Royal Archives – Page 4 Of 106

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!

Finding Harmony in Wartime: The Choral and the Power of Collective Song

December 16, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In The Choral, writer Alan Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner reunite for a thoughtful period drama that finds grace, humor, and resilience in the unlikeliest of places: a Yorkshire choral society during the First World War. Anchored by a powerful performance from Ralph Fiennes as the enigmatic Dr. Henry Guthrie, the film offers a portrait of a community seeking harmony—at once musical and human—in the face of loss and disruption.

Catch The Choral in theaters beginning December 25th at the Laemmle Royal, with an expansion to other theaters coming in January.

Set in the fictional mill town of Ramsden in 1916, The Choral explores what happens when music becomes not just performance, but a cherished source of purpose. With most of the town’s men already enlisted on the Western Front, the local choral society finds its ranks dangerously thin. In response, it appoints Dr. Guthrie, a cultured and unconventional choirmaster recently returned from Germany and met with suspicion for his background and aesthetic sensibilities. Tasked with leading the group, he proposes an ambitious performance of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, a spiritually rich oratorio that resonates deeply with a community acutely aware of its own mortality.

Fiennes embodies Guthrie with both gravitas and warmth, portraying a man whose intellect and devotion to music are inseparable from his own private sorrows. Around him, an ensemble cast—featuring Roger Allam as a grieving mill owner and Simon Russell Beale as Elgar himself—creates a tapestry of characters whose collective journey toward mounting a successful choral performance becomes a testament to the restorative power of art and beauty amid wartime disruption.

Alan Bennett’s screenplay is marked by his characteristic wit and emotional honesty. He balances the weight of loss with sharp dialogue and unexpected moments of levity, inviting audiences into a world where communal bonds are tested by war and yet strengthened by shared purpose. The film doesn’t shy away from the era’s anxieties—patriotism, class divisions, and suspicion of outsiders, etc.—but what emerges is a story less about the battlefield than the home front’s quiet courage.

The Choral may not be a rousing blockbuster in the conventional sense, but it’s precisely its reflective tone and ensemble performances that give it strength. It’s a film about how, in communities fractured by war and uncertainty, coming together in song can become a kind of salvation, a way to honor what was lost and to imagine something like grace.

“An unsentimental but deeply felt drama which subcontracts actual passion to the music of Elgar and leaves us with a heartbeat of wit, poignancy and common sense.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A reminder that life goes on, just like a song, even when it seems like everything should stop in the face of so much horror.” – Kate Erbland, IndieWire

“The film is best when it chafes quietly against our expectations of gentle British comfort viewing…” – Guy Lodge, Variety

Resurrection: Inside Bi Gan’s Cinematic Dreamscape

December 9, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

With Resurrection, Bi Gan delivers one of the boldest and most ambitious films of 2025, a hallucinatory odyssey that blurs time, memory, and what it means to be human. Emerging from the festival circuit with notable buzz and a reputation for eliciting polarized reactions, the film asks audiences to surrender to its own shifting realities, promising a unique cinematic experience for those willing to go along for the ride.

Catch Resurrection in theaters beginning December 11th at the Laemmle Royal and December 14th at the Laemmle Glendale, with post-showing Q&As with director Bi Gan following the 7:10 p.m. showing on Saturday the 13th, the 4 p.m. show on the 14th (at the Royal), and both the 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. shows at Glendale on the 14th.

In Resurrection, humanity has traded its ability to dream for immortality. Only one man—an enigma known only as the “Fantasmer,” portrayed by Jackson Yee—continues to dream. His journey propels us through various eras of Chinese history, from silent-film-era tableaux to the turbulence of war, from stylized noir to near-futuristic club scenes. Alongside him, Shu Qi plays a figure from the present who becomes entangled in his visions. Together, they traverse an uncertain landscape where dreams and reality collide, and where cinema becomes the medium for resurrection itself.

Bi Gan builds Resurrection as a kaleidoscopic collage rather than following a traditional narrative. Chapters flit by, each done in its own style: gothic horror, dreamlike fantasy, gritty noir, romantic tragedy, and beyond, each new iteration shifting tone, genre, and even logic itself. Ultimately, the film is less a story than a meditation on history, memory, identity, and the cinematic act. Period-specific cinematography, color palettes, and soundscapes dissolve into one another; time feels elastic, uncanny, haunted. The direction suggests that history isn’t linear, but rather layered, fragmented, haunted by what’s remembered as well as what’s repressed.

That boldness has divided viewers. Some hail the film as a triumph, a vividly realized vision of cinema in all its possibilities, and a sensory experience that stretches the imagination. Others find the abstraction disorienting, the emotional core elusive, or the structure too slippery for narrative comfort. Even among its admirers, there’s a clinging sense that Resurrection demands patience—or better yet, submission to its dream logic.

Still, for fans of experimental cinema, Resurrection feels like a return to something all-too-rare: an audacious and immersive cinematic odyssey that’s unafraid to wander through memory and myth. It isn’t a film to understand so much as feel, one that continues to resonate long after the credits have faded.

For those willing to take the leap, Resurrection poses a haunting question: What if cinema could resurrect not just images, but forgotten dreams? What if memory and desire, when filtered through light and sound, could transcend time? Resurrection doesn’t supply its own answers, but it does offer something even rarer: a place to dream again.

“A marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

Anniversary Classics Presents: Power, Politics, and Passion in Nixon and Doctor Zhivago

December 2, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This holiday season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present two sweeping cinematic epics: Oliver Stone’s Nixon and David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, the latter celebrating its 60th anniversary. Though separated by three decades and worlds apart in style, these films form a captivating double feature: one a feverish psychological portrait of American power, the other an expansive romantic epic set against the convulsions of revolutionary Russia. Together, they reflect cinema’s enduring ability to illuminate the human stakes behind history’s most turbulent eras.

Get your tickets today to see Nixon on December 21st, featuring an in-person Q&A with director Oliver Stone alongside author Tim Grieving to discuss his new book on legendary composer John Williams, or Doctor Zhivago on December 30th, both playing at the Laemmle Royal.

Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) remains one of the filmmaker’s boldest achievements. Rather than approaching Richard Nixon as a political symbol, Stone crafts a bruised, haunted character study of a man who carried childhood wounds into the Oval Office. Anthony Hopkins delivers a mesmerizing performance as Nixon, capturing him in all his yearning, paranoia, cunning, and profound isolation. Then there’s John Williams’ brooding, elegant score, which guest speaker Tim Grieving argues ranks among the composer’s most underrated works. His and Stone’s post-screening conversation promises an illuminating look into the film’s creation, its political resonance, and the musical architecture that gives it shape.

Seen nearly three decades after its release, Nixon feels startlingly contemporary, its themes of secrecy, ambition, partisan rage, and the weight of personal demons on public decision-making continuing to echo. Stone’s approach, blending documentary grit with operatic intensity, constructs not a straightforward biopic but a cautionary American tragedy.

If Nixon examines a presidency from the inside out, Doctor Zhivago (1965) offers a radically different but equally powerful meditation on individuals swept into history’s path. Even sixty years after its making, David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize–winning novel remains one of cinema’s most beloved epics: a story of love, revolution, and moral endurance set during Russia’s collapse into modernity. Omar Sharif gives one of his finest performances as Yuri Zhivago, a poet and physician who is forced to navigate the conflicting directives of loyalty, passion, and survival, while Julie Christie’s luminous turn as Lara elevates the film into mythic territory.

Lean’s filmmaking—full of painterly compositions, sweeping landscapes, and meticulous craftsmanship—creates a world that feels both intimate and vast. The film’s visual grandeur is matched by Maurice Jarre’s iconic score, whose themes have become synonymous with cinematic romance. Yet for all its beauty, Doctor Zhivago is fundamentally a story about how political upheaval reshapes the contours of private life, and how love endures even as the world fractures.

Screened across consecutive weekends at the Laemmle Royal, these Anniversary Classics invite audiences to rediscover the emotional, historical, and artistic power of these two landmark films. Whether exploring the shadows of American politics or the passions of a Russia in revolt, Nixon and Doctor Zhivago remind us why great cinema remains one of the profoundest tools we have for understanding both our past and our present.

La Grazia: Sorrentino’s Quiet Reckoning with Power and Conscience

December 2, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This winter, Paolo Sorrentino returns with a film that trades some of his usual baroque excesses for a more pared-back, reflective tone. La Grazia, which opened the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, follows Mariano De Santis, an aging Italian president played by Toni Servillo, as he confronts a cluster of moral dilemmas in what increasingly feels like the final stretch of his public life. The film is less about political theater, however, than about the interior weather of a man whose decisions will echo far beyond his lifetime.

Catch La Grazia in theaters beginning December 12th at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale.

Servillo gives a performance that folds restraint into thunder. He embodies a figure who has been both admired and mocked, nicknamed “reinforced concrete” for his resolute public persona, yet now hesitates in private. Mariano must weigh whether to sign a bill legalizing euthanasia, he must decide on clemency petitions for men convicted of killing their partners, and he wrestles with a decades-old suspicion about his late wife’s fidelity. These are not simple plot devices but moral fulcrums that expose what power leaves behind in the chambers of the self.

Sorrentino’s camerawork here is unusually intimate. Where his earlier films luxuriated in spectacle, La Grazia presents more subtly. At times, the director allows a whisper of the surreal—a gaggle of policemen humoring a president’s joke, a rain-soaked banquet that slips into the uncanny—but mostly he leans into silence and the slow erosion of certainty. The result is a meditation on conscience rather than a polemic about institutions.

What makes La Grazia especially compelling is how it links public choices to private loss. Mariano’s deliberations are haunted by grief and a stubborn loyalty to principle; the final refuge of a man who has spent a lifetime making hard judgments and is forced, at the end, to reckon with the consequences.

In the end, La Grazia is neither an easy dismissal of political life nor a blind exaltation of following one’s conscience. It is, instead, a film that asks what grace looks like when measured against law, tradition, and love. Sorrentino frames no tidy answers; he simply enlarges the questions, and in so doing paints a picture of an office whose decisions are at once juridical and profoundly human.

For viewers who appreciate films that interrogate the emotional cost of leadership, Sorrentino’s latest is a modest but resonant triumph: a film that listens, and then lingers in the mind.

“Paolo Sorrentino has rediscovered his voice, his wan humour and his flair for the surreal… a welcome reassertion of his natural style.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“The beauty of the script is the way the turbulent thoughts of De Santis’ past… feed into his most important final responsibilities and his state of mind as he steps away from his seat of power.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

A World Erased: Shttl Opens at Laemmle

November 25, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This week, we’re proud to welcome Shttl (2022) to the big screen—a breathtaking, audacious film that rebuilds a vanished Yiddish-speaking village with a level of authenticity and emotional power that few works of historical cinema can match. Written and directed by Ady Walter, Shttl takes place entirely on June 21, 1941, just one day before the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, wherein Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. What follows feels less like a fast-unfolding tragedy than a prayer, a time capsule, and an elegy rolled into one.

Catch Shttl in its Los Angeles theatrical debut beginning Friday, November 28th at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center. Tickets on sale now.

The film’s craftsmanship is nothing short of bold. The dialogue is spoken entirely in Yiddish, a deliberate choice by Walter, who refused to shortcut historical fidelity. With a commitment to authenticity that extends beyond the soundtrack, Walter and his team built a full-scale shtetl set, complete with homes, a synagogue, and winding paths. The effect is immersive, culminating in the kind of reconstruction that feels less like a museum than a living, restless community.

At the center of Shttl is Mendele, played by Moshe Lobel, an aspiring filmmaker who returns to his shtetl from Kyiv to pursue his former sweetheart and confront the world he left behind. His blend of idealism, hurt, and fierce longing gives the film its emotional heart. Meanwhile, veteran actor Saul Rubinek, fluent in Yiddish, plays the local rabbi with gravitas and humanity, embodying the moral complexity of a man steeped in tradition yet unflinchingly cognizant that his world may not survive the present era.

Walter’s film doesn’t shy away from the specter of disaster. As the day progresses, a sense of dread gradually builds—not with explosions, but with intimate tension, whispered fears, and the weight of unmet obligations. Yet even as catastrophe looms, Shttl finds beauty in its quietest moments: a mother’s blessing, children playing, a philosophical debate about faith and modernity. It’s a meditation on loss, but also on connection, and how people come together to sustain their humanity even when everything they know could vanish overnight.

For audiences drawn to films that balance historical gravity with human warmth, Shttl is a rare and deeply affecting experience. It’s a tribute to a lost way of life, a mournful love letter, and a bold reminder that what we reconstruct on screen carries the power to resurrect more than just buildings—It can resurrect memory.

“A keenly observed, deeply cathartic movie… the kind of film most filmmakers dream their entire lives of making.” – Barry Levitt, SlashFilm

“Like being dropped out of a time machine into a vanished world.” – Alan Zeitlin, Unpacked Media

Art, Memory, and Moral Reckoning: Pascal Bonitzer’s Auction

November 19, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

This weekend, Laemmle Theatres welcomes back a film that unravels something far more complicated than simply bidding on a masterpiece. Auction, directed by Pascal Bonitzer, is a tense, morally charged drama that plunges into the high-stakes world of art restitution, and the human cost behind a long-lost painting.

Catch Auction in its much-anticipated theatrical return beginning this Friday, November 21st at the Laemmle Royal and Town Center. Tickets on sale now.

At the film’s center is André (played with wry charm by Alex Lutz), a Parisian auctioneer with a sharp eye and ambition to match. When he learns that a painting once believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis may actually be hanging in an unsuspecting worker’s home, he must decide whether to seize the opportunity with discretion or confront the haunting legacy that comes along with it.

What he’s found proves authentic: a wartime-provenance painting by Egon Schiele, once looted and now unexpectedly returned. But the painting’s journey doesn’t end there, for into this discovery step André’s former wife, an art appraiser played by the perceptive Léa Drucker, and his intern, a mendacious young man whose ambitions make him dangerously flexible. On the other side stands the earnest worker, suddenly aware that something in his modest life carries monumental history and value. And Bonitzer, a former Cahiers du Cinéma critic turned screenwriter, stages their entangled destinies with dry humor, intellectual rigor, and a healthy dose of optimism.

Visually, the film is elegant without being slick. Bonitzer invites us into richly textured interiors—salerooms, private homes, exam rooms where authenticity is confirmed—to show how power and legacy trade hands exchange after exchange. The film’s pace is deliberate, preserving space for questions, for hesitation, and for the weight of what it means to hold something once lost to violence.

Auction doesn’t just dramatize the art world: it skewers its fetishization, its secrecy, its ambition. But it’s not a straightforward condemnation, for the film also dwells on memory, justice, and the possibility of redemption, even as it asks how one’s moral compass might bend in the face of beauty and profit. In this way, the film is both thriller and parable, holding a mirror up to history and art’s persistent ability to provoke, wound, and heal.

Watching Auction on the big screen feels especially significant. It’s more than a movie about art; it’s a story about memory, responsibility, and how the past continues to reverberate in the present. As you settle into your seat, anticipate more than a simple bidding war: This is a meditation on who owns history, and who pays the price.

“Bonitzer… still has a knack for cutting dialogue and unexpected turnarounds.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“The more they argue over the value of “Wilted Sunflowers,” the more we sense that they are being forced to contend with the value of the argument they’re making.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Sing Out, Sing Proud: Laemmle’s Christmas Eve Fiddler on the Roof Sing-Along Returns

November 19, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

For many, Christmas Eve brings rituals of light, warmth, and gathering. And at Laemmle Theatres, one of our most cherished traditions is a celebration of all of those things—in song, in community, and in the spirited, big-hearted world of Fiddler on the Roof. This year, we’re thrilled to bring back our annual Fiddler on the Roof Sing-Along, playing the evening of December 24th at the Laemmle NoHo, Newhall, Claremont, and Glendale, and with both matinee AND evening showings at the Royal and Town Center. Get your tickets while you still can!

Whether you’ve been joining us for years or will be stepping into Anatevka for the very first time, the invitation remains the same: Come lift your voice, lean into the music, and share in a night that honors joy, resilience, and the freedom to celebrate together.

Norman Jewison’s 1971 classic, adapted from the long-running Broadway musical, remains one of the most beloved works of American cinema. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye and His Daughters,” the film follows Tevye the milkman—played with iconic warmth and humor by Topol—as he navigates tradition, change, and the unruly love stories of his five daughters in a quaint Russian village at the turn of the 20th century.

The film’s emotional range is extraordinary: exuberant one moment, aching the next. “TRADITION” explodes with communal energy; “IF I WERE A RICH MAN” turns longing into musical ecstasy; “SUNRISE, SUNSET” captures the fleeting nature of time; “ANATEVKA” balances sorrow with wry endurance. These songs do more than entertain: they hold memory, identity, and cultural inheritance inside their melodies.

And, in the shared space of a sing-along, their meaning only deepens. There’s something almost sacred about hundreds of voices rising together in laughter, lament, and love.

Laemmle’s Christmas Eve Fiddler tradition began as an affirmation, a celebration of the freedom to gather openly, joyfully, and Jewishly at a time of year when many in earlier generations felt they had to retreat from view. In light of history (as well as events ongoing today), coming together to sing feels not just festive, but vital.

This event has always been more than a screening. It’s community theater meets holiday catharsis: an evening where people dress as their favorite characters, lean fully into their off-key harmonies, and rediscover the beauty of cultural expression shared in public. Children, grandparents, longtime fans, first-timers—All are welcome in this communal chorus.

So come ready to sing at the top of your lungs, or simply to enjoy the joyful noise around you. Costumes are enthusiastically encouraged. Families are warmly invited; the film is rated G, though some themes may be complex for young children.

And remember: Fiddler sells out every year. If tradition teaches us anything, it’s not to wait for a miracle—so grab your tickets early.