped Bernstein’s personal life, addressing his sexuality with unusual candor while drawing from deeply personal letters that illuminate the emotional strain placed upon his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein’s outspoken activism, too—from civil rights advocacy to antiwar protests—remains central to this portrait of artist-as-advocate, particularly in relation to his now-infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers that inspired Tom Wolfe’s term “radical chic.”

Yet for all its historical scope, Bernstein’s Wall is ultimately less about legacy than vitality, as the film continually returns to Bernstein’s overwhelming appetite for life itself. The result is a moving reminder of a singular artist who believed deeply in the power of music not merely to entertain, but to awaken something larger within us.

“A lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.” – Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“A thoughtfully constructed tribute that lacks neither cultural and political context nor intimate personal perspective.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Culture Vulture: All the World’s a Stage, and These Are Its Players

May 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 four upcoming National Theatre Live presentations, each exploring the intersections of power, identity, ambition, and performance in strikingly different ways:

The Audience (05/16–18)

Returning to cinemas for the first time in over a decade, The Audience offers a rare showcase for Helen Mirren’s celebrated performance as Queen Elizabeth II, reprising the role that earned her both Olivier and Tony Awards. Written by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry, the play imagines the monarch’s private weekly meetings with each of her twelve prime ministers, tracing the shifting political and cultural landscape of modern Britain through conversations held behind closed doors. Elegant, witty, and sharply observed, The Audience stands as a fascinating companion piece to The Crown, which later expanded upon many of the same themes for television.

The Playboy of the Western World (05/30 – 06/01)
Few plays capture the volatility of storytelling quite like John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, this new production stars Nicola Coughlan, Éanna Hardwicke, and Siobhán McSweeney in a story that begins when a mysterious young man arrives in a rural pub claiming to have killed his father. Instead of recoiling, the local community becomes enthralled by him, transforming violence into legend almost overnight. By turns riotously funny and quietly unsettling, the play explores how charisma, fantasy, and social hunger can reshape reality itself.

All My Sons (06/13–15)
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons remains one of the great American dramas precisely because its moral questions never lose their urgency. In visionary director Ivo van Hove’s new staging, the play’s portrait of postwar prosperity becomes newly immediate, exposing the fragile foundations beneath the promise of the American dream. Bryan Cranston leads the production as Joe Keller, a businessman whose financial success masks devastating ethical compromises, alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Paapa Essiedu, and Tom Glynn-Carney. Filmed live from the West End, this production emphasizes the claustrophobic tension simmering beneath family rituals and domestic normalcy, revealing how denial and self-justification can echo across generations.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (06/27–29)
Seduction becomes strategy in Christopher Hampton’s celebrated adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Directed by Marianne Elliott, this new staging stars Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner as the calculating Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, aristocrats who transform romance into a ruthless game of power and humiliation. Set amid the glittering salons of pre-revolutionary France, the play examines the performance of status itself, where every gesture, confession, and flirtation functions as part of a larger social battlefield. Elegant, dangerous, and psychologically incisive, the production highlights why Hampton’s adaptation remains one of the defining theatrical works of the modern era.

Culture Vulture continues to celebrate the unique power of live performance experienced collectively. Whether revisiting history through royal conversations, unraveling moral catastrophe within an American family, or plunging into worlds shaped by seduction and mythmaking, these National Theatre Live presentations bring internationally acclaimed productions directly to Los Angeles audiences, combining the thrill of theatre with the immersive scale and intimacy of cinema. Buy your tickets today and prepare to be wowed!

No Silence, No Sponsors: Amy Goodman and ‘Steal This Story, Please!’

April 15, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

At a moment when the boundaries of journalism feel increasingly unstable, Steal This Story, Please! makes a compelling case for returning to the fundamentals. The documentary follows Amy Goodman across decades of reporting, but it resists the familiar arc of a career retrospective. Instead, it focuses on the daily discipline of the work itself: the persistence required to ask difficult questions, to verify what others would rather obscure, and to keep attention fixed where it is most needed. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin frame their subject not as an outlier, but as a practitioner, someone committed to a method in a media landscape that often rewards speed over substance.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to catch Amy Goodman and co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin discuss their latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it live beginning April 15-17th at the Laemmle NoHo, Royal, and Glendale theaters, kicked off by a series of post-viewing Q&As.

What distinguishes the film is its emphasis on process. Rather than assembling a greatest-hits reel, it lingers on how reporting actually gets made: the calls, the research, the careful construction of segments piece by piece. This attention to labor grounds the film, turning “independent media” from an abstract label into something concrete and observable. Through archival footage and present-day scenes, the documentary collapses time, suggesting that the pressures journalists face—political, corporate, cultural, and more—are less cyclical than continuous.

The portrait that emerges is neither hagiographic nor detached. Goodman’s on-air clarity is paired with glimpses of the toll such work can take: the physical risks of field reporting, the emotional weight of bearing witness, the constant recalibration required to maintain focus in a shifting news environment. Yet the film also makes space for the little moments of humor, collaboration, and shared purpose that sustain such work over time. The newsroom is not presented as a platform for a single voice, but as a collective effort shaped by many hands.

Running beneath it all is a larger argument about what journalism is for. The film challenges the notion that neutrality requires distance, instead suggesting that rigor and empathy can (and perhaps must) coexist. By centering those most affected by policy and power, Goodman’s approach offers a different kind of orientation, one that prioritizes context over spectacle and accountability over access.

If the title carries a note of provocation, the film earns it. Steal This Story, Please! is less concerned with ownership than with circulation, an insistence that information only matters if it continues to move, to be tested, and (ideally) to ripple outward. In that sense, the documentary functions as both portrait and invitation: a reminder that the work of journalism is ongoing, collective, and, at its best, indispensable.

“A profile in courage, presenting Goodman as an unrelenting voice of the voiceless who is never afraid to get arrested or make an enemy in her pursuit of telling her truth.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“Steal This Story, Please!… builds a convincing case for the ability of dogged, courageous reporting to mobilise pressure against injustice and effect change.” – Lee Marshall, Screen Daily

The Art of Taking: Soderbergh’s ‘The Christophers’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a quiet thrill in encountering a late-period film from the great Steven Soderbergh, The Christophers delivers it almost immediately. Set largely within the cluttered confines of a once-great artist’s London home, the film trades spectacle for something knottier and more intimate: a duel of personalities, ideas, and unresolved histories.

Catch The Christophers in theaters beginning April 17th at the Laemmle Monica, NoHo, Town Center, and Glendale locations.

At its center is Julian Sklar, played with ferocious precision by Ian McKellen. A celebrated painter turned cultural relic, Julian has retreated into a self-made mausoleum of past successes and private grudges. McKellen inhabits him as both tyrant and ruin: acerbic, theatrical, and faintly ridiculous, yet never less than human. His performance resists easy sentiment; whatever sympathy he manages to arouse is accomplished in spite of Julian’s relentless abrasiveness, not because of any softening.

The premise initially suggests a familiar caper. Julian’s estranged children, eager to secure their inheritance, recruit Lori Butler, an art restorer who moonlights in forgery, to infiltrate his home and complete a set of unfinished paintings that could be worth a fortune. But the film quickly pivots away from such familiar Soderberghian mechanics and toward something more elusive as what unfolds between Julian and Lori (played by an electric Michaela Coel) is less a traditional con than a prolonged negotiation of identity and authorship.

Soderbergh, working with a script by Ed Solomon, keeps the narrative in constant motion—not through action, but through nonstop reversals of power. Conversations shift, allegiances blur, and what begins as manipulation gradually takes on the contours of recognition. Lori is not merely an intruder in Julian’s world; she is, in certain respects, his reflection. Both are artists stalled in different ways, each confronting the uneasy distance between creation and self-worth.

Formally, the film is deceptively loose. The camera drifts, lingers, and reacts, giving the impression of spontaneity while maintaining a careful sense of rhythm. The confined setting only heightens the sense of volatility, as if any exchange might tip into revelation or collapse. It’s a reminder of how much Soderbergh can do with minimal space when the material gives him something to push off against.

What ultimately distinguishes The Christophers is its preoccupation with legacy—not as a settled inheritance, but as something negotiated in real time. Who owns a work of art? Who gets to define its meaning? And what do we really leave behind: objects, or impressions? These questions animate every scene, giving the film a momentum that extends far beyond its deceptively contained setting. Anchored by two exceptional performances and a script that relishes every turn of the knife, The Christophers is a sharp, engaging showcase for Soderbergh at his most quietly confident.

“The Christophers feels as rich and expansive as anything Soderbergh has ever done.” – Seth Katz, Slant Magazine

“[The Christophers] bats about ideas pertaining to art, commerce, ownership and legacy with dexterous aplomb and boasts two equally superb leads who make the material crackle.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter