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Tickets for THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, Almodóvar’s first English-language film, go on sale on Friday.

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On December 20th we are opening Pedro Almodóvar’s first movie in English, The Room Next Door, at the Royal. We’ll bring it to Claremont, Glendale, Newhall, North Hollywood, and Encino in January. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as two friends who reconnect after decades apart and embark on an unusual new phase of their friendship. Writing in Time Magazine, Stephanie Zacharek describes how “the colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.”

 

“The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“In these intensely moving moments it feels as if the two artists — [James] Joyce and Almodóvar — are connecting across time, desperate to express the ineffable, and keen to capture a creative moment that honours both the living and the dead.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times

“The Room Next Door turns into something spiky, unnerving, and at times joyously silly.” ~ Leo Robson, New Statesman

Almodóvar, Moore, and Swinton spoke about the film over the weekend at a Deadline Contenders panel discussion. “It’s wonderful. He really honors the female experience,” said Moore. “I think it’s something that he talks about, sitting under the kitchen table when his mother was talking to her friends and absorbing those stories and how powerful they were, and understanding that point of view. I think he’s always in that feminine point of view. Like I said, he honors that world. You feel very, very seen as an actor when you work with Pedro.”

“I’m a very dull or heady director,” said Almodóvar. “I say to the actors many, many, many things, and what I learned about these two is that perhaps I don’t need to say so much information to the actors. There was one very important [scene of Moore reading] the letter at the end. For me, it was very important. I was almost crying when I talked to her and I said, ‘Well, Julianne, this is what I want for this letter.’ [She] said, ‘Pedro, please let me do it, and after that, you give me all the indications.’ And she was right. When she just read it, I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t intervene, but it was more than perfect. So I learned by then that perhaps I don’t need to tell them so many things to the actors.”

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE ~ new podcast episode with Professor Ross Melnick on the 100th anniversary of Arthouse Cinema.

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The newest episode of Inside the Arthouse just dropped and it’s a fascinating one. Hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge discuss the centenary of arthouse film with professor, historian, author and Academy Film Scholar Ross Melnick. It’s a lively conversation about the amazing history of arthouse film — Where it started, how far it’s come, and where is it today. Laemmle, third generation arthouse theater owner, adds his perspective, as the trio explores the last century considers the future of arthouse.

Here’s a taste from the beginning of their conversation:

ROSS MELNICK:  The history of arthouse theaters is about a hundred years old.  It really starts around 1925 with Simon Gould and the film guild and the beginning of what were then called “little cinemas.”  So the little cinemas grew out of what was called the “little theaters.”  Little theaters were performing arts theaters across the country.  There were almost 5000 of them.

RAPHAEL SBARGE:  Like vaudeville, kind of?

ROSS MELNICK:  No, actually, literally for performing arts.  For plays and performances that were avant-garde, experimental, off of the…mainstream.  And there’s a growing movement in the ’20s to kind of push away from mainstream narratives and create theaters, legitimate theaters, that were for live performances.  This is across the country.  And so, inspired by little theaters, little cinemas grew, sometimes even in previously legitimate houses, to start showing films that were also experimental, avant-garde and, in this case, often foreign.  They were sort of growing out of an interest in foreign films and if you — with the risk of boring you, let me take you back just a few years earlier, which is that World War I happens between ’14 and ’18.  And when it’s over there’s a huge anti-German sentiment in the United States.

GREG LAEMMLE:  Massive.

ROSS MELNICK:  Massive, to say the least.  And no one wants to show German films.  The only person that’s willing to show a German film is himself a German-American.  A guy named Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, who most people know as Roxy and who, of course, is the person who created Radio City Music Hall.  He founded it.  He ran the Roxy, the Capitol, the Strand, the Rialto, the Rivoli.  All the major movie houses or many of the major movie houses in New York were run by Roxy.  And when Roxy, underneath Samuel Goldywn — we’ll come back to Samuel Goldywn and later we’ll talk about a different company that his progeny ran — but when Roxy ran the Capitol Theater, he was really interested in this movie called Madame Du Barry.  It’s an Ernst Lubitch film.  1919.  Roxy saw it and said, “I’m going to bring this movie here.”  And he took that nine-reel film, and he cut it to six.  He made new inter-titles…and he released it as Passion.  The Capitol Theater in New York was 5,300 seats.

RAPHAEL SBARGE:  Oh, my God.

ROSS MELNICK:  So it’s the largest theater in the United States.  It was also a trade industry darling…and Roxy was running it and thought, “I’m going to bring this film.”  So it broke the unofficial German boycott, the anti-German boycott, and suddenly there was this massive hit of a foreign film.

Watch the whole conversation here:

Steve McQueen’s masterful BLITZ opens Friday.

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Tomorrow we open Blitz, the latest film English filmmaker Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave, Occupied City), at the Claremont, Glendale, Monica Film Center, Newhall, and Town Center. Starring Saoirse Ronan, it follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing in World War II. Top film critics have been singing its praises:

“McQueen—a director who understands we can only look forward by looking back—gives us a new lens through which to examine WWII in this masterful film.” ~ Emily Zemler, Observer

“I’ve been to whole film festivals with less cinema than Steve McQueen packs into just two hours.” ~ William Bibbiani, TheWrap

“The quiet puncturing of the myth of WWII solidarity on the homefront feels nearly as visceral a shock to the system… It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times

“Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

“Blitz, while not exactly a movie for children, is nonetheless a story about a child, and it has powerful moments of wonderment, humor and even joy.” ~ Justin Chang, NPR

“Arguably the most heroic character in the film is the city. And Blitz is, instantly, one of the great “London Movies.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times (UK)

“I went into solitude with the book by myself for a couple of months actually. I color-coded every page in different areas.” ~ THE OUTRUN filmmaker on bringing the memoir to the screen.

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Adapted from the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot, The Outrun follows a young Scotswoman (the always-fantastic Saoirse Ronan) as she returns to the wild beauty of her native Orkney Islands hoping to come to terms with her past and heal after living life on the edge in London. The director/co-writer Nora Fingscheidt sat for an in-depth interview with Filmmaker Magazine in which she details her process — from writing the screenplay with Liptrot, to working with Ronan, as well as the director of photography, editor, and sound designers. An excerpt:

Filmmaker: Because addiction is a sensitive subject matter and in this case, it’s your co-writer Amy Liptrot’s real life, I am wondering what sort of responsibility you felt in telling this true story. How did you collaborate with her on the page and elsewhere? How did you approach her story?

Fingscheidt: It’s a very challenging book to translate into a film because it is so personal and internal; much of it is about memory. But what makes it so beautiful is Amy’s thought process about the world. And I thought the film needed to be really nerdy in a way [especially when it came to her environmental pursuits]. So I pitched this approach to both Amy and our producers. And then I went into solitude with the book by myself for a couple of months actually. I color-coded every page in different areas. There is childhood, music, London, Orkney, sound elements, facts about the world… And then I went through it again and put all the little moments that I thought have to be in the film on different cards and arranged them. Then I wrote a treatment.

 

And from that moment on, we started to collaborate really closely. Amy read every version, and we spent hours on Zoom. She isn’t a celebrity who’s used to having their life portrayed. And her parents are there in the story. So I felt that I had to include her and protect her at the same time. Every decision that we made for the adaptation in changing, fictionalizing or dramatizing things, we made together. One of the first things we did is change her name to have a healthy creative distance. Amy suggested Rona, which is the name of a Scottish island. Saoirse loved it—it’s almost like Ronan. And it also has Nora in it. And it is the island behind the horizon when Amy was sitting on the outrun. So the character name was a mixture of the three of us.

Filmmaker: Did Saoirse spend time with Amy in crafting her performance, or did she approach it more freely to not do an impersonation?

Fingscheidt: Very early on she asked me, “Do you want me to sound like Amy?” Because Saoirse is Irish, we knew she would have to take on another accent. And we said, please don’t try and sound like Amy. Find your own voice, your own interpretation of Rona. That gave her a lot of liberty. She is a very physical actor, so she took quite a while preparing with a London choreographer, Wayne McGregor, whom she has worked with before. They worked a lot on how Rona moves: when she’s with her parents, when she’s happy-drunk or messy-drunk or trying to hide it; when she’s in a good mood or when she loses control. She also worked with a dialogue coach to get into this talk process. That physicality, the voice, and then the experiences like helping deliver lambs on the farm that we did at the pre-shoot helped her get into the bones and guts of Rona’s character.

We’re excited to open The Outrun on October 4 at the Royal, NoHo, Town Center, and Newhall.

“It’s a period look and feel that has to be alive, dirty, real, not glossy and polished and polite.” Ian McKellen stars in THE CRITIC.

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In his latest movie, The Critic, Ian McKellen plays a powerful London theater critic who lures a struggling actress into a blackmail scheme with deadly consequences. Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, and Lesley Manville co-star. We open the film on September 13 at the Laemmle Claremont, Newhall, and Town Center.

Director Anand Tucker wrote this about the film:

The Critic is an astonishingly contemporary piece of work, speaking directly to our time and condition. Set in the 30’s, a period of similar febrile upheaval and intensity to our present, with old certainties falling away, and the rise of the right and its instinct-based politics triumphing over rationalism and science, it is the story of an outsider trapped in the vice of events bigger than himself. It holds a mirror up to our time now.

As a British outsider myself — Indian father, German mother, child of Empire — I connected with Jimmy Erskine’s struggle for survival, for his voice, his identity in the face of monolithic ‘English’ (read white Heterosexual) culture and norms. His story is incredibly dark, surprising and moving.

Yet it is a much bigger and more elemental story than just politics. It asks questions of the nature of art and creativity, of ambition and desire. It has at its heart a thrillingly dark Faustian pact, a beautifully interconnected web of relationships that explode as a result of that pact, and ends as a meditation on the entire experience of being human, with all our flaws, our terrible choices and their consequences on display. Above all, it’s sublimely written and supremely entertaining.

My aim as Director is to bring Patrick’s script to life in the most immediate and visceral way possible. I want to deliver on the period promise without the period standing in the way, distancing one’s experience. It’s a period look and feel that has to be alive, dirty, real, not glossy
and polished and polite.

The camera will turn the world of this London — from mysterious, dark and dangerous Soho to the elevated privilege of the Country House — into a searching journey. We will probe and move and explore the faces set against these most British of Landscapes.

We will find the Dark Light that shines out of this world to shoot in, unexpected and dazzling. Above all we have a wonderful cast- and their performances are the most important element, their faces the ultimate Landscapes. – ANAND TUCKER

The “spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy” BETWEEN THE TEMPLES is charming critics and audiences.

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The new comedy Between the Temples, starring Jason Schwartzman as a troubled cantor who finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher (a never-better Carol Kane) re-enters his life as his adult Bat Mitzvah student, is living up to the hype and bringing audiences into theaters. Peruse this sampling of the catalyst for the film’s success, critics’ reviews:

“A spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy about a grief-stricken cantor who loses his voice, only to find that he’s surrounded by a chorus of well-intentioned people who are happy to speak for him.” ~ David Ehrlich, indieWire

“We get the sense that Silver would be perfectly happy just sitting there and watching these people forever, story and conflict and resolution be damned. And it really is in these characters’ close exchanges that the movie comes to life.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

“Both stars — romantic leads with character actor cred — have the power to be funny and heartbreaking simultaneously, and their unique chemistry drives the film’s craziness and humanity.” ~ Thelma Adams, AARP Movies for Grownups

“Between the Temples emerges as a quirky and effective showcase for two actors known for playing oddball characters. Kane and Schwartzman bounce off each other so well that their work alone makes the film worth seeing.” ~ Odie Henderson, Boston Globe

“The relationship that unfolds, with shades of Harold and Maude, is honest and unsparing, as well as being blatantly Freudian.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times

“The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Schwartzman is very affecting as a perplexed, tragicomic galoot and Kane is a marvel.” ~ Jonathan Romney, Financial Times

“Shot wanly on film in wintertime, Between the Temples takes a while to reveal its depths – its linguistic wit, its cockeyed humor and compassion, how it can modulate from deadpan-slapstick to achingly poignant and still feel authentic in both keys.” ~ Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle

“With both misery and comedy, director Nathan Silver satisfyingly captures the Jewish experience.” ~ Joey Shapiro, Chicago Reader

“The real attraction here is the interplay between the two leads, which makes Between the Temples sing.” ~ Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

Dropping Today: The First Episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

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Introducing the new video podcast Inside the Arthouse. Hosted by Greg Laemmle, President of Laemmle Theatres, and actor and Emmy award-winning director Raphael Sbarge, Inside the Arthouse is an insider’s perspective on filmmakers and the people responsible for the movies showing on arthouse screens across the U.S.

Episode 101: Merchant Ivory: A Conversation with Stephen Soucy is now live everywhere you get your podcasts.

Laemmle Theatres opens Merchant Ivory this Friday at the Royal/West L.A. and Town Center/Encino. In his Hollywood Reporter review, David Rooney wrote of the film, “anyone with a fondness for…what might be described as a gentlemen guerrilla filmmaking operation will find immense pleasure here.” Merchant Ivory director Stephen Soucy will do in-person Q&As following the 7 PM screenings at the Royal on August 30 and 31. Film critic David Ansen will moderate the Q&A on the 30th.

Learn more about Inside the Arthouse at Insidethearthouse.com.

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Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge Launch New Video Podcast INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

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Greg Laemmle, President of Laemmle Theaters, along with actor and Emmy Award-winning director Raphael Sbarge, are launching a new  Video Podcast called INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE. The show is dedicated to highlighting new  releases, repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and the key personalities who bring movies to the big screen. INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will be filmed and recorded at the Laemmle Royal Theatre, the 100-year-old theater that has been operated by three generations of Laemmles for the past half century.  

Laemmle says, “My family has been dedicated to providing a home for independent, foreign and documentary film for almost a century, and we have decided to launch INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE in order to promote the release of new films that will ultimately play in arthouses all across the country.” 

“Our interviews will be recorded in person or via Zoom, with filmmakers appearing large on  the screen,” says Sbarge, an independent filmmaker himself. “Opening a movie in theaters requires all the support they can get, and INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, is dedicated to the  celebration of seeing films in theaters.” 

Their first guests include Stephen Soucy, the director of MERCHANT IVORY, a documentary about art house mainstays Ismail Merchant and James Ivory; the Golden Lion-winning director of the Swedish film PARADISE IS BURNING, Mika Gustafson; the writer and director  of PREY FOR ROCK AND ROLL, Cheri Lovedog and Alex Steyermark, re-released in theaters via Kino Lorber, for their 20th anniversary; and the co-directors of the new documentary UNION, out of the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals, Brett Story and Steven Main.

In subsequent episodes – initially to be released every two weeks – INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will focus on new releases and repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and  personalities who are responsible for bringing movies to the big screen. The first episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will premiere on August 28, 2024. The show can be found on  YouTube and all major podcast platforms. For more information, visit www.insidethearthouse.com!