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Moviegoers, last chance to catch the Oscar nominated films in theatres.

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For cinephiles, there is nothing like awards season, when studios and distributors release their finest films in hopes of garnering rapturous reviews, capturing audiences’ attention, and earning accolades, none more coveted than an Academy Award. The 2021-2022 season comes to a close this Sunday at 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA and on a TV screen near you, but there’s still time to see the nominees. We’re playing the animated and live action shorts at the NoHo and bringing them back to Glendale and we have the documentary shorts on Saturday and Sunday at the Royal.  Some of these films, like THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, PARALLEL MOTHERS, LICORICE PIZZA, DRIVE MY CAR and FLEE, are so good they’re worth seeing twice. On Laemmle Virtual Cinema, see LUNANA and ASCENSION.  All terrific. Enjoy!
Riz Ahmed in Best Live Action Short nominee THE LONG GOODBYE.

Stand with Ukraine through Film: THE GUIDE and Ukraine War relief.

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We all know of the tragedy that is happening in Ukraine because of the Russian invasion.  Thousands of civilians are dying in the streets while as of today 3,000,000 people are fleeing the country.

Film exhibitors around the country want to do their small part. Working with filmmaker Oles Sanin, who is currently in Ukraine, we have banded together to screen his 2014 Ukrainian film The Guide and will donate 100% of the proceeds to help his fellow Ukrainians. We’ll begin screening the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center. The Guide follows an American boy named Peter and and a blind minstrel, Ivan, who are thrown together by fate during the Stalin-perpetrated genocide in 1930s Ukraine.

Here’s the official website: STAND WITH UKRAINE THROUGH FILM

Here is a message from the director that will precede the screenings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ea5wsqA6xI

Here is the film’s trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxoWXxdKSZA

Brevity is the soul of wit: The 2022 Oscar-nominated short films are now playing everywhere.

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This Friday we’ll expand our screenings of the 2022 Oscar-nominated short films — live action, animated and documentary — to almost all our venues so cinephiles from throughout L.A. County and beyond can enjoy them theatrically. Robert Abele of the L.A. Times weighed in on his favorites:

Documentaries: “The Queen of Basketball is a joyous portrait of college legend, breakthrough Olympian, and only ever female NBA draftee Lusia “Lucy” Harris, a gifted athlete without a professional league of her own. Harris died in January, but here she’s a wry chronicler of her underappreciated majesty, making Queen a fitting film obituary. Matt Ogens’ percussively energized, heartfelt Audible takes us into the tightknit huddle of high schoolers in the successful football program at the Maryland School for the Deaf, their Big Game preparation a poignant metaphor for the feelings of pride, loss and community that make them different from, but also no different than, any teenager facing an uncertain world…Looking back on a childhood choice (and seizing on a wild coincidence) is the province of veteran experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s When We Were Bullies, a wonderfully intimate, collage-styled reckoning with memory, hurt and the ethics of storytelling.”

From WHEN WE WERE BULLIES. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Live action: “The nerviest conscience buster is Aneil Karia’s The Long Goodbye, a companion film to actor/rapper Riz Ahmed’s same-named album. He plays one of many members of a large British-South Asian family in a bustling house preparing for a wedding until a violent reality intrudes, leading to a wall-breaking rap about race, history and nationalism that Ahmed delivers like a frontline soliloquy. On the more Black Mirror end of things is KD Davila’s Kafkaesque satire Please Hold, which fuses our blind fascination with all things contactless, online and privatized with our inability to reform a byzantine justice system, following it to a not-too-far-off conclusion for someone like innocent Latino 20-something Mateo (Erick Lopez).”

From PLEASE HOLD. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Animation: “Lives marred by cruelty factor into the hand-drawn Boxballet and stop-motion Bestia. The former, from Anton Dyakov, brings together a hulking, banged-up pugilist and an up-and-coming ballerina for a wordless-but-not-soundless meeting of sensitive souls. The latter is Chilean animator Hugo Covarrubias’ slow-burning, textural glimpse — set during the country’s military dictatorship — of the corrosive duality in a policewoman’s daily life with her dog, her body and her demons. The eerie airlessness of the dollhouse-like settings and the porcelain shine on the puppets are memorably unsettling.’

From BESTIA.

“Influential designer/animator Alberto Mielgo, who sparked the aesthetic of Into the Spider-Verse, is another wizard with texture and visual depth. His meditative The Windshield Wiper poses the question “What is love?” to a man in a café, then seeks clues in a series of vignettes with couples around the world. Mielgo’s urbanized hybrid of the painterly and the digitized is hypnotic and its own example of an artist’s love.’

From THE WINDSHIELD WIPER.

“British animator Joanna Quinn’s enthusiasm for the wiggly expressiveness of traditional animation, meanwhile, makes her latest romp starring middle-aged feminist factory worker Beryl, Affairs of the Art, a raucous delight. (The last Beryl short was in 2006.) Now hellbent on becoming a “hyperfuturist artiste,” drawing-obsessed Beryl (voiced as ever by Menna Trussler) relays a family history of sibling rivalry, imperiled pets, morbid curiosities and eccentric tastes, while Quinn’s masterful caricatures and love of bulbous bodies in motion would make Da Vinci blush, laugh and be jealous simultaneously. Drawing becomes riotously, beautifully alive in Quinn’s vaudeville of aging and anatomy, but so does the wonderfully personal message delivered through her never-too-late-to-try heroine: There’s power in passion, whenever it strikes you in life.”

From AFFAIRS OF THE ART.

Please note that the animated shorts are not MPAA rated but if they were they’d likely receive an R or NC-17 rating. Only adults will be admitted.

https://vimeo.com/678295462/7a10ce4892

The Top Ten Films of 2021 contest results are in.

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Filmmakers managed to create some amazing cinema during the beginning of the pandemic, as our Top Ten Contest results below attest. Heavyweights like Campion, P.T. Anderson, Spielberg, Almodóvar, and Villeneuve delivered, as did younger filmmakers like Hamaguchi and Ducournau.
We assigned each level a point value (1st choice = 10 points, 2nd choice = 9 points, and so on). Based on the results of that calculation, Laemmle moviegoers loved:
Nightmare Alley was a close 11th place. No one had an exact match to this list. In fact, even though Licorice Pizza was number one in terms of points, it was picked as number one only three times. It just happened to be somewhere on everyone’s list. Our point system does favor the more “popular” films since they are likely to have been seen by the most people. Had we used different metrics, where we listed the most common film in each category, #1 would be Drive My Car as it was the film most frequently chosen as the number one choice and The Power of the Dog would be the second most frequent number one pick. Licorice Pizza would be tops in category #2, #4, & #6, and probably tops in other categories too.
We will announce three randomly chosen contest winners on this page soon. We’ll send each of them 10 passes, good at any of our theaters and watch.laemmle.com.

“Beautiful…timely” new documentary about Laemmle Theatres ‘Only in Theatres’ premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

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The new documentary about Laemmle Theatres, ONLY IN THEATERS, was begun just before the pandemic began and completed last year. It recounts the company’s history and features interviews with all the surviving players as they face the seismic changes in the film exhibition industry. The family members behind this multigenerational business—whose sole mission has been to support the art of film—remain determined to see it survive, despite enormous challenges. From the festival program:

“Laemmle Theaters, the beloved L.A. art house cinema chain, has an astonishing legacy with ties to the origins of Hollywood. This is a story about a family business and their determination to survive in the face of headlines that question the future of movie theaters. For more than 84 years and through three generations, this family’s personal mission has been to elevate the art of films and the artists who make them.”

ONLY IN THEATRES premieres this Saturday night at the prestigious Santa Barbara International Film Festival. There is a second screening on Monday, March 7. Programming Director Claudia Puig was quoted in the L.A. Times today calling it “a beautiful film, and a timely one.”

Follow the film on Facebook for updates on future screenings at https://www.facebook.com/onlyintheaters and check out the trailer:

https://vimeo.com/547583876

Moviegoing safely.

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     The Washington Post published a good article by their chief film critic Ann Hornaday last week headlined “Is it safe? In the movie theater business, the question is how much to promise older audiences.” One of the public health experts quoted is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who thinks that “for people who are fully vaccinated, watching a movie in a theater while keeping a tightfitting N95 mask on the entire time (i.e. no sipping soda or nibbling popcorn) is among the safest group indoor activities they can have.”
     According to the L.A. County Health Department, test positivity rate has been plummeting. While it is too soon to say that the pandemic is over, it does appear that the Omicron surge has basically passed in L.A. Our seven-day average test positivity rate is at 2.56%, which is as low as its been since November of last year. L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said last week that “we do anticipate that if we have these continued steep declines in cases, which indicate lower transmission, we will be able to safely lift indoor masking mandates in mid-to-late March.” In the meantime, this week the Health Department announced a partial roll-back of the mask mandate. Fully vaccinated people who show proof may go without masks while visiting indoor businesses. Additionally, we will continue to allow our patrons extra space and breathing room by not selling adjacent seats to different parties and we keep our HVAC systems in excellent condition, regularly changing the filters. People can still choose to stay masked indoors as a way to help increase their personal safety — experts say one-way masking works. If you’re vaccinated, boosted, and wearing an N95, you’re protected, no matter what others are doing. What’s more, because of the availability of rapid home testing, instances of asymptomatic spread are increasingly rare.
     All of which is to say that it is relatively safe to go to the movies and it is now urgent for L.A. cinephiles to show up. Distributors of arthouse films need to see results or we risk losing something precious, the chance to experience truly brilliant, challenging, foreign and/or independent cinema as it was intended to be seen. Are you a movie lover who appreciates how integral public moviegoing is to cinema and everything cinema is? From the Post piece:
     “For Leana Wen, a physician and public health professor at George Washington University, the decision of whether to go back to theaters comes down to three factors: individual medical circumstances, risk tolerance and how highly one values going out to see a movie. “For some people, going to the movies was not something they particularly enjoyed, and therefore it’s something they don’t miss,” she says. “On the other hand, there are some individuals for whom it may be close to an essential activity, it’s such an important part of life.”

Moviegoers, start your guesses: The Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest has begun.

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The Oscar nominations are out, and in spite of the fact that Bradley Cooper was robbed of one and possibly even two nominations, it’s time for our Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest! Correctly guess how the Academy will vote and win movie passes good at all Laemmle venues and Laemmle Virtual Cinema.

Oscar Update: Contests, KStew, Sleepers from India and Bhutan, Plus Doc, Animated and Live Action Shorts!

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It’s Oscar nomination week which means it’s time for our Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest! Correctly guess how the Academy will vote and win movie passes good at all Laemmle venues and Laemmle Virtual Cinema.
Plus, there’s still time to win Laemmle passes by telling us your favorite ten films of 2021. That contest ends February 21.
Oscar nominations mean we’re almost ready to start screening the perennially popular Oscar-nominated shorts. We’ll open the documentaries February 25 at the Royal with other venues TBD. We’re planning to open the animated and live action shorts at the Claremont, Newhall, Playhouse, Town Center, NoHo and Monica Film Center, exact dates TBA.

Please note: this year neither the animated nor live action short programs are appropriate for children.

We have many other brilliant Oscar nominees on screen now, including Best International Film nominee Lunana and multiple nominees Drive My Car and Flee (Best International, Animated and Documentary Feature nominee!), and this Friday we’re bringing back Spencer to make sure everyone sees Kristen Stewart’s performance on the big screen. Beginning March 4 we’ll have Best Feature Documentary nominee Writing with Fire on our virtual platform.