Glendale Archives – Page 4 Of 50

A Christmas Harmony: Why Song Sung Blue Is the Season’s Perfect Crowd-Pleaser

December 16, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Arriving on Christmas Day, Song Sung Blue is the kind of theatrical experience that feels tailor-made for the holiday season: warm, generous, and powered by the simple pleasure of shared music. Directed by Craig Brewer, the film blends biography, romance, and performance into a story about second chances and the quiet triumphs that come from believing in yourself as well as one another.

Catch Song Sung Blue in theaters beginning Thursday, December 25th at the Laemmle Glendale, Newhall, Town Center, NoHo, and Claremont to see for yourself why it’s Tish Laemmle’s favorite movie of 2025, a fun fact made even funner by this ringing endorsement of both the film and Laemmle Theatres in general made by iconic filmmaker Baz Luhrmann.

Inspired by a true story, Song Sung Blue follows Mike and Claire Sardina, a Wisconsin couple whose dreams of musical success have dimmed with time. When they form a Neil Diamond tribute band called Lightning & Thunder, what began as a modest idea becomes a lifeline. Through local gigs, long drives, and moments of doubt, the couple reconnects not just with audiences, but with the reasons they fell in love with music—and with each other—in the first place.

Hugh Jackman brings warmth, vulnerability, and charm to Mike, a performer learning to reclaim his voice after years of disillusionment. Opposite him, Kate Hudson gives one of her more versatile performances to-date as Claire, infusing the role with optimism, humor, and emotional clarity. Together, they create a portrait of partnership that feels deeply human: messy, supportive, occasionally strained, but ultimately resilient. The supporting cast—highlighted by Michael Imperioli, Fisher Stevens, and Jim Belushi—adds texture and humor to the world surrounding the band.

Music, however, is the film’s connective tissue. Songs like “Sweet Caroline” and “Cherry, Cherry” are woven naturally into the narrative, not as spectacle but as compelling expressions of longing, joy, and perseverance. Brewer’s direction resists gloss in favor of sincerity, allowing the actors’ performances to unfold with intimacy and ease. Rather than chasing the highs of overnight success, Song Sung Blue finds its emotional payoff in the smaller victories: the applause of a local crowd, the harmony between two voices, and the triumph of simply being seen.

As a Christmas theater-going experience, Song Sung Blue hits a rare sweet spot. It’s uplifting without being sentimental, musical without being flashy, and rooted in the belief that it’s never too late to rediscover one’s purpose. Perfect for audiences looking to close out the year with something heartfelt and communal, the film reminds us that joy often arrives not with fireworks, but with a familiar song sung together and at just the right moment.

“A family movie in the best sense of the term, a crowd-pleaser with a ton of heart.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“Let-it-rip acting with the fussiness burned off.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“If the right Diamond song at the right time can turn you into mush, you’re likely to find that Brewer’s film is capable of tugging on the same heartstrings.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

Resurrection: Inside Bi Gan’s Cinematic Dreamscape

December 9, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

With Resurrection, Bi Gan delivers one of the boldest and most ambitious films of 2025, a hallucinatory odyssey that blurs time, memory, and what it means to be human. Emerging from the festival circuit with notable buzz and a reputation for eliciting polarized reactions, the film asks audiences to surrender to its own shifting realities, promising a unique cinematic experience for those willing to go along for the ride.

Catch Resurrection in theaters beginning December 11th at the Laemmle Royal and December 14th at the Laemmle Glendale, with post-showing Q&As with director Bi Gan following the 7:10 p.m. showing on Saturday the 13th, the 4 p.m. show on the 14th (at the Royal), and both the 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. shows at Glendale on the 14th.

In Resurrection, humanity has traded its ability to dream for immortality. Only one man—an enigma known only as the “Fantasmer,” portrayed by Jackson Yee—continues to dream. His journey propels us through various eras of Chinese history, from silent-film-era tableaux to the turbulence of war, from stylized noir to near-futuristic club scenes. Alongside him, Shu Qi plays a figure from the present who becomes entangled in his visions. Together, they traverse an uncertain landscape where dreams and reality collide, and where cinema becomes the medium for resurrection itself.

Bi Gan builds Resurrection as a kaleidoscopic collage rather than following a traditional narrative. Chapters flit by, each done in its own style: gothic horror, dreamlike fantasy, gritty noir, romantic tragedy, and beyond, each new iteration shifting tone, genre, and even logic itself. Ultimately, the film is less a story than a meditation on history, memory, identity, and the cinematic act. Period-specific cinematography, color palettes, and soundscapes dissolve into one another; time feels elastic, uncanny, haunted. The direction suggests that history isn’t linear, but rather layered, fragmented, haunted by what’s remembered as well as what’s repressed.

That boldness has divided viewers. Some hail the film as a triumph, a vividly realized vision of cinema in all its possibilities, and a sensory experience that stretches the imagination. Others find the abstraction disorienting, the emotional core elusive, or the structure too slippery for narrative comfort. Even among its admirers, there’s a clinging sense that Resurrection demands patience—or better yet, submission to its dream logic.

Still, for fans of experimental cinema, Resurrection feels like a return to something all-too-rare: an audacious and immersive cinematic odyssey that’s unafraid to wander through memory and myth. It isn’t a film to understand so much as feel, one that continues to resonate long after the credits have faded.

For those willing to take the leap, Resurrection poses a haunting question: What if cinema could resurrect not just images, but forgotten dreams? What if memory and desire, when filtered through light and sound, could transcend time? Resurrection doesn’t supply its own answers, but it does offer something even rarer: a place to dream again.

“A marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

La Grazia: Sorrentino’s Quiet Reckoning with Power and Conscience

December 2, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This winter, Paolo Sorrentino returns with a film that trades some of his usual baroque excesses for a more pared-back, reflective tone. La Grazia, which opened the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, follows Mariano De Santis, an aging Italian president played by Toni Servillo, as he confronts a cluster of moral dilemmas in what increasingly feels like the final stretch of his public life. The film is less about political theater, however, than about the interior weather of a man whose decisions will echo far beyond his lifetime.

Catch La Grazia in theaters beginning December 12th at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale.

Servillo gives a performance that folds restraint into thunder. He embodies a figure who has been both admired and mocked, nicknamed “reinforced concrete” for his resolute public persona, yet now hesitates in private. Mariano must weigh whether to sign a bill legalizing euthanasia, he must decide on clemency petitions for men convicted of killing their partners, and he wrestles with a decades-old suspicion about his late wife’s fidelity. These are not simple plot devices but moral fulcrums that expose what power leaves behind in the chambers of the self.

Sorrentino’s camerawork here is unusually intimate. Where his earlier films luxuriated in spectacle, La Grazia presents more subtly. At times, the director allows a whisper of the surreal—a gaggle of policemen humoring a president’s joke, a rain-soaked banquet that slips into the uncanny—but mostly he leans into silence and the slow erosion of certainty. The result is a meditation on conscience rather than a polemic about institutions.

What makes La Grazia especially compelling is how it links public choices to private loss. Mariano’s deliberations are haunted by grief and a stubborn loyalty to principle; the final refuge of a man who has spent a lifetime making hard judgments and is forced, at the end, to reckon with the consequences.

In the end, La Grazia is neither an easy dismissal of political life nor a blind exaltation of following one’s conscience. It is, instead, a film that asks what grace looks like when measured against law, tradition, and love. Sorrentino frames no tidy answers; he simply enlarges the questions, and in so doing paints a picture of an office whose decisions are at once juridical and profoundly human.

For viewers who appreciate films that interrogate the emotional cost of leadership, Sorrentino’s latest is a modest but resonant triumph: a film that listens, and then lingers in the mind.

“Paolo Sorrentino has rediscovered his voice, his wan humour and his flair for the surreal… a welcome reassertion of his natural style.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“The beauty of the script is the way the turbulent thoughts of De Santis’ past… feed into his most important final responsibilities and his state of mind as he steps away from his seat of power.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Sing Out, Sing Proud: Laemmle’s Christmas Eve Fiddler on the Roof Sing-Along Returns

November 19, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

For many, Christmas Eve brings rituals of light, warmth, and gathering. And at Laemmle Theatres, one of our most cherished traditions is a celebration of all of those things—in song, in community, and in the spirited, big-hearted world of Fiddler on the Roof. This year, we’re thrilled to bring back our annual Fiddler on the Roof Sing-Along, playing the evening of December 24th at the Laemmle NoHo, Newhall, Claremont, and Glendale, and with both matinee AND evening showings at the Royal and Town Center. Get your tickets while you still can!

Whether you’ve been joining us for years or will be stepping into Anatevka for the very first time, the invitation remains the same: Come lift your voice, lean into the music, and share in a night that honors joy, resilience, and the freedom to celebrate together.

Norman Jewison’s 1971 classic, adapted from the long-running Broadway musical, remains one of the most beloved works of American cinema. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye and His Daughters,” the film follows Tevye the milkman—played with iconic warmth and humor by Topol—as he navigates tradition, change, and the unruly love stories of his five daughters in a quaint Russian village at the turn of the 20th century.

The film’s emotional range is extraordinary: exuberant one moment, aching the next. “TRADITION” explodes with communal energy; “IF I WERE A RICH MAN” turns longing into musical ecstasy; “SUNRISE, SUNSET” captures the fleeting nature of time; “ANATEVKA” balances sorrow with wry endurance. These songs do more than entertain: they hold memory, identity, and cultural inheritance inside their melodies.

And, in the shared space of a sing-along, their meaning only deepens. There’s something almost sacred about hundreds of voices rising together in laughter, lament, and love.

Laemmle’s Christmas Eve Fiddler tradition began as an affirmation, a celebration of the freedom to gather openly, joyfully, and Jewishly at a time of year when many in earlier generations felt they had to retreat from view. In light of history (as well as events ongoing today), coming together to sing feels not just festive, but vital.

This event has always been more than a screening. It’s community theater meets holiday catharsis: an evening where people dress as their favorite characters, lean fully into their off-key harmonies, and rediscover the beauty of cultural expression shared in public. Children, grandparents, longtime fans, first-timers—All are welcome in this communal chorus.

So come ready to sing at the top of your lungs, or simply to enjoy the joyful noise around you. Costumes are enthusiastically encouraged. Families are warmly invited; the film is rated G, though some themes may be complex for young children.

And remember: Fiddler sells out every year. If tradition teaches us anything, it’s not to wait for a miracle—so grab your tickets early.

Bearing Witness: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

November 11, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona craft a documentary of haunting immediacy. Through more than 200 days of video calls, the film charts Hassona’s life under siege in Gaza from 2024–25, capturing the everyday resilience of a young photojournalist who insists on maintaining her ideals even as bombs fall and hope frays.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Farsi discuss her revolutionary project with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its impending run at the Laemmle Monica and Glendale theaters beginning November 14th.

The filmmaking is itself quietly radical. Farsi, barred from Gaza, connects remotely via smartphone, creating a frame-within-a-frame aesthetic that reflects the imposed distances and filtered visibility of war. Critics have noted the film’s stripped-back style (mostly buffer-laden FaceTime footage, interrupted calls, and pixelated images) that tastes of unmediated reality and sorrow, making the viewer feel even more intimately involved in the events being depicted on the screen.

Through it all, Fatma Hassona emerges as the film’s beating heart: always cheerful, even when surrounded by rubble, shortage, and grief. She shares her world with a quiet strength and surprising humor, discussing photography, music, and the simple joy of eating chips while bombs echo outside. Yet in April 2025, mere weeks after the film was selected for Cannes’ prestigious ACID sidebar, Hassona and several members of her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Her death casts a permanent shadow over the documentary, leaving behind a chilling statement about what it costs to look.

For all its opportunity, the documentary refuses easy distance or objective coldness. Instead, it lingers on the interruptions—the frozen frames, the dropped calls, the unedited glitches—so that viewers can feel even a shred of what it means to live under siege. It asks what form seeing takes when the camera, the connection, and even one’s body are all vulnerable. And though the film documents devastation, it refuses to devolve into either reductionism or the fetishization of victimhood; after all, Hassona is not a number. She is smiling, stubbornly alive, a human face among many, and the film dutifully preserves her voice.

For viewers drawn to documentaries that fuse intimacy and urgency, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk stands as a testament not just to loss, but to persistence. Perhaps its greatest superpower lies in juxtaposing life’s ordinary moments—calls about electricity, photos shared with friends abroad—with the extraordinary circumstances that turn them into daring acts.

“A moving monument to this young woman and countless others like her—lovers of life who refused to be quiet as they were swept into the dehumanizing machinery of war.” – Eli Friedberg, Slant Magazine

“Farsi’s film does not necessarily expose the morbid reality of Gaza as much as it reveals what it would be like to survive through it.” – Akash Despande, High On Films

“[The film] exudes character from every frame.” – Landon Defever, In Session Film

Nouvelle Vague: Linklater’s Love Letter to the French New Wave

October 28, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

With Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater turns his lens on one of cinema’s most electrifying moments: the birth of the French New Wave, inviting us to observe how a revolution in filmmaking quietly came to life. Shot in French, in black-and-white, and in a boxy 4:3 frame, the film brings back the heady Paris days of 1959, when Jean-Luc Godard and his Cahiers du Cinéma peers set out to reinvent cinema itself—and, against all odds, actually succeeded.

Come experience Nouvelle Vague in theaters, beginning Friday, October 31st at the Laemmle Royal, Claremont, Glendale, and NoHo 7.

Rather than dramatizing the legendary finished product À bout de souffle [Breathless], Linklater focuses on the process of its creation. We watch Godard pitch his radical proposal to a skeptical producer, assemble a cast of willing conspirators, and wrestle with the chaos of what develops when limited means meets infinite ambition. The film unfolds in cafés, cramped apartments, and dim cutting rooms, where ideas collide faster than film stock can capture them.

Linklater’s directorial approach is both affectionate and incisive. He recreates the textures of the period with meticulous care—grainy cinematography, reel-change marks, and jittery hand-held movement—but his real interest lies in unpacking the spirit of risk that defined the New Wave. Yet Nouvelle Vague doesn’t attempt to imitate Godard’s jump-cuts or anarchic cool; instead, it channels something closer to Truffaut’s warmth and curiosity; that tender belief in cinema as both laboratory and love affair.

Among the cast, Guillaume Marbeck’s Godard and Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg both ground and fortify the film’s emotional backbone. Marbeck faithfully captures Godard in all his restlessness and self-doubt, while Deutch lends Seberg an air of grace and melancholy, embodying the paradox of a star who feels both essential and expendable in someone else’s vision. Their uneasy rapport becomes the heart of the film, as a portrait of two artists suspended between devotion and doubt.

While Nouvelle Vague may lack the raw insurgency of its inspiration, it triumphs as a thoughtful and exuberant reflection on the act of creation itself. Beneath its wry humor and intelligence runs a current of affection for those who dare to see life as cinema, and cinema as life. In the end, it is a film that reminds us of why movies matter: not because they preserve the past, but because they keep it perpetually alive.

“It’s a savory pleasure to be able to step into this time machine and luxuriate in the company of people who thought that movies were the only thing that mattered.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“A cinephile’s film through and through.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“A slick Steadicam ride through a historic, tumultuous moment.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Art of the Slow Heist: Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind

October 21, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

In The Mastermind, acclaimed filmmaker Kelly Reichardt ventures into the familiar terrain of the heist movie… and then quietly rewrites its rules. Set in early 1970s Massachusetts, the film follows Josh O’Connor as J.B. Mooney, a once-aspiring architect turned husband and amateur criminal who hatches a plan to steal abstract paintings from a local art museum. But this isn’t Ocean’s Eleven: the glamour is stripped away, the stakes feel muted, and the aftermath is as mild and inconspicuous as the heist itself.

Catch The Mastermind in theaters beginning Friday, October 24th at the Laemmle Glendale, Town Center, Monica, Claremont, and NoHo 7.

Reichardt, whose past work has often focused on the imperceptible leaps of its lead characters—on a road trip, in a forest, in a lapsed mechanic’s shop, etc.—now applies that same contemplative lens to a genre whose mechanics have traditionally demanded speed and spectacle. She directs the film with her signature minimalism: restraint in gesture, economy in dialogue, and an eye trained on the void behind ambition for ambition’s sake. As in Showing Up and First Cow, the roar of a larger world remains just off-screen, yet its presence is felt in every muffled scene or stray whorl of cigarette smoke.

What distinguishes The Mastermind is that the so-called heist barely registers as its focus. The robbery unfolds almost incidentally, stripped of both glamour and tension. Instead, Reichardt lingers on the quiet details: the faint clink of museum glass being lifted, the awkward thud of stolen chairs crammed into a car, the weary stillness of J.B. returning home, where he drifts through the world of his judge father and socialite mother like an unmoored ship, steered by forces outside his reckoning. The film’s true intrigue lies not in the crime, but in its aftermath; the emotional debris left behind once that initial thrill has already faded.

O’Connor delivers an unexpectedly subdued performance. His J.B. has zero swagger, simply a quiet entitlement and a suggestion that he deserves something for nothing. Surrounding him are rich supporting performances from Alana Haim (his wife), Bill Camp (his father), and Hope Davis (his mother), each anchoring the film’s emotional weight without stepping into melodrama. Reichardt’s long-time cinematographer Chris Blauvelt and composer Rob Mazurek combine to deliver a vintage jazz score, each sax note and 16-mm texture suggesting more than what’s actually shown.

If The Mastermind feels slow, starved of the genre’s usual arrests, explosions, and triumphant escapes, that’s precisely the point. Reichardt aims to observe a man who planned to rob a museum and ultimately robbed himself. What remains is the humdrum tragicomedy of a life unraveling. And yet, in its stillness, the film finds its own power exploring such ideas as privilege, desperation, and craft hovering in the background of a genre made for thrill.

“A masterclass in the director’s own unique philosophical take on life.” – Amelia Harvey, ThatHashtagShow.com

“Reichardt has unerringly located the unglamour in the heist.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Painting Change: Inside the Uplifting World of Artfully United

October 14, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

More than a decade in the making, Artfully United traces the work of Mike Norice, a Los Angeles muralist whose expansive, colorful pieces are not just art, but acts of reclamation in neighborhoods too often shut out from visibility and voice.

Catch Artfully United in theaters beginning October 17th at the Laemmle Glendale, highlighted by an in-person Q&A with both Mike Norice and producer Christopher Walters following the 7:45pm showing, moderated by radio personality Tammi Mac.

Chris Walters first met Norice thirteen years ago in the latter’s boutique on Melrose Avenue, an encounter that ignited a collaboration and a creative mission that would persist across time, geography, and mutual adversity. Together with director Dave Benner, Walters follows Norice from his roots in Watts through dozens of cross-country trips and prolonged mural projects, capturing not only the final painted walls but the sweat, doubt, and resolve that underlies each stroke.

Rooted as much in quiet reflection as in sweeping public murals, the film traces how Norice’s life shaped his art, from a childhood marked by a teacher mother and an incarcerated father to the spiritual and communal values that serve as guideposts in the creation of art that feels both profoundly personal and powerfully collective. Each mural becomes a gathering place, a message, and a mirror—echoes of hope, defiance, and renewal painted across the city’s worn walls.

Visually, Artfully United doesn’t shy away from spectacle. Murals tower and sprawl, color bursts through grime, and entire city blocks become open-air galleries. But the film also balances those sweeping images with moments of presence and proximity: Norice selecting his palette, a neighbor’s quiet response to a newly finished mural, hands smeared with paint beneath a muted dusk light. These smaller moments anchor the film emotionally, reminding us that transformation is not only seen, but felt.

Walters has called the journey “the experience of a lifetime,” crediting Norice’s artwork, activism, and faith for inspiring communities in Los Angeles and beyond. When the credits roll, viewers will recognize that Norice’s murals are more than just decorations; they are living gestures of solidarity, symbols of what art can be when it reaches beyond aesthetics into the realm of belonging.

Ultimately, Artfully United is more than a portrait of its artist. It is a meditation on place, loss, renewal, and how visual creativity can become a force for collective healing, demonstrating how much stronger spirits can become when we prioritize beauty in the unlikeliest of places.

“A powerful documentary about art, transformation, and the enduring strength of community.” – Jon Stojan, LA Weekly