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Dropping Today: The First Episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

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Introducing the new video podcast Inside the Arthouse. Hosted by Greg Laemmle, President of Laemmle Theatres, and actor and Emmy award-winning director Raphael Sbarge, Inside the Arthouse is an insider’s perspective on filmmakers and the people responsible for the movies showing on arthouse screens across the U.S.

Episode 101: Merchant Ivory: A Conversation with Stephen Soucy is now live everywhere you get your podcasts.

Laemmle Theatres opens Merchant Ivory this Friday at the Royal/West L.A. and Town Center/Encino. In his Hollywood Reporter review, David Rooney wrote of the film, “anyone with a fondness for…what might be described as a gentlemen guerrilla filmmaking operation will find immense pleasure here.” Merchant Ivory director Stephen Soucy will do in-person Q&As following the 7 PM screenings at the Royal on August 30 and 31. Film critic David Ansen will moderate the Q&A on the 30th.

Learn more about Inside the Arthouse at Insidethearthouse.com.

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The story of the “gentlemen guerrilla filmmaking operation,” MERCHANT IVORY opens August 30 at the Royal and Town Center.

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Merchant Ivory is the first definitive feature documentary to lend new and compelling perspectives on the partnership, both professional and personal, of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and their primary associates, writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins. Some of their many career highlights include A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. Footage from more than fifty interviews, clips, and archival material gives voice to the family of actors and technicians who helped define Merchant Ivory’s Academy Award-winning work of consummate quality and intelligence. With six Oscar winners among the notable artists participating, these close and often long-term collaborators intimately detail the transformational cinematic creativity and personal and professional drama of the wandering company that left an indelible impact on film culture.

Mr. Soucy on his film:

“There’s no other story like Merchant Ivory in the history of cinema and what a gift to be given an inside view of the Merchant Ivory
World from James Ivory and the more than 50 collaborators I interviewed in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, in making this documentary film.

“James Ivory is one of our greatest living directors and, at 95 years old, this Oscar-winner for the much-lauded Call Me by Your Name shows no sign of slowing down. He’s still working, having recently adapted a Ruth Jhabvala short story The Judge’s Will for director Alexander Payne and the French novel The End of Eddy slated to be a multi-episode miniseries.

“Once James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Jhabvala met, they were connected forever. Their work and personal lives entwined for over forty-five years, and they became the most famous collaborative troika in film history.

“Merchant Ivory released 43 films. Many were fraught productions, often budget-related, and their last film, The City of Your Final Destination, brought the company to bankruptcy. A look at the comprehensive list of films that Merchant Ivory made, and the roster of talent they worked with, reveals that theirs was a spectacular achievement.

“The Merchant Ivory story, with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant at its center, is about art, money, partnership, loyalty, dysfunction, love, jealousy, and, eventually for Jim, the necessity to move forward and embark on a new chapter after Ismail’s passing.”

“Anyone with a fondness for these movies and for tales of what might be described as a gentlemen guerrilla filmmaking operation will find immense pleasure here.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge Launch New Video Podcast INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

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Greg Laemmle, President of Laemmle Theaters, along with actor and Emmy Award-winning director Raphael Sbarge, are launching a new  Video Podcast called INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE. The show is dedicated to highlighting new  releases, repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and the key personalities who bring movies to the big screen. INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will be filmed and recorded at the Laemmle Royal Theatre, the 100-year-old theater that has been operated by three generations of Laemmles for the past half century.  

Laemmle says, “My family has been dedicated to providing a home for independent, foreign and documentary film for almost a century, and we have decided to launch INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE in order to promote the release of new films that will ultimately play in arthouses all across the country.” 

“Our interviews will be recorded in person or via Zoom, with filmmakers appearing large on  the screen,” says Sbarge, an independent filmmaker himself. “Opening a movie in theaters requires all the support they can get, and INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, is dedicated to the  celebration of seeing films in theaters.” 

Their first guests include Stephen Soucy, the director of MERCHANT IVORY, a documentary about art house mainstays Ismail Merchant and James Ivory; the Golden Lion-winning director of the Swedish film PARADISE IS BURNING, Mika Gustafson; the writer and director  of PREY FOR ROCK AND ROLL, Cheri Lovedog and Alex Steyermark, re-released in theaters via Kino Lorber, for their 20th anniversary; and the co-directors of the new documentary UNION, out of the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals, Brett Story and Steven Main.

In subsequent episodes – initially to be released every two weeks – INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will focus on new releases and repertory classics, filmmakers, distributors, and  personalities who are responsible for bringing movies to the big screen. The first episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE will premiere on August 28, 2024. The show can be found on  YouTube and all major podcast platforms. For more information, visit www.insidethearthouse.com!

“A rare work of art that thrills the senses and the mind… Worthy of that overused superlative ‘masterpiece.’” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times. Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center.

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ARMY OF SHADOWS, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 epic of the French Resistance unseen in the U.S. until its acclaimed 2006 release by Rialto Pictures, returns in a stunning new 4K Studiocanal restoration, having its L.A. premiere starting this Friday at at the Royal in West L.A. at the Town Center 5 in Encino. Winner of the New York Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006 — 36 years after it was made — ARMY OF SHADOWS stars Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Simone Signoret.

Occupied France: an escape from the Gestapo, so sudden and hairsbreadth as to leave Ventura, the toughest of tough guys, gasping with the icy sweat of terror and relief; two brothers remain unaware, to the end, of each other’s clandestine activities; patriots, who, in relentless pursuit of traitors, must steel themselves to the most brutal of face-to-face violence. But heroism can come at a truly high price.

 

French gangster movie legend Melville (Bob Le Flambeur, Le Samouraï, etc.) realized the dream of a quarter century when he adapted “the book of the Resistance,” written in 1943 by Joseph Kessel (Belle de Jour). Melville turned the detached, unblinking gaze of his film noir classics on these memories of his youth — he himself served for years underground — adding a finale so stoically uncompromising as to reduce Kessel himself to sobs.

Rialto’s 2006 release was the arthouse movie event of the year, getting awards from both the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Circles, but also appearing on over 20 major Top Ten lists of the year, including the number one pick for Manohla Dargis of The New York Times.

PRAISE FOR ARMY OF SHADOWS

“A rare work of art that thrills the senses and the mind…Worthy of that overused superlative MASTERPIECE!” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“THE TIGHTEST THRILLER IN TOWN! Lovers of cinema should reach for their fedoras, turn up the collars of their coats, and sneak to this picture through a mist of rain.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“A LOST MASTERPIECE…NOT JUST ONE OF THE GREAT FILMS OF THE ’60s BUT ONE OF THE GREAT FILMS — PERIOD.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

Restored in 4K from the original 35mm negative. Scanned by Image Retrouvée, with the project carried out by Sophie Boyer and Jean-Pierre Boiget of StudioCanal. Digitization and restoration with the support of the CNC.

Repertory Central – Upcoming Classics include THE CONVERSATION, ARMY OF SHADOWS, PARIS, TEXAS and BASQUIAT.

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Wasn’t it fabulous getting to see Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI on the big screen?  Well, there’s more where that came from. Get fired up for Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS, Wim Wenders’s PARIS, TEXAS, and Julian Schnabel’s BASQUIAT in the coming weeks, plus our one-night screening of LEGENDS OF THE FALL (with director Ed Zwick in person for a Q&A).  We’re planning even more for the fall. Add to these all the award-season films coming to Laemmle screens, that is a lot of rewarding moviegoing!
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THE CONVERSATION follows lonely wiretapping expert and devout Catholic Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who is hired to record a seemingly innocuous conversation in San Francisco’s Union Square between two lovers (Frederick Forsythe and Cindy Williams). Upon re-hearing the tapes, however, Caul believes he may put the couple in danger if he turns the material over to his client (Robert Duvall). But what one hears can ultimately turn out to be quite different from what was actually recorded. Opens this Friday at the Laemmle Royal, Town Center, and Glendale.
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ARMY OF SHADOWS opens August 16 at the Royal and Town Center: A gorgeous restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 epic of the French Resistance during World War II, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret. Based on the novel by Joseph Kessel (perhaps best known for Belle de Jour), the film draws on the wartime experiences of Kessel and Melville himself, both active members of the Resistance and Free French Forces. This is the first time the film has been released in the U.S.
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PARIS, TEXAS opens August 30 at the Royal. New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. PARIS, TEXAS follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski).
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BASQUIAT, opening September 13 at the Laemmle NoHo, depicts the meteoric rise of the brilliant artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, played by Jeffrey Wright in one of his first roles. Starting out as a street artist, living in Thompkins Square Park in a cardboard box, Jean-Michel is “discovered” by Andy Warhol’s art world and becomes a star. But success has a high price, and Basquiat pays with friendship, love, and, eventually, his life.

LEGENDS OF THE FALL 30th Anniversary Screening Director Ed Zwick in person August 15.

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LEGENDS OF THE FALL (1994)
30th Anniversary Screening
Director Ed Zwick in person, signing his book Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions
Thursday, August 15, at 7 PM, Royal Theatre

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 30th anniversary screening of Ed Zwick’s ‘Legends of the Fall,’ his hit Western epic starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas, and Julia Ormond. The screening is presented in conjunction with the recent publication of Zwick’s best-selling memoir, ‘Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.’ Zwick will participate in a post-screening Q&A along with the film’s award-winning editor Steven Rosenblum (Oscar-nominated for his work on Zwick’s ‘Glory’ and ‘Blood Diamond’), and he will be selling and signing copies of his book.

‘Legends of the Fall‘ was based on a highly praised novella by Jim Harrison and centers on a family in Montana during the early years of the 20th century. Susan Shilliday and William Wittliff wrote the screenplay. Hopkins plays the patriarch of the family, and his three sons are played by Pitt, Quinn, and Thomas. The film deals with the mistreatment of indigenous people during that period in history and also includes vivid scenes set during World War I, when all three brothers enlist to fight Germany. After the war, they become entangled with Irish bootleggers during the Prohibition era. Ormond is the Eastern woman loved by all three brothers. The cast also includes Karina Lombard, Tantoo Cardinal, and Gordon Tootoosis.

The film won an Oscar for John Toll’s stunning cinematography and also received nominations for art direction and sound. The following year, Toll won a second Oscar for shooting Mel Gibson’s ‘Braveheart.’ Steven Rosenblum, who edited many of Zwick’s movies, also worked on ‘Braveheart.’ The score for ‘Legends‘ was composed by another of Zwick’s frequent collaborators, James Horner (an Oscar winner for ‘Titanic’).

Made on a budget of $30 million, the film earned $160 million, making it a major hit and one of the most popular films during the 1994-1995 Oscar season. Although reviews were mixed, many critics praised the film. Variety wrote, “Zwick imbues the story with an easy, poetic quality…the actors, working as an ensemble, are near perfect in their service of the material.” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers singled out Brad Pitt, declaring that Pitt “proves himself a bona fide movie star, stealing every scene he’s in.” The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington wrote, “the landscapes, photographed by John Toll, majestically backdrop all the personal and cultural furies.” Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer concurred: “Check your cynicism at the door, and just revel in its enormity.”

Zwick’s book chronicles his career from his early days writing for television and includes piercingly candid reminiscences of his landmark shows ‘thirtysomething’ and ‘My So-Called Life,’ along with his features ‘About Last Night,’ ‘Glory,’ ‘Courage Under Fire,’ ‘The Last Samurai,’ ‘Blood Diamond,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (for which he won an Oscar for Best Picture). The book recounts his conflicts with Matthew Broderick, Julia Roberts, and Pitt, as well as studio executives like the infamous Harvey Weinstein. But Zwick also includes praise for his closest collaborators and many incisive reflections on the essential tenets of moviemaking.

“A puzzle-like homage to the noir genre itself, with echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and CHINATOWN,” ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS opens Friday at the Royal.

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Nineteen nineties small-town China. A woman’s body washes up in the local river. The chief of police, Ma Zhe, is tasked with heading up the investigation. An obvious perp leads to a hasty arrest, though the mystery lingers in Ma Zhe’s mind. What kind of darkness is truly at play here? Director Wei Shujun’s murky throwback film noir, gritty, textured film grain captures the pulpy proceedings. Torrents of rain envelop the characters as they descend into madness in pursuit of the truth. Equal parts atmospheric tour-de-force and beguiling puzzler, Only the River Flows is a masterfully styled ode to a bygone cinematic era and a sharp-edged portrait of provincial paranoia. The film, starring Zhu Yilong, is based on Yu Hua’s popular short novel Mistakes by the River. We open the film this Friday at the Royal.

“In a seamy offbeat world englobing the gleaming surfaces of Park Chan-wook’s terrific Decision to Leave, all scuzzed-up and grimy and the Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice with seams of absurdist dark comedy, Wei Shujun’s inventive riff on Asian-noir gives the expanding subgenre something its Chinese contributions often lack: a pitch-black sense of humor. Like the greatest genre exponent, Raymond Chandler, Wei cares less about logistics than about mood in this rainy, grainy movie (DP Chengma shoots on film in low light, giving the images a lovely dirty texture), lending the film in a cool retro vibe and a schlocky Brian De Palma-style opening. Humanizing quirks and flourishes abound, providing profundity to this touchingly melancholic portrait of small-town desperation.” -Variety.

  

“An enigmatic, progressively more engrossing noir directed by Wei Shujun, structurally inventive, if not downright format-twisting. The cinematography is genuinely star-making.” ~ Screen International

“A film noir that’s so vintage it comes wrapped in crackling celluloid and old cassette tapes. Written and directed by Wei Shujun, the movie is a puzzle-like homage to the noir genre itself, with echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville, Chinatown, and Memories of Murder.” ~ Hollywood Reporter

Wei Shujun was born in 1991 in Beijing, China. He started his career as an actor at age 14. He completed his master’s degree at the Communication University of China. His films include On the Border (short, 2018, Special Jury Award at Cannes Film Festival), Striding into the Wind (2020, Official Selection Cannes Film Festival) and Ripples of Life (2021, Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes). 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964) 60th Anniversary Screenings.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classic Series present this month’s screening in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Michelangelo Antonioni’s vibrant masterpiece RED DESERT, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1964 and collected rave reviews around the world on its release over the next several months. We will show the film at five of our theaters at 7 PM on Wednesday, July 31.

Antonioni had earned critical acclaim for the three movies in his “alienation trilogy”—’L’Avventura,’ ‘La Notte,’ and ‘Eclipse’ — made during the early 1960s. RED DESERT explored some of the same themes but introduced a new element to the director’s work. The three earlier movies were all shot in black-and-white, but with RED DESERT Antonioni decided to experiment with color cinematography for the first time, and critics heralded his achievement. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann declared, “With Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, the art of the film advances…quite simply, it is the best use of color I have ever seen in a film, exquisite in itself.” Kauffmann added, “there is a buried history of modern painting in it, from the Impressionists through Mondrian to Hopper and Wyeth.”

Monica Vitti, who had starred in all three of Antonioni’s earlier movies, has the leading role of Giuliana, the wife of an industrialist in Ravenna. She is emotionally troubled and eventually begins an affair with an employee at her husband’s factory. Carlo Chionetti plays the husband, and Richard Harris — fresh from his Oscar-nominated performance in Lindsay Anderson’s ‘This Sporting Life’ — plays her lover. Antonioni wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Tonino Guerra.

In addition to its psychological themes, the film offers prescient critique of industrial pollution, with the color cinematography contributing to this political commentary. A key collaborator was director of photography Carlo Di Palma, who worked closely with Antonioni to paint the landscapes when necessary to create the desired mood of malaise. Antonioni and Di Palma collaborated again on the director’s most successful movie, the English-language ‘Blowup,’ an Oscar nominee in 1966. Other directors around the world — including Ettore Scola, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Sidney Lumet — worked with Di Palma. The cinematographer later established a fruitful collaboration with Woody Allen on such films as ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ ‘Radio Days,’ and ‘Bullets Over Broadway.’

Time magazine called RED DESERT “at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by Italy’s masterful Michelangelo Antonioni.” More recently, Geoff Andrew of Time Out hailed “perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni’s entire career.” Robbie Collin of London’s Daily Telegraph declared, “Almost half a century on, RED DESERT remains a film of rare beauty and brooding erotic intensity.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called the film Antonioni’s “most mysterious and awe-inspiring work.”

Screening one night only at the Royal in West Los Angeles, the Town Center in Encino, and Laemmle Theatres in Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall.