Film Reviews & Previews
The Oscar nominations are out and it was another excellent cinematic year. As always, some categories will be more unpredictable than others. Last year, most contestants 59.5% thought Lily Gladstone would win Best Actress for Killers of the Flower Moon, while only 29.7% correctly divined that Emma Stone would win for Poor Things. This year, Best Picture may be the most challenging category; there are at least six real possibilities. That’s where you come in because it’s time for our Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest! If you, dear cinephile, can accurately predict how the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will vote in all 23 categories, (or close to it), all while coping with the fact that Marianne Jean-Baptiste was snubbed for her stupendous turn in Hard Truths, you will win movie passes good at all Laemmle venues! These contests are always close so we have a tie-breaker question: try to guess the running time! The 97th Academy Awards ceremony takes place on Sunday, March 2 and we’ll announce the winners (with snazzy charts) soon afterwards.
A very entertaining way to improve your odds is to watch the Oscar-nominated shorts. We’ll start screening all of them — the animated, live action, and documentary — beginning February 14.
Good luck!
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of the Oscar-winning 1979 hit ‘Breaking Away‘ with costar Paul Dooley joining for an in-person Q&A after the screening. The movie earned five Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Yates, and it won the Oscar for the Original Screenplay by Steve Tesich. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical of the year, and it won the Writers Guild award for Best Original Screenplay. Many years later, when the American Film Institute compiled a list of the most inspiring movies in history, ‘Breaking Away‘ ranked in the top 10.
Tesich based the script in part on his own experiences at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The story tells of the bond between four young working-class men raised in the town but unable to afford college. They are scorned by the college students in town and called “cutters” because of their families’ work as stonecutters in the local quarry. The four young men are played by newcomers Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley. Christopher’s parents are played by Paul Dooley and Barbara Barrie, and the snooty college kids include actors Hart Bochner and Robyn Douglass.
Christopher’s Dave, the leading character, becomes obsessed with Italian bicycle racers and Italian culture in general, to the dismay of his working-class father, played by Dooley. Eventually he decides to enter the local bicycle race dominated by the college students, and he becomes a symbol to his pals of the possibilities of transcending their humble backgrounds.
Critics were swept up in the story’s inspirational message. Roger Ebert called ‘Breaking Away‘ “a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin agreed and declared, “Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn’t even need a big budget or a pedigree.” Variety summarized the overwhelmingly positive reviews, calling the film “a thoroughly delightful light comedy, lifted by fine performances from Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley.”
Dooley got his start working several times with director Robert Altman on such films as ‘A Wedding,’ ‘Health,’ and he had a leading role in Altman’s offbeat romantic comedy ‘A Perfect Couple.’ In Altman’s musical adaptation of ‘Popeye,’ Dooley played the role of Wimpy. He also costarred in such films as ‘Paternity,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Underneath,’ ‘Runaway Bride,’ ‘A Mighty Wind,’ and ‘Happy, Texas.’ He provided one of the voices in the ‘Cars’ animated movies, and he also had prominent roles on such popular TV series as ‘thirtysomething’, ‘My So-Called Life,’ ‘Dream On,’ ‘The Practice,’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’
Fri (1/03) 4pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening with Q&A with director Michael Schwartz and star Eros de la Puente
Fri (1/03) 7pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening with Q&A with director Michael Schwartz and star Eros de la Puente
Sat (1/04) 4pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening with Q&A with director Michael Schwartz
Sat (1/04) 7pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening with Q&A with director Michael Schwartz
Fri (1/03) 4:10 pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening followed by Q&A with director Tyler Nilson
Fri (1/03) 7:10 pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening followed by Q&A with director Tyler Nilson
Sat (1/04) 4:10 pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening Q&A with director Tyler Nilson star Eros de la Puente
Sat (1/04) 7:10 pm – Los Frikis – Special Screening Q&A with director Tyler Nilson star Eros de la Puente
Acclaimed filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck, three-time Sundance honorees who previously took audiences to the secret corners of the Italian countryside in search of white truffles with The Truffle Hunters, recently sat down with Inside the Arthouse hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge to talk about their latest striking nonfiction work. Gaucho Gaucho paints an Argentinian western with images and sounds of operatic beauty, building on their earlier success with The Last Race, a film that explored the last stock car racetrack on Long Island.
Kershaw and Dweck’s focus is now on the vast mountains of Argentina, expressed in stunning black-and-white photography, and a small community of gauchos who hold profound connections to the surrounding nature and their own traditions. As older generations dispense their wisdom, the film keeps its eye toward a new generation which continue to fight for their families’ legacies in a modern world.
“These filmmakers have enormous reserves of love and empathy for traditions that miraculously survive in spite of the modern world. And their compassion has never looked more cinematic.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar
“An affecting tone poem which ruminates on the passage of time and the passing of traditions from one generation to the next.” ~ Tim Grierson, Screen International
In Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada, which we open Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo, and Town Center, Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi play a man at opposite ends of his life, deciding how to live it. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Victoria Hill co-star.
Schrader said this about his film:
“When friend and author Russell Banks (Affliction) took ill I was weighing other story possibilities. I realized that mortality should be the subject. Russell had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked if I would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.
“Leonard Fife became a successful documentary filmmaker after fleeing to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Sick and dying in Montreal, he is interviewed by his former students. ‘I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,’ he says, ‘Now it’s my turn.'”
“Paul Schrader and Richard Gere, reunited for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo, are at the peak of their powers.” – Chuck Bowen, Slant
“Energized by the reunion of its director, Paul Schrader, and its star, Richard Gere, in their first collaboration since American Gigolo.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Richard Gere gives his best performance in years.” – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies
“Takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning… to sincerely moving effect.” – Justin Chang, The New Yorker