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The beautifully acted late-life romance MY SAILOR, MY LOVE opens Friday.

September 20, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

This Friday we’re pleased to open a touching and charming Irish indie film My Sailor, My Love. It follows Howard (James Cosmo), a widowed sailor living alone on the coast of Ireland and struggling to care for himself. His daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), hires Annie (Bríd Brennan) to help out around the house. Though Howard initially rejects this imposition, Annie’s charm and gentle care win him over, and the two fall in love. Annie’s large and loving family welcomes Howard into their lives, but these new relationships only serve to illuminate the depth of pain and hurt between Howard and Grace, who is facing challenges of her own. Grace’s resentment tears at Howard and Annie’s otherwise idyllic seaside love story. This windswept drama deftly balances a universal family saga with a tender and timeless romance. We open My Sailor, My Love this Friday at the Town Center, Monica Film Center and Claremont with Saturday and Sunday morning screenings at our Newhall theater.

Critics around the world have been writing about the acting. The film’s director, acclaimed Finnish filmmaker Klaus Härö, said this about his experiences working with the actors:

“The cast has been an immense joy, from the moment the roles were confirmed and when we first went on set. I would often sit very close by to the actors and get to witness what goes into their work, which left me very impressed. Sometimes when I looked around, I could see the emotions brought to surface after a take. Someone might have tears in their eyes, or the crew might burst into applause after a scene. This isn’t very common on a movie set, and it might even seem unprofessional in a way. The atmosphere at the set has been exceptional, and the actors left a very strong imprint on the whole crew.”

“Sharp writing, subtle acting, and a winning Irish setting. My Sailor, My Love will play to any nation where humans struggle to make themselves understood.” – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times

“A quiet yet profoundly powerful feature, aching in emotional sophistication and depth. Cosmo and Brennan are divine.” – Andrew Murray, The Upcoming

“A lovely indie. Klaus Härö’s gentle and special family drama has much more at play than rote tear-jerking. Magnificently shot and acted. Sailor is filled with sage wisdom and vulnerable people struggling to do the best that they can even when they are at their worst.” – Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“Prepare to be moved.” – Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer to Nail

National Silent Movie Day: See Restored Classic THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD September 27.

September 20, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

In honor of Silent Movie Day, we are presenting screenings of Irving Cummings’ THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD (1926), a pioneering disaster and special effects movie, starring Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien. A highlight of this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the film has been restored with a lush musical soundtrack by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. We are screening the film September 27 only at our Royal, Glendale, Claremont and Newhall theaters.

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD re-creates one of the greatest disasters in American history, when, in 1889, over 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, lost their lives. In her first major role, Gaynor plays a teenage girl smitten with dashing engineer O’Brien, whose pleadings about the imminent collapse of the local dam are ignored. It’s up to Gaynor to ride through the streets à la Paul Revere to warn the townspeople of the imminent disaster. After 97 years, the movie’s flood sequence is still a pre-CGI marvel of optical effects, matte paintings, and miniatures.

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD has been newly restored in 4K by The Film Preserve, Ltd. and The Maltese Film Works, from 35mm elements preserved at George Eastman Museum. Noted preservationists Robert Harris and James Mockoski (archivist for Francis Ford Coppola) worked on the restoration.

Academy Award winners and film scholars Ben Burtt (sound designer of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more) and Craig Barron (visual effects supervisor for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Batman Returns, and more), have recorded a 30-minute illustrated conversation deconstructing the movie’s visual effects, that will be screened following the feature.

Oscar-winner NOWHERE IN AFRICA 20th anniversary screenings September 20.

September 6, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 20th anniversary screenings of the Academy-Award winning film NOWHERE IN AFRICA as the next entry in the Anniversary Abroad Series of notable international films. (Following our September 13 screening of SOYLENT GREEN at the Royal with special guest Leigh Taylor-Young.) Coinciding with the High Holidays, NOWHERE IN AFRICA is about a German Jewish refugee family relocating to Kenya to escape the Nazis just before the outbreak of WWII, will play for one night only, September 20 at four Laemmle locations (Royal, Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall).

The Foreign Language Film (AKA International) Oscar winner in 2003, based on the autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, was adapted for the screen by writer-director Caroline Link, who had been previously nominated in the same category for her 1996 film Beyond Silence. The story concerns the Redlich family, Walter (Mirab Ninidze), his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler), and their daughter Regina (Lea Kurka as younger, Karoline Eckertz as older) who flee Nazi persecution in Germany in 1938. Walter leaves behind his law profession and becomes the manager of a British-owned farm in Kenya. While his nine-year-old daughter Regina takes to her new African life, his snobbish wife Jettel has difficulty with the family’s reduced status. They are attended by their Kenyan cook Owuor (beautifully played by Sidede Onyulo), who offers an African perspective to the tale. With the outbreak of WWII, the family is interned by the British along with all German citizens, an ironic twist since they had fled Germany to avoid such a fate in their homeland. The war and their plight put even more pressure on the strained relationship of Walter and Jettel, with Regina (now a teenager) caught in the middle.

Admiration from critics of the day included assessments from Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who said the film was, “laced with poignancy, conflict, urgency, and compassion.” Roger Ebert praised Link for her “interest in good stories and vivid, well-defined characters.” Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune cited it as “a lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.” Rita Kempley in the Washington Post called it a “consistently absorbing family saga that is primarily a safari of the soul.” Newsweek’s David Ansen noted, “an absorbing tale of cultural displacement. It’s also a remarkable, complex examination of a marriage…with its lush cinematography and lush score, (it) has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.” Some critics even called it perfect Oscar bait at the time, and the Academy members agreed, rewarding it with the Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Laemmle Theatres joining the second National Cinema Day, bringing America’s day at the movies to L.A. this Sunday, August 27.

August 23, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres is excited to partner with the Cinema Foundation to celebrate the second annual National Cinema Day this Sunday, August 27th.

All seven Laemmle venues will be participating in the one-day event, which celebrates the power of movies to bring us all together, and discounted admissions for all movies in all formats (including Premium Large Format screens) will be no more than $4. What’s more, we’re discounting our fresh popcorn: $2 small, $4 medium and $6 large.

To celebrate the day, choose from any of our movies, including new films opening this weekend like Golda, The Owners, Love Life, Bella! This Woman’s Place is in the House, Mutt, or King Coal. Or catch a newly restored modern classic like Oldboy. Haven’t yet seen box office phenomena Barbie or Oppenheimer? Now you can see them as they were meant to be seen, on a big screen, and for cheap!

For more details, visit NationalCinemaDay.org. Join friends, families, and communities of moviegoers at a Laemmle theater near you.

“A Deeply Human Experience You’ll Never Have on Your Couch” ~ The New York Times on BARBENHEIMER and the power and importance of the theatrical experience.

August 2, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Seeing a movie from your sofa is convenient and pleasant but watching the same film in public takes it from passive consumption to active experience. Funny, frightening, sexy, exciting, awesome movies are 100 times funnier, scarier, sexier and more exciting when seen in public. Being in a theater with strangers allow a frisson that you just do not get at home. The laughter that Barbie elicits and the awe, fear and terror that Oppenheimer elicits make this perfectly clear.

The New York Times just posted a terrific piece about this that articulates this beautifully. It’s by the writer Mark Jacobson.

“For a moment, at least, the Barbenheimer phenomenon brought back the sensation of the movie theater as a semi-sacred public place, a space where we congregate to have an experience, made all the more transcendent by having it together.”

Here’s how it starts:

“It seemed like a miracle. The Cobble Hill Cinemas, a neighborhood joint that opened in the 1920s as the Lido and that served for decades as a venue for B-movie action films, was packed on what would ordinarily be a dead Monday night — and without a single La-Z-Boy recliner, goat cheese pizza or other modern enticement in sight. I was there with 200 or so other patrons, a gloriously mixed crowd, to see Oppenheimer, one-half of the Barbenheimer cultural moment. When the bomb finally went off in the New Mexico desert — this fulcrumatic moment in our species’ history — it was beheld simultaneously, an exhilarating common experience, which is exactly what the movie house is supposed to deliver. In the end, it didn’t matter if you liked the picture or not. What mattered is that we’d seen it together.

“After a few years in which the pandemic and streaming platforms combined to break Americans of their movie theatergoing habits, we’d surged back joyfully, triumphantly, to theaters, producing the fourth biggest domestic weekend of all time. For a moment, it was possible to forget the grim realities that still linger for the cinema business, circling like vultures. The actors’ and writers’ unions (I am a member of the latter) are still on strike with no end in sight. With far fewer products in the pipeline, there won’t be many Barbenheimer-shaped rabbits to pull out of the hat anytime soon. AMC is in trouble. So is Regal, which narrowly avoided having to close its theater in Union Square. On the day before the blockbuster weekend, the Regal UA in Staten Island, one of the last remaining theaters in that borough, closed its doors for good. The 2016 demise of the Ziegfeld means that the largest single-screen theater in Manhattan is now the relatively diminutive 571-seat Paris — which tellingly was saved by and is run by Netflix.

“In the time of streaming and 146-inch TV screens, the simple act of going out to the movies feels contrarian, even subversive. It also feels endangered. That’s grim news, because the beauty of going to the movies was never just about the films on the screens; it was about the way we all gathered to watch them.”

Click here to read the full piece.

30th Anniversary Screenings of Michelle Yeoh’s THE HEROIC TRIO August 9.

July 26, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Before she demonstrated dazzling fight skills in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning spectacle ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,’ and before she became the first Asian performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once,’ Michelle Yeoh demonstrated her action movie skills and commanding presence in THE HEROIC TRIO in 1993. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 30th anniversary screenings of that martial arts extravaganza to remind moviegoers of Yeoh’s stellar history. Screening at the Laemmle Claremont, Newhall, Glendale and Royal.

The actress had been working in Hong Kong cinema for a decade when she co-starred with Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung in this entertaining action film. Yeoh plays Invisible Woman, Mui portrays Wonder Woman, and Cheung depicts Thief Catcher, three women who band together to foil a kidnapping plot devised by the Evil Master (portrayed by Shi-Kwan Yen). Damian Lau co-stars as the police inspector who heads up the official investigation. The picture is directed by Hong Kong cinema veteran Johnnie To.

Variety praised the film as a “flashy kung fu super-heroine adventure full of solid production values.” Tony Rayns, an expert in Asian cinema, wrote for England’s Sight and Sound, “Its design and mise en scene are expansive and occasionally exhilarating.” The San Francisco Examiner called the movie “a ” And the Austin Chronicle added, “’THE HEROIC TRIO is a live-action comic book and captures the quirky spirit and shrewd logic of the medium better than both ‘Batmans’ put together.”

The movie was successful enough to inspire a sequel later that same year, and Yeoh went on to demonstrate her talents in a rich variety of movies, culminating in her Oscar win this past March. Enjoy an early glimpse of her talents in this rarely revived action spectacle made 30 years ago.

The triumphant return of New Deal Tuesdays: $7 tickets all day long.

July 19, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Coinciding with the liberation of the term “Taco Tuesdays” from the clutches of Big Taco, Laemmle Theatres is pleased to bring back our weekly discount program New Deal Tuesdays. We first introduced it during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and although economists are now saying we will probably avoid another economic downturn any time soon, it is always a good time to encourage people to see movies as they were meant to be seen, where they are scientifically proven (research pending) to be 1000% better: in theaters.

For a limited time, we will sell all tickets for all Tuesday afternoon and evening screenings for only seven dollars. (Fine print: the discount only applies to movies we’re screening as part of regular engagements, so that excludes operas and film festivals. But those represent a fraction of the films we show.) This means that if one were to bring six friends or family members to a Laemmle movie on any given Tuesday, said person and their party could all enjoy the flick for only [7 x 7, checks calculator] $49!

What’s more, we are planning Tuesday concessions discounts. Stay tuned to our socials to keep abreast of the developing New Deal Tuesdays tidings. Use laemmle.com/connect as a way to stay connected and get further announcements. And consider enjoying tacos before or after the movies! Tacos, too, are wonderful and affordable.