Glendale Archives – Page 2 Of 50

François Ozon’s Cool, Unsettling ‘The Stranger’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean to bring The Stranger—a novel defined by absence, detachment, and interiority—into a medium built on appearances? In his new adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, François Ozon approaches that challenge not by radically reimagining the text, but by making its silences visible. The result is a film that feels at once faithful and interpretive, attuned to both the enduring power of Camus’s text and the historical context it left largely unspoken.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Ozon discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning April 10th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

Set in 1930s Algiers under French colonial rule, the film follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a clerk whose emotional detachment shapes every aspect of his life. He receives news of his mother’s death with little visible reaction, carrying out the rituals of mourning with a kind of mechanical precision. In Ozon’s retelling, it’s as if Meursault has only just arrived in the world at that moment: unformed, unmoored, and curiously untouched by the social expectations that surround him.

That sense of dislocation extends into his relationships. He begins an affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), responds to her questions with indifference, and drifts into the orbit of his volatile neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault rarely initiates; he responds. Yet this passivity proves deceptive as he repeatedly declines to perform basic gestures that would mark him as a passable member of society while simultaneously slipping into patterns of behavior that align him with its ugliest assumptions.

Ozon captures this tension with remarkable precision. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film emphasizes texture and physical sensation: sunlight on skin, the rhythm of breath, the weight of heat pressing down on bodies. These tactile details root us in Meursault’s immediate experience even as his inner life remains opaque. Voisin’s performance is key here: controlled, watchful, and withholding, he becomes a figure defined as much by what he doesn’t express as by what he does.

At the same time, Ozon subtly expands the frame of Camus’ story. Where the novel treats its colonial setting as a given, the film foregrounds it, allowing the social and political tensions of French Algeria to register more clearly. The people who exist at the margins of Meursault’s awareness take on a greater presence, not through overt revision but through subtle shifts in emphasis. The result is a quiet but meaningful rebalancing, one that reframes Meursault’s indifference as something shaped not only by temperament but by environment.

As perhaps the quintessential work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger endures not because it offers answers, but because it resists them. Ozon’s adaptation honors that resistance, even as it invites us to look more closely at the world surrounding it, and at what it means to move through that world without fully engaging with it.

“The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“Ozon’s The Stranger keeps the spirit of its source material alive as a timeless warning in a modern world of stark polarization, ongoing colonialism, and plenty of Meursaults ignoring the suffering of others.” – Monica Castillo, The AV Club

Babysitting the Void: Stalled Adulthood in ‘Fantasy Life.’

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is the kind of modest, perceptive character piece that sneaks up on you: initially breezy, even familiar, before revealing a deeper ache beneath its carefully arranged surfaces. A lightly comic drama about stalled adulthood and second acts, Fantasy Life centers on Sam (Shear), an anxious, recently laid-off paralegal whose life has quietly collapsed. Through a combination of desperation and social proximity, Sam takes a babysitting job for a wealthy, creatively inclined couple, David and Dianne, and finds himself drawn into their fragile domestic ecosystem.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Matthew Shear discuss his directorial debut with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it at the Laemmle Royal, NoHo, Glendale, or Town Center theaters beginning April 3rd.

The premise has the makings of farce, but the film resists easy escalation. Instead, Shear builds a tone of low-key, accumulating discomfort, where every interaction feels slightly off-balance. Sam’s crippling anxiety isn’t played for charm; it’s awkward, limiting, and at times frighteningly disruptive. Yet it also becomes the unlikely bridge between him and Dianne, a former actress who now drifts through her own life with a kind of numbed disillusionment. Their connection—tentative, intimate, and ethically precarious—forms the film’s emotional core, less a conventional romance than a mutual recognition between two people who feel they’ve missed their moment.

It’s here that Amanda Peet delivers what many have called a career-best turn. As Dianne, she is at once brittle and luminous, exuding the residual magnetism of someone who once commanded attention while allowing the cracks in that persona to show. There’s no vanity in her performance: Peet leans entirely into Dianne’s dissatisfaction and flashes of need, and the result is both funny and devastating. In the context of Peet’s long absence from major film roles, the performance carries an added resonance; a meta-textual echo of the character’s own sidelined career. That poignancy deepens further given Peet’s recently disclosed breast cancer diagnosis, lending her return an added layer of vulnerability that subtly accentuates the film’s themes of resilience and reinvention.

Shear, pulling from a historied lineage of New York-based neurotic comedies, crafts dialogue that feels lived-in and unforced, with a sharp ear for the rhythms of privileged but emotionally adrift lives. The ensemble, anchored by Alessandro Nivola’s charmingly self-involved musician, creates a dense social web where everyone seems both deeply connected and fundamentally alone. The stakes are, on paper, relatively small, but Shear understands that for his characters, these life developments and emotional entanglements feel seismic. Ultimately, the film is less about dramatic transformation than about the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day, and the uneasy realization that those stories might be all we have.

In that sense, Fantasy Life more than lives up to its title. It’s about the gap between the lives we imagine and the ones we inhabit, and the strange, fleeting moments when those two begin, however imperfectly, to overlap.

“Shear eloquently portrays the ways that near-misses can still feel like cataclysmic life events.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The kind of quiet film about life’s little moments, insecurities, and challenges that we rarely see… Peet reminds us that she is a bona fide star.” – Phil Walsh, Geek Vibes Nation

Only ‘Yes!’: Inside Nadav Lapid’s Existential Howl

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a unifying impulse in Nadav Lapid’s cinema, it’s refusal: refusal of comfort, of distance, and of the idea that art can stand apart from the conditions that produce it. In Yes!, his most confrontational film to date, that refusal takes on a new intensity. What begins in manic, almost grotesque satire gradually reveals itself as something closer to an existential reckoning, a film less interested in persuading its audience than in exhausting it.

Catch Yes! in theaters beginning April 2nd at the Laemmle Glendale.

Set in the aftermath of October 7th, Yes! centers on Y, a pianist living in Tel Aviv with his wife and their young child. They are ambitious, affectionate, and acutely attuned to the possibilities of upward mobility. Their strategy is simple: ingratiate themselves with powerful individuals. Moving through parties, performances, and private gatherings, they attach themselves to a network of political, military, and cultural elites, saying “yes” to every opportunity, every demand, every unspoken expectation.

Lapid renders this ascent in a style that is deliberately overwhelming. The film’s early passages unfold in a rush of movement and noise: faces contort, bodies thrash, images veer toward the surreal. Satire here is neither cool nor distancing but feverish, almost desperate. Moments of comedy land uneasily, often collapsing into something more abrasive. The effect is one of constant destabilization, as though the film itself were struggling to contain its own anger.

At the center of it all is Ariel Bronz’s Y, a figure defined by his almost-superhuman capacity for acquiescence. He absorbs the rhetoric around him without question, reshaping himself to fit the expectations of those in power. His ambition—to be seen, to succeed, to matter—drives him forward, even as it erodes any stable sense of self. What Lapid tracks, with increasing severity, is not a moral awakening but the consequences of its absence. Y does not so much choose a path as slide into it, one “yes” at a time.

What distinguishes Yes! is its refusal to offer release. Lapid does not build toward catharsis, nor does he grant his characters the dignity of clear transformation. Instead, he circles a more troubling idea: that complicity is rarely dramatic, rarely declared, but incremental, shaped by small concessions that accumulate over time.

The lingering effect of Yes! is less the shock of its imagery than the persistence of its central idea. Lapid’s film doesn’t argue so much as confront, exploring what it means to live alongside catastrophe, to filter it, to rationalize it, or simply to keep moving. The answers remain unresolved, but the implication is clear enough: indifference is not a neutral position.

“You can hear the rage behind the laughter in Israeli satire Yes… [Lapid] almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A whirling, maximalist satire… Exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Deliriously provocative, a veritable orgy of self-loathing.” – David Ehrlich, Indiewire

Law as Labyrinth: Loznitsa’s ‘Two Prosecutors’

March 25, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors is less a historical drama than a slow descent into a meticulously ordered nightmare. Set in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, the film follows a young, newly promoted prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), whose belief in the integrity of the Soviet legal system has not yet been eroded by experience. So when a blood-written letter alleging systemic torture and fabricated charges from a political prisoner crosses his desk, Kornyev does something both admirable and, in this world, dangerously naïve: he takes it seriously.

Catch filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa for a series of live Q&As regarding his latest work following the 7 p.m. showing at the Laemmle Glendale on March 24th or the Laemmle Royal on March 26-27th.

Kornyev’s journey begins in Bryansk, where Loznitsa immediately establishes the film’s governing logic: obstruction not through force, but through delay. Doors remain closed, officials are perpetually “unavailable,” and requests are met with polite deflection. Kornyev merely waits, wielding his patience as a bureaucratic weapon. When he finally gains access to the prisoner, Stepnyak (Aleksandr Filippenko), the encounter is shocking not only for the man’s physical deterioration but for the clarity of his accusations. A former legal mind himself, Stepnyak describes a system that has turned inward, devouring its own architects in order to sustain the illusion of order. Convinced this must be an isolated case of local corruption rather than a structural reality, Kornyev travels to Moscow to bring the case to higher authorities, placing his faith in the idea that somewhere, at the top, justice still exists.

Loznitsa, whose background in documentary filmmaking informs his rigorously controlled style, stages much of Two Prosecutors in long, static takes that deny the audience conventional emotional cues. The camera rarely moves; instead, dread accumulates within the frame. Offices, corridors, and waiting rooms become indistinguishable from prison cells, suggesting that confinement is not a matter of walls but of systems. Even moments of apparent absurdity—a talkative stranger on a train, an encounter with a man too frightened to move—carry a disquieting sense of design, as though every interaction is part of an invisible web closing around Kornyev.

Though rooted in Stalinist history and adapted from a suppressed work by dissident writer and gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, Two Prosecutors resonates far beyond its period setting. Loznitsa is not simply reconstructing the past, but mapping the anatomy of authoritarian logic, where procedure replaces morality and complicity is cultivated through cynicism and inertia.

By the time Kornyev begins to understand the true nature of the system he has appealed to, the film has already made its devastating point. This is not a story about whether justice will prevail, but about how long one can believe in it once the evidence proves otherwise.

“A very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“[A] compelling, meticulous, mordantly relevant historical drama.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Running on Empty: Compassion and Crisis in ‘Late Shift’

March 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

When Late Shift premiered in 2025, it quickly established itself as a gripping portrait of life inside an overburdened healthcare system. Now returning to theaters for an expanded run, Petra Volpe’s propulsive hospital drama offers audiences another chance to experience one of the year’s most quietly intense character studies.

Catch Late Shift beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

At the center of the film is Leonie Benesch, an actor who has developed a reputation for portraying capable professionals under extreme duress. After her acclaimed performance in The Teachers’ Lounge—which earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature—and memorable roles in September 5 and The Crown, Benesch once again plays a woman trying to maintain her composure in an environment that threatens to overwhelm her.

In Late Shift, she is Floria, a single mother and dedicated nurse beginning a long night in the surgical ward of a Zurich hospital. The film unfolds almost entirely over the course of one exhausting shift. From the moment Floria pulls on her blue scrubs and steps onto the floor, the pace is relentless. The ward is understaffed, one colleague has called in sick, and the list of patients requiring attention seems endless.

Volpe structures the film as a breathless procession of urgent tasks and interruptions. Floria rushes through corridors, checks charts, administers medication, and tries to keep dozens of patients calm while juggling the demands of doctors, relatives, and a nervous trainee nurse.

The film’s tension comes not from a single dramatic crisis but from the constant accumulation of small ones: An elderly man awaits test results from an overbooked doctor; a patient’s medication allergy threatens to slip through the cracks in the rush of rounds; a terminally ill woman’s worried sons demand updates that Floria scarcely has time to give. Every encounter matters, and every minute lost with one patient means someone else must wait.

Volpe captures this controlled chaos with brisk, fluid filmmaking that keeps the camera close to Floria as she moves through the hospital’s sterile corridors. The effect is immersive: viewers experience the shift as she does, racing from one urgent call to the next with barely a moment to breathe, faithfully mirroring the rhythms of hospital life, where emotional highs and lows arrive in rapid succession.

Amid this constant motion, Benesch gives a performance of remarkable control. Floria is compassionate and efficient, but the strain is always visible just beneath the surface. In small gestures—a weary pause in the hallway, a flicker of frustration when another demand arrives—Benesch reveals the human cost of a job that requires endless patience and emotional endurance.

Returning to theaters for a second go, Late Shift remains a tense, empathetic reminder of the unseen labor that keeps hospitals running, and of the quiet heroism that’s required to endure it.

“Benesch could be cornering the market in tough, competent, hardworking young women doing their best in a stressful situation.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Perhaps the slickest example yet of [Volpe’s] mainstream but character-oriented storytelling sensibility.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

A Summer of Echoes: ‘Miroirs No. 3’ and the Art of Starting Over

March 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Christian Petzold has long been one of Europe’s most distinctive filmmakers, crafting coolly precise dramas wherein ordinary settings conceal deep emotional fault lines. In his latest film, Miroirs No. 3, a chance encounter on a quiet country road sets off a moving tale about grief, identity, and the strange ways people try to begin again.

Catch Miroirs No. 3 in theaters beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, or from March 27th at the Glendale or Town Center 5.

The film opens with Laura (Paula Beer), a piano student in Berlin who seems adrift even before tragedy strikes. After reluctantly accompanying her boyfriend Jakob on a weekend trip out of the city, she asks to turn back almost as soon as they set out. What follows is sudden and violent: a car crash that leaves Jakob dead and Laura, miraculously, alive. Shaken and disoriented, she is taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a middle-aged woman who witnessed the accident and lives nearby in a modest rural home.

Rather than heading to a hospital, however, Laura asks if she can stay with Betty while she convalesces. The arrangement is unexpected but quietly welcomed. In the days that follow, Laura drifts into Betty’s daily routines: helping paint a fence, working in the garden, preparing meals in the kitchen. Freed from the pressures of her former life, she appears almost relieved to inhabit this temporary refuge.

Yet Petzold’s films rarely settle for simple emotional recovery, as subtle signs suggest that Betty’s generosity is tied to deeper wounds of her own. Her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a nearby auto repair shop, seem wary of Laura’s presence. Their unease hints at unresolved family tensions and a past loss that still reverberates through the household.

Visually, Miroirs No. 3 carries the director’s familiar elegance. Shot in natural light by Petzold’s longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm, the Brandenburg countryside becomes a place both serene and uneasy, where summer warmth never quite dispels the lingering chill of grief.

At the center of it all is Paula Beer, continuing her remarkable collaboration with Petzold. Her performance balances opacity with vulnerability, making Laura both enigmatic and deeply human. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Miroirs No. 3 is less about solving a mystery than about watching people tentatively reshape themselves after suffering a loss.

Quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant, the film offers another example of Petzold’s penchant for uncovering profundity within the smallest moments of everyday life.

“A compact, masterful film, with affecting performances.” – Dustin Chang, Screen Anarchy

“A quietly haunting domestic drama that remains cloistered in its pastoral setting.” – Brad Hanford, Slant Magazine

‘Charliebird’: When the Music Doesn’t Fix Everything

March 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

How do you make space for joy inside a children’s hospital? In Charliebird, winner of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival’s US Narrative Feature Prize, the answer is neither grand nor sentimental. It’s a ukulele carried from room to room, a pop song request taken seriously, or a willingness to sit beside someone who doesn’t feel like singing.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Libby Ewing discuss her new hit film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see Ewing, lead actors Samantha Smart and Gabrielle Ochoa Perez, and production designer Emily Li participate in live Q&As following the film’s one-night stay at the Laemmle Royal on March 5th, or to kick off its theatrical run at Glendale beginning March 6-8th.

Charliebird centers on Al (Smart), a music therapist working with seriously ill young patients. Her job description ranges from lullabies for restless five-year-olds to tracking down the right track to coax a guarded teenager into cracking a smile. It’s delicate work—sometimes playful, sometimes devastating—yet the film resists any temptation to frame it as miraculous. Music here doesn’t cure; it connects.

That connection proves hardest to forge with Charlie (Perez), a sharp, funny seventeen-year-old who has spent years in and out of hospitals. Convinced that adults are shielding her from the truth about her condition, Charlie has little patience for forced cheer. What unfolds between her and Al is not a tidy inspirational arc but a gradual, hard-earned friendship. They talk about sex and regret, about fear and boredom, about the awkwardness of being young in a body that won’t cooperate. Their conversations are by turns irreverent and raw, sidestepping clichés about generational divides or saintly caregivers.

The film’s power lies in that restraint. Rather than building toward sweeping melodrama, Charliebird offers glimpses: a Snow White costume that doesn’t quite land, a hospital corridor that feels too narrow, a moment of laughter that catches both women off guard. Cinematographer Luca Del Puppo shoots in an unusual, vertically compressed frame that at first feels constricted, then intimate, as though we’re being invited into a private space. This visual approach mirrors the story itself: focused, uncluttered, attentive to faces.

Smart’s performance as Al reveals a woman whose devotion to her patients coexists with her own unresolved struggles. Perez, meanwhile, delivers a breakout turn, allowing Charlie’s sarcasm to soften into vulnerability without losing her edge.

Ewing makes bold choices in the film’s second half, embracing ambiguity instead of easy answers. Not every question is resolved. Not every outcome is spelled out. The film trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty—much as its characters must.

Ultimately, Charliebird argues for the value of presence over perfection. It suggests that even when one’s circumstances can’t be changed, a shared joke, an honest confession, or a song played slightly off-key can resonate the longest.

“An emotional roller coaster that will inspire viewers to cherish every day.” – Thomas Duffy, Film Book

“A simple, elegant look at friendship and finality.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Every year, the Oscar-nominated short films deliver some of the boldest storytelling, the biggest emotional swings, and the most inventive filmmaking anywhere on the ballot. They’re compact, adventurous, and often unforgettable — and seeing them before the ceremony doesn’t just make you a more informed viewer; it gives you a real edge in our ongoing Oscar contest. If you want a competitive advantage (and bragging rights), the shorts are your secret weapon.

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter — “Retirement Plan”

Come see the 2026 slate of Oscar-nominated shorts beginning February 20th at various Laemmle locations.

This year’s nominees across the Animated, Live Action, and Documentary categories once again prove that small runtimes can deliver enormous impacts. After all, we love short things: short stories, short ribs, short naps, short lines at the concession stand — and yes, short films.

Animated Short Film Nominees

This year’s entries for animation range from historical to mythic to darkly funny:

Butterfly (France) paints the life of Olympic swimmer Alfred Nakache—from glory to Auschwitz and back again—as a flowing stream of memory.
Forevergreen (USA) delivers an eco-fable about an orphaned bear cub and its arboreal protector.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Canada) offers a haunting, handcrafted tale of love, sorrow, and avarice.
Retirement Plan (Ireland) brings wry humor to a man’s elaborate fantasies about his golden years.
The Three Sisters (Israel/Cyprus) unfolds wordlessly, following siblings surviving in isolation.

Live Action Short Film Nominees

The live-action lineup is especially wide-ranging this year as satire, dystopia, tenderness, and social tension all share the same stage:

Butcher’s Stain (Israel) centers on an Arab-Israeli supermarket worker accused of tearing down hostage posters at his workplace.
Jane Austen’s Period Drama (USA) is an Austen-inspired satire about a woman whose sudden menstruation interrupts her much-anticipated marriage proposal.
Two People Exchanging Saliva (France/USA) imagines a future where kissing is punishable by death.
A Friend of Dorothy (UK) follows a lonely widow whose routine is broken by an unexpected connection.
The Singers (USA) builds drama around an unlikely sing-off, inspired by Turgenev’s lauded short story.

Documentary Short Film Nominees

The documentary shorts continue to be a testing ground for urgent, personal, and formally daring nonfiction:

All the Empty Rooms depicts the profound grief of school shootings via the untouched bedrooms of its victims.
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud honors the life, career, and death of an American journalist killed in Ukraine.
Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” follows Israeli peace activists holding silent vigils in Tel Aviv for slain Gazan children.
The Devil Is Busy chronicles the day-to-day operations of a reproductive health clinic post-Roe v. Wade.
Perfectly a Strangeness follows three donkeys exploring an abandoned observatory.

Previous short-film winners have gone on to become cultural touchstones and launch major careers, and they frequently preview themes and talents that shape the future of feature filmmaking. Watching them now isn’t just homework — it’s discovery.