Theater Buzz Archives – Page 6 Of 260

Culture Vulture: Big-Screen Art, Ideas, and Performance at Laemmle

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture is Laemmle Theatres’ ongoing invitation to experience world-class art, performance, and cultural storytelling on the big screen and with an audience at your side. Curated from across the ballet, opera, theatre, fine art, and documentary landscapes, this series brings exceptional works to the Laemmle Glendale, Monica, and Town Center locations on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 10:00 a.m. and Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m.

Below are the next five Culture Vulture presentations, each offering a distinct outlook on history, creativity, and human expression:

The Hell of Auschwitz: MAUS by Art Spiegelman (January 24)
Blending humor, rigor, and deep emotional intelligence, this documentary explores Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel Maus, a work that permanently transformed how the Holocaust could be represented. By recounting both his father Vladek’s survival of Auschwitz and their fraught father-son relationship in postwar New York, Spiegelman forged a new artistic language, one that made space for memory, trauma, and inherited silence. Director Pauline Horovitz approaches Maus not just as cultural history, but as a personal reckoning, examining its enduring impact through the lens of the “second generation.”

Accompanied by: EGG CREAM (short)
Screening alongside Maus is this affectionate documentary short about the iconic New York City drink that contains neither egg nor cream. Through family stories, archival material, and neighborhood rituals, “Egg Cream” is a meditation on Jewish-American identity, immigration, and the bittersweet pull of nostalgia—small pleasures standing in for much larger histories.

Hamlet – National Theatre Live (January 31)
Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy returns in a filmed presentation from London’s National Theatre. This production emphasizes Hamlet’s psychological intimacy and moral uncertainty, bringing fresh immediacy to a timeless play about grief, power, and the impossibility of clean action. Captured live for the screen, it preserves the electricity of theatre while granting audiences an unusually close encounter with one of drama’s greatest roles.

Frida: Viva la Vida (February 7)
This vivid documentary portrait of Frida Kahlo draws directly from the artist’s own letters, diaries, and writings to illuminate her life beyond the rich mythology she left behind. Moving seamlessly between themes of art, illness, love, and political commitment, the film illuminates Kahlo as both fiercely self-aware and profoundly vulnerable, tracing how pain and creativity became inseparable forces in her work.

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (February 21)
An urgent and inspiring civil rights documentary, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round examines and unpacks the first organized interracial protest in U.S. history. When Black students and white allies joined together in 1960 to desegregate a Maryland amusement park, their sustained picket line became a training ground for future Freedom Riders and a crucible for grassroots activism. Told through immersive storytelling, archival footage, and firsthand accounts, the film expounds upon a pivotal but largely forgotten chapter of American protest history.

Water Lilies of Monet: The Magic of Water and Light (March 7)
This visually sumptuous film immerses viewers in Claude Monet’s lifelong obsession with water, reflection, and light. Moving between art history and sensory experience, it explores how the Water Lilies series redefined modern painting, and how Monet’s garden at Giverny became both subject and sanctuary. Seen on the big screen, the paintings’ scale, texture, and color take on renewed power.

Culture Vulture is an ongoing celebration of art in all possible forms. Whether you’re drawn to history, performance, or visual beauty, these curated screenings offer a rare chance to encounter such landmark works on the big screen, as they were meant to be experienced. Buy your tickets today and prepare to be wowed!

A Private Life: Rebecca Zlotowsky’s Unlikely Psychological ‘Whodunit’

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a delightfully hard-to-classify mystery-thriller starring actress Jodie Foster in her most significant French-language role in decades, offers a uniquely human story of doubt, memory, and emotional reckoning. Set largely in Paris, the movie follows Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst whose ordered professional life begins to unravel after the unexpected death of one of her long-term patients. What unfolds is less a conventional mystery than a richly layered exploration of how we process loss, guilt, identity, and the private truths we carry inside us.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Zlotowski discuss her latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its opening at the Laemmle Royal on January 16th.

The narrative begins with Lilian’s professional and personal worlds colliding when her patient is pronounced dead by suicide. Convinced that there’s more to the story, she launches an investigation that moves from psychological inquiry to sleuthing through records, recordings, and personal interactions.

Foster’s performance is central to the film’s distinctive tone. While A Private Life marks her first French-language leading role, it builds on a long (if intermittent) history of working in French cinema, including smaller but memorable appearances in the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004). That experience shows in the ease and precision of her delivery here, grounding Lilian’s twitchy intelligence, emotional restraint, and gradual unraveling in a performance that feels fully at home in its Parisian setting. Daniel Auteuil complements her with a weathered, effortless presence as Gabriel, a foil and ex-partner whose familiarity with Lilian underscores the film’s thematic interests in memory, connection, and the stories we tell ourselves about the people we once loved.

Zlotowski’s direction embraces a playful ambiguity: flirting with Hitchcockian suspense, nodding at noir tropes, and even indulging in quirky dreamlike sequences that blur the boundary between reality and invention. Yet the heart of the film remains firmly in the relationships at its core, particularly the tentative reconnection between Lilian and Gabriel, as well as Lilian’s growing self-awareness as she interrogates what motivates her own desperate search for truth.

Both visually and tonally, the film feels Parisian in spirit: elegant stairwells, warm café interiors, and a palette that supports both the introspective melancholy and the lighter, more compassionate moments shared between its characters. With its distinctive blend of mystery, comedy, drama, and character study, A Private Life offers audiences something all-too-uncommon: a story that entertains while inviting reflection on how the inner lives we guard shape the lives we live.

“A throwback to the sort of character-driven dramas that defined Foster’s early career.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“A genial, preposterous psychological mystery caper.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Weight of History: Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In All That’s Left of You, writer-director Cherien Dabis crafts an expansive, emotionally grounded portrait of a Palestinian family shaped by decades of displacement, political upheaval, and inherited memory. Spanning more than seventy years, the film situates an intimate domestic story within the broader arc of Palestinian history, tracing how the consequences of one violent moment ripple backward and forward across generational lines.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Cherien Dabis discuss her latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its return to Laemmle Theatres beginning January 8th at the Royal, kicked off by a series of live Q&A sessions with Dabis moderated by actors Mark Ruffalo, Tatiana Maslany, and Diego Luna over its first three days, before expanding to the Town Center on January 16th.

The narrative begins with a Palestinian teenager living in the Occupied West Bank who is swept into a protest that turns suddenly and irrevocably violent. Yet rather than centering on the incident itself, the film unfolds through the voice of the boy’s mother, who recounts the personal and political forces that brought her family to this precise moment in time. From there, All That’s Left of You moves fluidly across the generations, returning to earlier chapters of family life—the loss of a home, the pressures of occupation, the persistence of love and routine—while showing how each generation carries both the scars and the hopes of those who came before.

Dabis approaches this sweeping material with a focus on the textures of daily life. Weddings, meals, schooldays, and quiet conversations are given as much weight as moments of historical rupture. The effect is cumulative and deeply affecting: history presented not as abstraction, but as something that fundamentally reshapes families from the inside out.

Visually, All That’s Left of You balances intimacy with scope, grounding its political context in faces, gestures, and lived-in spaces. The performances, including masterful contributions from members of the Bakri acting family, bring an intergenerational authenticity to the story, emphasizing continuity as much as loss.

At once a family chronicle and a political testimony, All That’s Left of You refuses simplification. It does not ask viewers to look away from pain, nor does it reduce its characters to symbols. Instead, it offers a sustained act of bearing witness: to a family, to a history, and to the enduring emotional cost of dispossession. By the time the film returns to its opening moment, that act of violence is no longer isolated, but has been integrated as part of a long, unfinished story whose consequences are still unfolding.

“A moving and intimate narrative about the toll displacement takes on generations of people.” – Lovia Gyarke, The Hollywood Reporter

“[A] considered, moving tale that effectively blends the personal and the political.” – Allan Hunter, Screen Daily

Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s Quiet Meditation on Family Ties

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, winner of the coveted Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, offers a signature turn from one of independent cinema’s most distinctive voices, culminating in a gentle, contemplative triptych that quietly observes the tangled, often unspoken dynamics between children and their parents. Opening January 9th at the Laemmle Monica, Claremont, NoHo, and Glendale theaters, the film invites audiences into three subtly interconnected stories about siblings, aging, and legacy, all rendered with the iconoclastic filmmaker’s characteristic blend of wit, understatement, and emotional precision. Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Jarmusch discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut.

Structured in three chapters set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, Father Mother Sister Brother foregrounds ordinary domestic encounters over flashy, overt drama. In the first story, adult siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) make a quiet, tentative journey to visit their widowed father (Tom Waits) at his remote home, negotiating the awkwardness and muted affection that define long years of estrangement. Jarmusch’s direction attends closely to how the three characters move and speak around one another, revealing a lifetime of shared history through pauses, glances, and half-finished thoughts.

The second segment moves to Dublin, where an accomplished novelist (Charlotte Rampling) receives her rarely-seen daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) for an annual tea. Here, the emotional choreography is just as rife: politeness, competition, and unspoken disappointment circulate beneath measured exchanges, offering a quietly sharp exploration of how adult relationships with parents can continue to bear the marks of youth.

In the final story, set in Paris, twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) sift through their deceased parents’ belongings, reminiscing and confronting the traces of the lives that shaped them. Minimalist but resonant, this segment emphasizes memory, loss, and the ways shared history lingers in objects and quiet conversations.

While some viewers may find Jarmusch’s pared-back rhythms and emphasis on silence challenging, the film’s rewards lie in its textured, patient observation of ordinary life and its capacity to reflect shared human experience without forcing tidy resolutions. The cast—a blend of longtime Jarmusch collaborators and fresh faces—brings this world to life with subtle (yet thematically crucial) commonalities, underscoring the film’s unstated hypothesis that, whatever differences may exist between us, family dynamics follow a universal language.

In a cinematic landscape that often equates drama with spectacle, Jarmusch’s latest anthology stands apart as a humane, reflective study of the ties that bind us—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes silently, but always with a strange, persistent tenderness.

“What makes the triptych of thematically connected snapshots memorable is its deftly unfussy observation of the unknowability that can endure among people who share the same bloodlines.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The film’s] laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting Henry & June With Philip Kaufman

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

First on the 2026 docket for Laemmle Theatres’ Anniversary Classics Series comes Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June, a film that helped redraw the boundaries around what American cinema could openly explore. Released in 1990, it was the first film to receive the NC-17 rating, a designation that became inseparable from its reputation, but which only partially explains its lasting appeal. More than a provocation, Henry & June is a lush, literary meditation on desire, authorship, and the porous line between lived experience and art.

Get your tickets today to see Henry & June on Sunday, January 11th, 2026 at the Laemmle Royal, kicked off by a pre-screening discussion with director Philip Kaufman moderated by Stephen Farber, ex-president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (which will be honoring Kaufman with their Career Achievement Award the day prior) and host of Reel Talk at Laemmle Theatres.

Set in 1930s Paris, the film draws from the diaries of Anaïs Nin, whose encounters with the fledgling writer Henry Miller (still working on his masterpiece-to-be Tropic of Cancer) and his enigmatic wife June catalyze both personal and creative awakenings. Kaufman treats this triangle less as a conventional erotic drama than as a shifting constellation of gazes and power. Anaïs, played with quiet intensity by Maria de Medeiros, begins as an observer—absorbing, recording, translating sensation into language—before gradually stepping into her own erotic and artistic agency. Fred Ward’s Henry is all swagger and verbal excess, while Uma Thurman’s June is an apparition, at once muse, manipulator, and mirror for the myriad desires projected onto her.

What distinguishes Henry & June is its attention to interiority. Kaufman visualizes thought and memory as tactile experiences: ink bleeding across paper, shadows pooling in lamplit rooms, bodies framed as if already being remembered. The film’s eroticism is inseparable from its interest in writing itself, in how confession, exaggeration, and performance shape identity. Sex here is never reduced to spectacle for its own sake, but a language through which the characters attempt to define themselves.

Following Henry & June’s release, the controversy surrounding its NC-17 rating often obscured how carefully crafted the film really is. Its sensuality is deliberate and measured, rooted in atmosphere rather than shock, while its emotional core lies in Anaïs’s struggle to reconcile intimacy with autonomy. Kaufman resists easy moralizing, allowing contradictions to coexist: freedom and dependency, inspiration and exploitation, love and self-invention.

Seen today, Henry & June feels less like a boundary-pushing outlier than a throwback to a brief moment in time when American studios were willing to support adult, intellectually curious filmmaking that trusted audiences to engage with such complexity. Its frankness remains striking, but so does its elegance, as well as its belief that erotic experience can be cinematic without being reductive or vulgar. More than three decades on, the film endures as a portrait of artists in formation and as a sensual inquiry into how stories—especially the ones we tell about ourselves—come into being.

Chlorinated Cruelty in Charlie Polinger’s The Plague

December 23, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

In The Plague, writer-director Charlie Polinger delivers a bracing, tactile descent into adolescent cruelty and contagion, crafting a horror film that feels less interested in jump scares than in the slow seep of dread. Set within the pressure-cooker ecosystem of a boys’ water polo camp, the film uses genre as a prism, refracting familiar rites of passage into something diseased, hallucinatory, and quietly devastating. With its brutal group dynamics, The Plague often feels like a modern, chlorine-soaked Lord of the Flies, where social order erodes not on some remote desert island but in plain sight.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to catch writer-director Charlie Polinger discussing his debut film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its release on December 24th at the Laemmle Royal.

From its opening moments, The Plague announces its intentions through sound and image. Polinger’s approach is intensely sensory, and nowhere is that clearer than in his score, which pulses with a discordant, off-kilter rhythm. Rather than underlining emotions, the music destabilizes them, oscillating between menace and melancholy while subtly complementing the film’s meticulous sound design: splashes echo too loudly, breathing feels amplified, and the ordinary acoustics of locker rooms and pool decks take on an oppressive weight.

Visually, The Plague is just as unsettling. The cinematography leans into sickly color palettes and claustrophobic framing, transforming sunlit pools and suburban spaces into arenas of quiet menace. Polinger and his cinematographer repeatedly trap characters at the frame’s edge or obscure them behind bodies, water, or architecture, reinforcing the film’s fixation on hierarchy and exclusion.

The cast grounds the film’s escalating unease with remarkable precision. Joel Edgerton brings a coiled intensity to his role as an authority figure whose presence looms larger than his screen time, embodying the institutional blindness that has allowed such abuse to metastasize. The younger ensemble, led by Everett Blunck and Kayo Martin, delivers performances of unnerving authenticity, capturing the volatility of adolescents caught between bravado, fear, and complicity. Their interactions reveal how quickly cruelty can become currency in closed systems, and how survival often depends on knowing when to look away.

That cruelty manifests most explicitly through the film’s body horror, which Polinger deploys with remarkable restraint. The physical affliction at the center of The Plague is never treated as spectacle for its own sake; instead, it becomes a grotesque metaphor for how shame and violence spread when left unchecked, infecting bodies and communities alike.

By the time The Plague reaches its unsettling conclusion, it has established Polinger as a filmmaker with a precise command of mood and an unflinching eye for social rot. Anchored by its inventive score and unnerving cinematography, the film lingers long after its final frame, less like a scream than an infection you can’t quite shake.

“An eerie sense of unreality runs through The Plague… Polinger uses horror conventions to tease out the psychic terror and intimidation of pre-teen social codes.” – Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter

“A film that harnesses its many offbeat and potent powers in service of a unique strain of reassurance.” – Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

Snapshots: This Year’s Shortlist for Best Documentary and International Feature

December 23, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Each year, the Academy’s documentary and international feature shortlists offer an early snapshot of the stories, styles, and concerns shaping global cinema. This season, 15 documentaries and 15 international features have advanced to the shortlist stage in their respective categories, from which just five nominees apiece will ultimately be selected. Reaching this point alone signals extraordinary distinction, marking these films as some of the most resonant and accomplished works released worldwide this year.

Documentary Features

Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat follows the family of Liat Beinin Atzili after she is taken hostage from her kibbutz during the October 7th attacks, capturing the emotional toll of waiting while navigating grief, fear, and fragile hope. Kramer avoids sensationalism, allowing viewers to feel the weight of time as it stretches unbearably forward. Holding Liat returns to Laemmle Theatres on January 16th, with advance shows featuring Q&As with the filmmakers at Glendale on January 14th and the Royal on the 15th.

Brittany Shyne’s Seeds offers a lyrical portrait of Black farmers in the American South, tracing generations of agricultural knowledge passed down through land, labor, and memory. Shot in black-and-white, the film observes these farmers’ daily rituals (planting, harvesting, repairing equipment) with reverence and care while more broadly addressing the systemic forces that have threatened Black land ownership for decades. Shyne’s approach is contemplative rather than didactic, allowing the resilience, dignity, and perseverance of her subjects to speak for themselves. Seeds opens at Laemmle’s Glendale January 23rd.

International Features — Returning to Laemmle Theatres in early January 2026

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (South Korea), adapted from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Axe, offers a bleakly comic portrait of economic precarity pushed to its logical extremes. The film centers on Man-su, a longtime paper company employee whose comfortable life unravels after a corporate buyout leaves him unemployed. As financial pressure threatens his home and family, Man-su’s desperation hardens into calculation, leading him on a methodical, morally chilling effort to ‘eliminate’ rival job candidates, reframing professional competition as literal survival.

In The President’s Cake (Iraq), Hasan Hadi offers a deceptively simple coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of authoritarian rule. Told through the eyes of a young girl tasked with baking a cake to honor Saddam Hussein, the film balances innocence and menace, revealing how political power infiltrates even the smallest rituals of childhood.

In Oliver Laxe’s Sirat (Spain), middle-aged dad Luis travels with his son Esteban to a rave in southern Morocco in search of his missing daughter, only to be swept into a nomadic convoy pushing deeper into an increasingly unstable landscape. As rumors of global conflict spread and the desert becomes increasingly militarized, the narrative shifts from communal drift to stark survival. When tragedy fractures the group, Sirat becomes a meditation on grief and forward motion, asking what it means to keep walking when meaning itself has collapsed.

Petra Volpe’s Late Shift (Switzerland) turns its attention to the pressures of contemporary labor, unfolding over the course of a single night in a Swiss hospital. With mounting urgency, the film observes a nurse pushed to her limits by understaffing and impossible demands. Volpe’s clear-eyed direction transforms everyday professional stress into a gripping ethical drama about care, responsibility, and systemic neglect.

Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You (Jordan) centers on a Palestinian teenager swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank, where a sudden act of violence sends shockwaves through his family. From that rupture, the narrative expands outward as his mother recounts the personal and political forces that shaped the critical moment, threading past and present together. Rather than offering a single perspective, the film unfolds as an act of bearing witness, honoring survival not as abstraction, but as something lived, remembered, and passed down.

Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 (Palestine) revisits the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British colonial rule, foregrounding the human cost of resistance and focusing on intimate relationships shaped by betrayal, loyalty, and survival. Jacir brings emotional depth and political clarity to a story rarely depicted on screen, offering a work that feels both historically grounded and urgently contemporary.

Together, these shortlisted films reflect a cinema attuned to moral complexity and the enduring consequences of power, memory, and choice. Catch them in theaters before awards season really takes off!

Happy Holidays!

To the loyal patrons of the Claremont 5 – Closing

December 20, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 2 Comments

It is with a sense of reflective pride that we announce the sale of the Laemmle Claremont property to a new owner. Proud of all the wonderful independent, and award-winning films that we have brought to The City of Trees and PhDs since our opening in 2007. And proud to report that the new owner intends to continue operating a movie theater at this location, marking the beginning of an exciting new chapter for this venue.

“Of all the possible outcomes, we feel that this is truly the best option for Laemmle, the new owner, and the community,” according to Laemmle President Greg Laemmle. “It’s an overused term, but in this case, this really is a win-win situation.”

A handover will happen toward the end of January, 2026. Patrons can continue to use Premiere Card balances, gift certificates and Frequent Moviegoer Vouchers

“Thank you to the Claremont community for 18 years of patronage. It is sad to say goodbye, but we truly believe that we are leaving you in good hands,” said Greg Laemmle in closing

Groundbreaking ceremony: August 4th, 2005

From left to right: Jon Tolkin, the Manager of Claremont Village Expansion and Claremont Village Inn – Jay Reisbaum (VP of Laemmle Theatres) – Bob Laemmle (owner) – Bob Laemmle loved driving out to check on the progress of construction so that he could visit the Some Crust Bakery on Yale Ave

The Claremont 5 was built from the ground up by Laemmle Theatres and opened to the public on Friday July 27th, 2007. The first five films booked were Hairspray, My Best Friend, No Reservations, Sunshine and Sicko. The theater had 5 auditoriums with stadium seating and wall-to-wall screens. The houses ranged in size from 113 to 250 seats.

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