Royal Archives – Laemmle Theatres

David Alvarado’s ‘American Pachuco’ Pays Tribute to a Pioneering Director

July 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

It’s notable and maddening that the director of the most successful Chicano movie ever never got to make another theatrical feature. Fortunately, it’s not like Luis Valdez, who made La Bamba, has been idle. David Alvarado’s American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, catches up with the now-octogenarian to chronicle his life as an artist and activist.

Watch American Pachuco: the Legend of Luis Valdez at Laemmle’s Royal and NoHo starting July 24^th. Director David Alvarado and subjects Luis Valdez and Lou Diamond Phillips will participate in Q&As after the 7:20 PM show on July 24 at the Royal and after the 7:00 PM show on July 25 at the NoHo.

According to Merriam-Webster, “pachuco” means a young Mexican-American having a taste for flashy clothes and a special jargon and usually belonging to a neighborhood gang. The gang part is likely a stereotype; socially defiant attitudes were definitely involved, as with many youth cultures. Yet the film underscores that the Zoot Suit riots, and the Sleepy Lagoon murder that preceded them, were more about white racism than Chicano crime, though law enforcement at the time knew who was easier to blame.

Valdez immortalized the events in the play Zoot Suit, and its subsequent filmed version; it became a huge hit in Los Angeles, but fared less well on Broadway, where the documentary highlights how racially charged reviews speculated whether Valdez, who was an English major in college, could speak the language well enough to convey a point.

Considering Valdez was born in 1940 to poor migrant farm workers, it’s remarkable just how much filmed footage exists of his entire life, including the early years. Director David Alvarado, who was inspired by La Bamba to make movies, clearly reveres Valdez, and sets out to make the case that you should too. A theater kid in a family where lack of privilege made that kind of think a nigh-untouchable luxury, Luis Valdez had his first role in a school play stymied by his parents being evicted. As he grew up and understood the protests led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, he staged activist plays by and for the workers, sometimes performed on truck beds. Alvarado frames the story as a quintessentially American success story, albeit one that must still speak out to justify itself.

Still alive and vital, Valdez is able to reflect back on camera, as is Huerta, Linda Ronstadt, Zoot Suit star Edward James Olmos, La Bamba breakthrough star Lou Diamond Phillips, producer Taylor Hackford, and more. Alvarado, whose previous documentary feature Blood Sugar Rising dealt with diabetes, has a much more pleasant task at hand here. Paying tribute to an artistic hero of his, he has the treasure trove of a lifetime of footage, from which to assemble a mere hour and a half. Edward James Olmos narrates in character as Zoot Suit‘s El Pachuco, which became his breakthrough, Tony-nominated role, though he also appears as himself.

As Valdez prepares to executive-produce a remake of La Bamba, perhaps this vital look back at his entire career as a playwright, TV producer, and activist can offer him more opportunities while he’s still with us. Like Ritchie Valens might sing, “Come on, let’s go!”

“Alvarado’s documentary turns into a defiant reminder of our past struggles, a celebration of our successes and progress, and a call to remain proud of one’s roots. “ – Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com.

“As much as the doc is explicitly celebratory, its existence is inherently a political statement, just like Valdez’s oeuvre. To spotlight a Mexican American pioneer who still stands proud in all the nuances of his identity feels necessarily defiant. “ – Carlos Aguilar, Variety.

Ross McElwee Revisits Personal Loss and Cinema in ‘Remake’

July 14, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Long before blogging and social media, Ross McElwee was turning a movie camera on his own life, processing his own reality through the films he made, like 1985’s groundbreaking documentary Sherman’s March. His latest, Remake, offers the biggest personal challenge to date – emotionally coming to terms with the death of his son.

Catch both Remake and a new restoration of Sherman’s March this Friday, July 17^th at Laemmle’s Royal.

Whatever the ostensible, assigned topic of McElwee’s documentaries – be it General Sherman or Big Tobacco – the real pleasures of his movies come when he tends to get sidetracked and return to the subject of his own life. For his last couple of films, In Paraguay and Photographic Memory, he cut directly to the chase and started with his family. Photographic Memory spotlighted his complicated relationship with his son, Adrian; fourteen years later, he’s dealing with Adrian’s death from drug addiction.

There is an originally assigned topic to Remake – Sherman’s March was being considered for a Hollywood remake as a fiction film, and McElwee signed a deal that allowed him to make a film about the making of the new film. As the movie stalled in development, however, Adrian spiraled downward and ultimately died. Adrian was himself an aspiring filmmaker, and Remake is made up of footage shot by him as well as his father.

McElwee’s narration remains as steadily deadpan as always, like he can reason his way through anything, but in this case he only comes up with more questions that require answers from the heart rather than the head. He’s always been masterful at self-analysis, yet it’s clear that he now realizes its inadequacy in the face of such a blow. The best he can do is keep Adrian alive on film, and try to understand him by seeing the world through his camera. At a certain age, Adrian stopped wanting to be the subject of his father’s films – in death, his shared credit as cinematographer and editor offers a glimpse at the artist he might have become. It’s clear that he followed somewhat in his father’s footsteps, trying to understand his own life through the camera lens, but having his own addiction as a topic didn’t allow him enough distance. The elder McElwee, naturally, wonders how much of this is his fault as a father.

The reuse of footage from his older films is a common McElwee technique, done both because he doesn’t assume audiences have seen all his films, and because the footage takes on new context when viewed as flashback rather than contemporary commentary. In Remake, he takes short side quests to catch up with some of the characters from Sherman’s March, now four decades older, using the old scenes for contrast. Audiences don’t have to make do with those snippets, as Sherman’s March in its entirety, now remastered in high definition, will be playing alongside Remake in theaters. Indeed, it is even more effective as a time capsule than it was as contemporaneous Boomer self-reflection. Particularly in light of all McElwee’s subsequent movies about himself as a family man, filmed evidence of his awkward single life during the Reagan administration stands as a slice of verite Americana, unpolished by the image-consciousness of the era.

“Even in a film as sombre as “Remake,” one of the joys of [Ross] McElwee’s method is the freedom with which he constructs his movies. “ – Richard Brody, The New Yorker.

“Both an elegy for a son and a meditation on artistic purpose, this autobiographical documentary transforms unbearable personal loss into a powerfully intimate probe of memory, creativity, and family legacies. “ – Todd Jorgenson, Cinemalogue.

Mystery and the Immigrant Experience in Guido Chiesa’s ‘For the Love of a Woman’

July 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In 1970s Rhode Island, all cold grays and blues, a mother dies in hospital, and her estranged adult daughter barely feels anything. In a 1930s moshav in British Mandate Palestine, all vibrant colors as memories tend to be, a widower hires an attractive newcomer to be his housekeeper. These are different women, yet their stories entwine a family mystery in Guido Chiesa’s For the Love of a Woman.

Catch For the Love of a Woman at Laemmle’s Royal and Town Center 5 starting Friday, July 10^th. Star Mili Avital will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:00 p.m. Royal show on July 11, as well as the 1:00 p.m. TC5 show and the 4:00 p.m. Royal show on July 12.

For the Love of a Woman is loosely based on Meir Shalev’s novel The Loves of Judith, also known as As a Few Days or The Four Meals, but it adds a lot in the adaptation. Only the scenes set in the ’30s are from the novel, though the format of nesting stories remains the same, turning the book’s wraparound narrative into the story being uncovered by the new framing device, set 40 years later and invented for the film. Director Chiesa, an Italian immigrant who worked with Michael Cimino and Jim Jarmusch, has turned the story from a riff on Jewish folktales to a meditation on the immigrant experience. What does a person lose when they leave the homeland…and how might they find it again?

Mili Avital, the acclaimed Israeli actress whose Hollywood breakthrough was as the female lead in Stargate, plays Esther, a middle-aged woman who is handed a mystery upon her mother’s death. Prior to succumbing to dementia she left Esther a letter and a piece of jewelry, telling her to take it to Israel and look for the name “Judith.” With the assistance of a family friend who lives there, she discovers an old farmhouse, and under pretense of wanting to buy it, meets the heir, a university professor (Ori Pfeffer) whose actual given name is Zayde, or “Grandpa.”

As Esther asks more questions about the house, Zayde reveals his own family history, mostly focusing on the quirky circumstances that led to his having three fathers. All of them pined for one woman, Yehudit, or Judith (played by Romanian actress Ana Ularu), who had a secret backstory of her own. Moshav communities, like kibbutzes, involve shared resources and collectivism; this story humorously suggests that might extend to women too. Yet Yehudit is nobody’s property; she owns her sexuality, and the men eventually fall in line. Especially when she gives birth to Zayde (standing up, no less!), without knowing which of her triptych of lovers is the dad. “Who does he look like?” they ask. “Me,” she responds.

Chiesa’s filmography consists primary of Italian films, sometimes depicting political/historical moments, as in Working Slowly (Radio Alice) or Johnny the Partisan, and sometimes comedies both romantic and family-related, like 30 Nights With My Ex or Belli di Papa. Taking on an English-language movie about the Israeli immigrant experience is a bold leap, but he draws on his experience with both family complications and political history, along with his own experience as an import, to reveal that sometimes there is universality in the specifics.

Ties to two cultures can make a person’s life feel divided; different people bridge the divide in different ways, but it all stems from the same root feeling. One need not be either Italian or Israeli to connect to the journeys Esther and Zayde take, and their realizations that key elements of their pasts have been missing. For the Love of a Woman reveals that there may be sorrow in the lost connections, but there’s joy in making new ones, and the former can directly fuel the latter.

“With a moving story, beautiful direction and a cast and crew that execute with precision this is a film not to be missed.” – Ricky Archuleta, Film Threat

“Some films sweep you away with breathtaking action. Others quietly capture your heart. For the Love of a Woman belongs firmly in the second category, blending romance, mystery and family history into a thoughtful, emotionally rewarding film.” – Mira Temkin, Splash

‘O Horizon’ Explores Loss in the Age of AI

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Artificial intelligence has long been a staple of science fiction, but as AI becomes an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, filmmakers face a new challenge: how to tell stories about technology that no longer feels wholly speculative. Writer-director Madeleine Rotzler’s O Horizon approaches that question from an intimate angle, using a near-future premise to explore the ravages of grief.

Catch O Horizon in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal.

Maria Bakalova, the Oscar-nominated breakout actress from Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, stars as Abby, a neuroscientist struggling with the death of her beloved father (David Strathairn). Months after his passing, she remains emotionally adrift, unable to fully connect with her family, her work, or her own future. Then she discovers an unusual service called “Seeking a Friend,” which uses personal data—messages, videos, recordings, and emails—to create an AI facsimile of a deceased loved one. Soon Abby finds herself speaking regularly with a digital recreation of her father.

The premise recalls classics such as Her and episodes of Black Mirror, but O Horizon is less interested in providing dystopian warnings than in exploring the emotional complexities of loss. What begins as a source of comfort gradually becomes something more complicated as Abby confronts unresolved feelings, old frustrations, and the question of whether technology can truly help us heal or merely postpone the process of actually moving forward.

Running parallel to Abby’s personal journey is her groundbreaking neuroscience research, which explores the possibility of artificially recreating human sensations and experiences. Together, these storylines examine a common theme: If pain, loneliness, and grief can be technologically softened, what might be lost along the way? The film raises provocative questions without insisting on easy answers.

Much of the film’s appeal rests on Bakalova’s nuanced performance, which brings emotional authenticity to Abby’s complex journey through loss. David Strathairn, for his part, makes a strong impression despite limited screen time, lending warmth and humanity to both the memories of Abby’s father and his AI-generated counterpart. Together, the two actors ground the film’s speculative premise in recognizable human emotions, helping transform a contemporary technological thought experiment into something more personal and universal.

Beautifully photographed and deliberately understated, O Horizon favors reflection over spectacle. Rather than presenting artificial intelligence as either salvation or catastrophe, it uses emerging technology as a lens through which to examine love, memory, and the lingering bonds between parents and children.

At a moment when AI is rapidly moving from science fiction into daily reality, O Horizon offers a timely and deeply personal meditation on what it means to hold on—and when it may finally be time to let go.

“A moving lead performance from Maria Bakalova.” – Alex Harrison, ScreenRant

“Sort of a Black Mirror premise… [but] more of a fable.” – Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

‘Peter Asher’: The Man Behind the Music

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

For many music fans, Peter Asher is one of those names that seems to appear everywhere once you start paying attention. A member of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon, head of A&R for the Beatles’ Apple Records, producer of landmark albums from James Taylor to Linda Ronstadt, and a trusted collaborator to generations of artists, Asher has spent more than six decades helping shape popular music from both center stage and behind the scenes.

The new documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man traces that remarkable career, revealing how one seemingly modest figure repeatedly found himself at pivotal moments in music history. Helmed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, the film combines archival footage, contemporary interviews, and performances from Asher’s acclaimed live storytelling show to create a portrait of a life that often feels stupefyingly interconnected.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear co-directors Goldfine and Geller discuss their fascinating new release with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning with a special Q&A on June 22nd at the Laemmle Royal.

Asher’s story begins in an unusually artistic household in London. His sister Jane Asher’s relationship with Paul McCartney brought the Beatles directly into the family orbit, with McCartney at one point living in the Ashers’ home. Numerous songs that would become part of popular music history were written there, and the documentary delights in recounting how Peter found himself witnessing events that would later seem legendary.

Yet Everywhere Man makes clear that Asher was never merely a bystander. As one half of Peter & Gordon, he scored international hits, including “A World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, as an executive at Apple Records, he signed a young James Taylor, beginning a partnership that would help define the singer-songwriter boom of the 1970s.

The documentary is particularly compelling when examining Asher’s influence as a producer and manager. Working with Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, and many others, he helped shape the polished California sound that dominated popular music throughout the decade. Along the way, he pushed for greater recognition of studio musicians, insisting that the talented players behind classic recordings receive proper credit on album sleeves—a practice that seems obvious today but was far from standard at the time.

What emerges is not simply a history of one career, but a tour through several eras of popular music, featuring everyone from the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to Elton John, Diana Ross, and Randy Newman. The result is an entertaining and affectionate documentary about a man whose influence extends far beyond the spotlight. Even viewers who don’t immediately recognize Peter Asher’s name may discover that they already know much of the music—not to mention the stories—that he helped usher into the world.

“The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong.” – Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The] film does an amazing job tracking the arc of a career of an artist who was really just about everywhere.” – Brad Auerbach, Entertainment Today

Haifaa Al-Mansour’s ‘Unidentified’ and the Women Hidden in Plain Sight

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the past decade, Haifaa Al-Mansour has become one of the most important cinematic voices to emerge from Saudi Arabia. Her breakthrough feature Wadjda followed a young girl determined to buy a bicycle in a society that discouraged such independence. The Perfect Candidate centered on a woman running for local office. With Unidentified, Al-Mansour again focuses on a female protagonist navigating institutional barriers, but this time she does so through the framework of a murder mystery.

Catch Unidentified in theaters beginning June 19th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center.

The film opens with the discovery of a teenage girl’s body abandoned in the desert outside Riyadh. The victim has no identification, few clues, and seemingly little chance of receiving justice. When the case crosses her desk, Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), a recently divorced police clerk and devoted true-crime listener, sets out to uncover the girl’s identity.

What follows is part detective story, part social portrait, as Al-Mansour uses the familiar structure of a procedural to explore larger questions about gender, autonomy, and social expectation. As Nawal begins asking questions, she encounters a world of silences, evasions, and unspoken assumptions. School administrators, family members, and community figures each possess fragments of information, yet the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that solving the crime means understanding the circumstances that allowed the victim to disappear in the first place.

One of the film’s strengths is its refusal to present Saudi women as a monolith. Throughout Nawal’s investigation, she encounters women of different generations, backgrounds, and beliefs, each navigating the constraints of their society in distinct ways. Some push against those limitations; others accommodate them, and many exist somewhere in between.

Mila Alzahrani, reuniting with Al-Mansour after The Perfect Candidate, anchors the film with a performance that balances determination and vulnerability. Nawal’s interest in the case is clearly fueled by her own personal losses, but the film wisely avoids reducing her to a simple symbol or crusader. Instead, she emerges as a complicated individual whose search for answers becomes inseparable from her effort to reclaim agency in her own life.

Stylistically, Unidentified represents a somewhat more commercial turn for Al-Mansour. The film embraces suspense, red herrings, and genre conventions more readily than her earlier work. While the mystery itself remains engaging throughout, the film’s lasting impact comes less from the mechanics of the investigation than from the social realities it reveals along the way.

In the end, Unidentified works as both a compelling thriller and a continuation of Al-Mansour’s long-standing interest in the lives of Saudi women. The mystery may provide the engine, but humanization remains the destination.

“Unidentified… utilizes the death of a young woman to explore how Saudi Arabia’s crushing patriarchy creates both victims and criminals out of its female population. – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.” – Beandrea July, IndieWire

Homoerotic Hitchcock: ‘Strangers on a Train’ at 75

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the movie that launched Hitchcock’s greatest decade of moviemaking, the 1951 suspense classic Strangers on a Train.

On Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m., attend the 75th anniversary screening at Laemmle’s Royal, complete with a Q&A with Stephen Rebello, Author of Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitcchock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train and Hitchcockian Thrillers.

Hitchcock had started his career in England with such top thrillers as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hollywood quickly came calling, and when Hitchcock moved to America, he won his only Best Picture Oscar for Rebecca in 1940. He continued with other classic films Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, and Notorious.

But in the late 1940s the Master of Suspense hit a dry spell, when his films The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright failed to connect with audiences. Searching for inspiration, he landed on Patricia Highsmith’s first acclaimed novel, Strangers on a Train, a story drenched in homoeroticism and perverse psychology. Highsmith, who was herself gay (she later wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley and a lesbian-themed novel, Carol, that was turned into an acclaimed 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), provided the inspiration that Hitchcock needed.

Strangers tells the story of a chance meeting between a handsome tennis star, Guy Haines, and a charming but deranged aristocrat, Bruno Anthony. Bruno has read about Guy’s problems with his estranged wife and suggests half-jokingly that if they swap murders (Bruno wants to get rid of his disapproving father), neither would have a discernible motive for the murders they commit. Guy does not take the suggestion seriously, but when Bruno kills Guy’s wife, he expects Guy to return the favor.

The screenplay is credited to acclaimed mystery writer Raymond Chandler and female writer Czenzi Ormonde, but Chandler actually contributed very little to the movie; he and Hitchcock did not get along. Nevertheless, the script is tightly structured and consistently gripping. Like many Hitchcock movies, Strangers is distinguished by several memorable set-pieces, including the murder at an amusement park, a tense tennis match, and the climax on board a carousel spinning wildly out of control. But it also has the psychological depth of the Master’s best movies. Defying the Production Code, which had a strict prohibition against depictions of homosexuality, Hitchcock and his screenwriters clearly delineate the attraction that Bruno feels toward the handsome tennis champ. Robert Walker, the star of several lighter pictures, relishes his stab at villainy, and he is well matched with Farley Granger, who had starred in Hitchcock’s Rope and was gay in real life.

Ruth Roman, Laura Elliott, Norma Varden, Leo G. Carroll, and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia round out the cast. Robert Burks, who earned an Oscar nomination for his cinematography, went on to work with Hitchcock again on Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, among others. Oscar-winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had worked with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, wrote the effective score.

Stephen Rebello, who will be doing a Q&A at the screening, is the author of the best-selling Alfred Hitchock and the Making of Psycho (which was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) and Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!: Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time. He has written for Movieline, GQ, Playboy, and other publications.

‘Honeyjoon’ and the Distance Between Grief and Connection

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Grief is rarely a solitary experience. Even when family members mourn the same loss, they often do so in profoundly different ways. That tension lies at the heart of Lilian T. Mehrel’s deeply felt debut feature Honeyjoon, a warm, observant drama about a mother and daughter struggling to find one another in the aftermath of loss.

Catch Honeyjoon in theaters beginning June 12th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set against the lush volcanic landscapes of Portugal’s Azores Islands, the film follows June (Ayden Mayeri) and her Persian-Kurdish mother Lela (Amira Casar) as they mark the first anniversary of the death of June’s father. The destination is not arbitrary: It is a place he’d once visited and loved, making the trip both a memorial and a search for connection. Yet from the outset, it is clear that mother and daughter have arrived carrying vastly different emotional agendas.

Lela wants to sit with her grief, to revisit memories and honor what has been lost. June, meanwhile, seems eager to keep moving, whether through flirtation, distraction, or simply avoiding conversations that might force her to confront feelings she has spent months suppressing. Their differing approaches create moments of tension, but Mehrel wisely avoids turning those disagreements into melodrama. Instead, Honeyjoon finds poignancy in smaller misunderstandings: the comments that sting more than intended, the silences that speak volumes, and the quiet realization that even those closest to us may experience the same event in dramatically different ways.

What distinguishes the film is the compassion it extends to both women. June’s restlessness and Lela’s yearning emerge not as opposing forces but as parallel responses to the same wound. Mayeri and Casar share an easy, lived-in chemistry that makes their relationship feel authentic, capturing the complicated blend of affection, frustration, obligation, and love that often defines parent-child relationships well into adulthood.

The Azores themselves become an essential part of the film’s emotional texture. Mehrel and cinematographer Inés Gowland make full use of the islands’ dramatic coastlines, green hills, and volcanic terrain, creating a setting that feels both idyllic and reflective. The landscape’s beauty never overwhelms the story, but it quietly reinforces the film’s central concerns with memory, change, and the passage of time.

At just over eighty minutes, Honeyjoon unfolds with a light touch, resisting grand revelations or tidy emotional resolutions. The result is a modest but affecting debut that understands grief not as something to overcome, but as something we learn to carry—sometimes alone, and sometimes, if we are fortunate, alongside the people who know us best.

“A story of Iranian diaspora, of sexual and emotional repression, and of culture and politics experienced at a distance.” – Siddhant Adlakha, Variety

“A quietly powerful exploration of grief, family, and the small moments that connect us.” – Rachel West, ThatShelf.com