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Laemmle Theatres
Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/blind-willow-sleeping-woman | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | A lost cat, a giant talkative frog and a tsunami help a bank employee without ambition, his frustrated wife and a schizophrenic accountant to save Tokyo from an earthquake and find a meaning to their lives in the animated feature Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car), the debut of composer Pierre Földes won the Jury Special Mention award at the renowned Annency Animation Film Festival.<br /><br />Tokyo, a few days after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Kyoko suddenly leaves her husband after spending five days in a row glued to unfolding<br /><br />Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/blind-willow-sleeping-woman<br /><br />RELEASE DATE: 4/14/2023<br /><br />-----<br />ABOUT LAEMMLE: Since 1938, Laemmle [Theatres] has been showing the finest independent, arthouse, and international films.<br /><br />Subscribe to Laemmle's E-NEWSLETTER: http://bit.ly/3y1YSTM<br />Visit Laemmle.com: http://laemmle.com<br />Like LAEMMLE on FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/3Qspq7Z<br />Follow LAEMMLE on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/3O6adYv<br />Follow LAEMMLE on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/3y2j1cp
Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/sanson-and-me | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes (499) met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. With no permission to interview him, Sansón and Reyes worked together over a decade, using hundreds of letters as inspiration to create a portrait of a friendship navigating immigration and the depths of the criminal justice system.

Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/sanson-and-me

RELEASE DATE: 3/20/2023
Director: Rodrigo Reyes

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ABOUT LAEMMLE: Since 1938, Laemmle [Theatres] has been showing the finest independent, arthouse, and international films.

Subscribe to Laemmle's E-NEWSLETTER: http://bit.ly/3y1YSTM
Visit Laemmle.com: http://laemmle.com
Like LAEMMLE on FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/3Qspq7Z
Follow LAEMMLE on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/3O6adYv
Follow LAEMMLE on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/3y2j1cp
Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/sweetwater | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | Hall of Famer Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton makes history as the first African American to sign an NBA contract, forever changing how the game of basketball is played.

Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/sweetwater

RELEASE DATE: 4/14/2023

-----
ABOUT LAEMMLE: Since 1938, Laemmle [Theatres] has been showing the finest independent, arthouse, and international films.

Subscribe to Laemmle's E-NEWSLETTER: http://bit.ly/3y1YSTM
Visit Laemmle.com: http://laemmle.com
Like LAEMMLE on FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/3Qspq7Z
Follow LAEMMLE on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/3O6adYv
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Laemmle Theatres

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“One of the very best movies Wes Anderson has ever made.” (IndieWire) #AsteroidCity tickets now on sale! Opens June 23rd! 🎟️ laemmle.com/film/asteroid-cityJason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks star ... See MoreSee Less

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"Refreshing and inspiring. Raises the bar for trans stories onscreen, and Lysette takes her rightful place as its muse... A meticulously crafted master class in restraint." -IndieWire Tickets: 🎟️ laemmle.com/film/monica ... See MoreSee Less

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STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie is “a deeply satisfying portrait of a legend.” -The Hollywood Reporter - Get tickets now!From Academy Award Winner Davis Guggenheim, Michael J. Fox shares his story in his own words.Laemmle Royal & Laemmle NoHo 7 Tix 🎟️: laemmle.com/film/still-michael-j-fox-movie ... See MoreSee Less

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Home » Theater Buzz » Town Center 5

A “sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama,” THE STARLING GIRL opens Friday at the Laemmle Town Center, Monica Film Center and Glendale.

May 24, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

A Grand Jury Prize nominee at Sundance and an Audience Award nominee at South by Southwest as well as a winner of the Directors to Watch Prize at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, The Starling Girl is both a brilliant depiction of the American evangelical community and, with the fantastic lead performance of Eliza Scanlen, a chance to catch a rising star. You may have seen her supporting performances in, among other things, Sharp Objects (2018) and Little Women (2019). The Starling Girl gives Scanlen the chance to carry a feature and she utterly succeeds.
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“The Starling Girl lives and breathes through Scanlen’s stellar performance.” ~ Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com
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“Parmet’s strong script and surety behind the camera navigates the audience through this complicated story of religion and sexuality, patriarchy and power, brought to eerily accurate life by the ensemble of excellent actors.” ~ Katie Walsh, TheWrap

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“Laurel Parmet makes a striking, assured feature directorial debut with The Starling Girl, which serves double duty in solidifying Eliza Scanlen’s already pretty solid reputation as a young actor worth watching.” ~ Glenn Kenny, Boston Globe

“Parmet is confident enough to know that atmosphere, emotional tone and unspoken feeling can convey far more meaning than the talkiest of dialogue.” ~  Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“Parmet’s less interested in cultish dread than a more naturalistic dullness of isolation and groupthink you’d find in any closed conservative society where women of faith have been sold a purity narrative.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“It’s a refreshing change to see this milieu treated with the level of nuance that Laurel Parmet brings to The Starling Girl.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety

“The language and strictures of their religious community are perfectly rendered by writer and director Laurel Parmet, who captures the complicated interplay of power and immaturity that can blossom in isolated communities.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

“Scanlen’s work here is steeped in the feeling of a real-life being lived right in front of you.” ~ Jason Bailey, The Playlist

“The power of this sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama is rooted in the friction that it finds between biblical paternalism and modern personhood.” ~ David Ehrlich, indieWire

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Filed Under: Featured Films, Featured Post, Films, Glendale, Press, Santa Monica, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

“When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it.” Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus on YOU HURT MY FEELINGS, opening Friday.

May 22, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Gifted writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Last Duel) has a new comedic drama we’re thrilled to open Friday at our Claremont, Glendale, Santa Monica, Newhall, North Hollywood and Encino theaters. You Hurt My Feelings is her second collaboration with Seinfeld and Veep legend, 11-time Emmy Award winner and Mark Twain Prize for American Humor recipient Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The first was Enough Said, with James Gandolfini. Hopefully the two collaborate again because this one’s a gem too. Alissa Wilkinson of Vox described the movie as “warm-hearted and rueful and hilarious in all the best ways” while Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote that it’s “one of [Holofcener’s] smartest and funniest films.”

The New York Times just published a joint interview with Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus. Here’s an excerpt:

Was there an inciting incident that prompted this film?

NICOLE HOLOFCENER It started brewing as soon as I started screening my movies or having people read my scripts, wondering if they’re telling me the truth or not. And believing that I can tell. What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies. They have to love everything, in other words, for me to feel safe.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS She’s very sensitive.

HOLOFCENER I just came up with a what-if. What would be the worst scenario of somebody telling me they love something and me not believing them? I do have friends that I don’t believe. And there’s one person in particular that I don’t believe. I’m actually OK with it. Because I know they love me and get me and clearly they’re wrong. I mean, it hurts a little. They didn’t admit it.

Since Nicole wrote this script with you in mind, did you connect to it immediately?

LOUIS-DREYFUS Yes. I think it’s interesting to consider the notion of worth and self-worth. Am I my work? And who am I without my work? That’s certainly something I like to think about. And that this is ostensibly a great relationship between a married couple, and then the wheels just totally fall off the bus. That was kind of terrifying to consider.

I told Frank Rich [the former New York Times columnist who was an executive producer of her series “Veep”] the premise of this before we shot it. He audibly gasped.

HOLOFCENER Oh good. That’s my audience. Not the p

eople who would hear the premise and go, ‘Yeah, so what? Like, what planet are you from?’

Since you wrote this with Julia in mind, did that change your approach?

HOLOFCENER [To Louis-Dreyfus] Just don’t listen, because it’s going to sound stupid.

[Louis-Dreyfus throws her cappuccino-stained napkin over her head to avoid eye contact.]

HOLOFCENER When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it. She just sparks my imagination.

Is there a scene that you wouldn’t have written if Julia wasn’t your lead actress?

LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh God.

HOLOFCENER Certainly, I can see other actors doing the scenes differently, and I’m so glad they’re not in it and she is.

What scene specifically?

HOLOFCENER The scene where she’s sitting on the couch with her sister, she’s smoking pot. This is after she’s heard the bad news; she’s crying. It’s tragic. And you really feel for her, but you’re laughing because of that face.

LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh gee, thanks.

HOLOFCENER Julia walks a very fine line between comedy and drama. And that’s what I like to do with my writing. I didn’t have to do much, or anything, for her to get what I mean. We know this movie is about something fairly minor in the world of things.

LOUIS-DREYFUS But also very major.

HOLOFCENER But in the big picture, we’re not going to be crying for her. We hope she’ll get over it. But I think that scene works because she seems like she’s about 16. I think all of us are sometimes still 16. Especially when it comes to getting approval or not getting approval. I still think of myself that way. So that’s funny to see a grown-up person behave like they’re 16, in an honest way. Not in a movie way. Or a histrionic or a silly way.

Click here to read the full New York Times piece.

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Filed Under: Claremont 5, Featured Films, Films, Glendale, Newhall, News, NoHo 7, Santa Monica, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

ONLY IN THEATERS now on VOD.

May 3, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

If you or someone you know want to see the acclaimed documentary about Laemmle Theatres Only in Theaters at home, it’s now available for rent via Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and other on demand platforms. The film about the 85-year history of the family owned and operated foreign and indie movie exhibition company has been praised as both “heartbreaking and heartening…its subject the movies themselves” (Longtime lead L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan). Robert Abele of the Times wrote “like a knotty, poignant family business saga you might see on one of their screens, the story here is beautiful and complicated, one in which the twin weights of legacy and calling bear down on the need to survive in changing times.” The interviewees include Turan, Greg and Tish Laemmle, Allison Anders, Cameron Crowe, Ava DuVernay, Nicole Holofcener, James Ivory and Leonard Maltin.

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Claremont 5, Films, Glendale, Greg Laemmle, Newhall, News, NoHo 7, Royal, Santa Monica, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

Bronx Bomber Yogi Berra bio-documentary IT AIN’T OVER opens May 11 with 2-for-1 discounts.

May 3, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra is one of baseball’s greatest. He amassed ten World Series rings, three MVP awards and 18 All Star Game appearances. He caught the only perfect game in World Series history. Yet for many his deserved stature was overshadowed by his simply being himself and being recognized more for his unique personality, TV commercial appearances and unforgettable “Yogi-isms,” initially head-scratching philosophical nuggets that make a lot more sense the more you think about them. In telling the whole story, It Ain’t Over gives Berra his due in following the life of a savvy, commanding, bad ball-hitting catcher with a squat frame but also a D-Day veteran, loving husband and father and, yes, product endorser and originator (mostly) of his own brand of proverbs now ingrained into everyday life. Granddaughter Lindsay Berra tells his story along with his sons, former Yankee teammates, players he managed, writers, broadcasters, and admirers (such as Billy Crystal), plus photos and footage on and off the diamond. Berra famously said, “I’d be pretty dumb if I started being something I’m not,” and It Ain’t Over lovingly makes clear he stayed who he was for the benefit of baseball and everyone else.

We open the film on Thursday, May 11 at the Royal and Friday, May 19 at the Town Center, Newhall, Glendale and Claremont.

On Thursday, May 11 and Sunday, May 14, we’re running a two-for-one promotion: buy one ticket for any screening of It Ain’t Over at the Royal on either day and get a second one for free. The only restriction is you have to buy your tickets at the Royal box office, not online.

“Yogi Berra lived the kind of life we wish our heroes to have: filled with love, respect, and integrity. This is a film fans can embrace and younger generations can learn from. I loved it.” ~ Leonard Maltin, leonardmaltin.com

“More emotional than you’d expect from a doc about a hard-hitting catcher.” ~ Dan Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter

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Filed Under: Claremont 5, Featured Films, Featured Post, Filmmaker in Person, Films, Glendale, Newhall, News, Q&A's, Royal, Special promotion, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

The “tender, sexy, very French” OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center.

April 26, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Other People’s Children, the French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski’s romantic drama about a Parisian high school teacher who falls in love with the single father of a little girl, was nominated for four Lumiere Awards, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, and Actress, winning the latter. The film “sneaks up on you, with a depth and complexity of feeling that throws [its] glossy, idyllic opening moments into bittersweet relief.” (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)
 
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: “When a woman falls in love in the sensitive French slice of life Other People’s Children, you may fall, too…while [Zlotowski is] very good at making the character’s romantic intoxication feel vivid and real — you vibe on the heady dreaminess of this new love — the filmmaker isn’t inside that bubble. Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies…By the end, with delicacy and with a sympathetic if unsentimental gaze, Zlotowski has gathered together the story’s seemingly disparate, charming and aching pieces — a song, a tantrum, an illness, a misunderstood boy, a traumatic childhood accident — and turned these fragments of life into a life, one that’s as worth living as it is worth watching.”

“Deftly written, directed with a light hand and acted with honesty and heart, the picture captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality.” ~ Wendy Ide, Guardian

Rebecca Zlotowski’s Director’s Statement: I began by adapting Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, a novel that confronts a man’s impotence head on. But something resisted. Not because I couldn’t project myself into this man who was unable to get hard, or who feared no longer being able to, but perhaps because I could identify too well. Gradually I recognized my own impotence, that of a 40-year-old woman without children, who wants one, and in part raises those of another woman. A stepmother without being a mother herself. As painfully commonplace as male impotence, this situation was nevertheless the starting point of a story worthy of being told, having hardly been told before.

It seemed to me that the bond which can link us to the child of another, a man we love, whose life and therefore family we share, not only has no name – we speak of motherhood, of fatherhood, not ‘step-motherhood’ or ‘step-fatherhood’ – but is also rarely depicted.

There was a kind of gap between comic book representations on one hand – the evil ‘Disney’ stepmother from a world in which women died in childbirth and were replaced by young women unwilling and ill-equipped to love children who weren’t their own, burdens that came with marriage, and on the other hand overwhelmed stepmothers in reconstituted families in unevenly successful romantic comedies.

Rebecca Zlotowski

Where was the woman who nurtured an intimate and precious connection with the child or children, she was raising for years without having any herself, while accepting the risk of being erased from the equation once her relationship with the father ended? What is to be done with this relationship when it weighs heavily on decisions of the heart? How can you still live in the same city with people you have been with, loved, cared for, but who are already sharing their lives with others?

I wanted to write this film about this secondary character using the tools of cinema. But a cinema of secondary characters, as opposed to the cinema of protagonists experiencing passion and excess in conflict. To have a new matrix of emotions prevail: friendship between men and women, tenderness between women, frustration rather than betrayal, the melancholy of missed rendez-vous with life but also the joy of successful encounters with desire, eroticism, the consolations of happiness. To focus on those transitory loves we experience between great romances… what the Americans call “on the rebound”. Rebound girl, rebound boy.

I imagined Other People’s Children in its literary and melodic dimension. Each fade out and in, every iris in and out, the skies that show the passing seasons, all should be read as chapters in a countdown in the life of a woman, of a couple and their desire.

I thought a lot about those studies of human nature from the early 1980s at which American cinema excelled: Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, Kramer vs. Kramer, An Unmarried Woman… definitive films about ordinary, collective experiences, with a sort of musical generosity and classical simplicity in their structures, a modesty in their depiction of these relationships that develop and disintegrate, that struggle and break apart.

Other People’s Children owes almost everything to its cast, which isn’t the case with every film. Roschdy Zem, my great ally since Savages, and Chiara Mastroianni, who agreed to join us for several scenes and who during the shoot agreed that we were breaking the rule that dictates that there is room for only one great female role in a film, not two. The film above all compensated for – I was going to say avenged! – my missed appointment over the years with Virginie Efira, who contributed with her “erotic brain,” to use the phrase coined by Anne Berest (who also acts in the film). The intelligence of her acting, her generosity, her dignity renders her the heir to the stars of those studies of human nature whose guiding spirit hovered over the film: Jill Clayburgh, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton… Women who touched me and in whom I recognized myself, for whom femininity is not a given, but something of their own making. Action, diction, reaction, seduction: there is nothing ‘in itself’ about Virginie’s femininity, but a fierce and stubborn will to be. To construct the person you want to be. And I loved her.

In a sort of ironic twist of fate, having no longer hoped for it, I discovered during prep that I was pregnant, and I shot the film while expecting a child who was born several days after we finished mixing. I felt that I was filming this love letter in solidarity with childless women – nulliparous, as the doctors say – while no longer belonging to their community without having yet joined the other.

With Other People’s Children, I wanted to simply make the film I needed to see. ~ Rebecca Zlotowski, Paris, June 8th, 2022.

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Filed Under: Director's Statement, Featured Films, Films, News, Royal, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

“We must switch over — and fast.” Oliver Stone on his new documentary NUCLEAR NOW, opening April 28

April 19, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

As fossil fuels continue to cook the planet, the world is finally becoming forced to confront the influence of large oil companies and tactics that have enriched a small group of corporations and individuals for generations. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy- science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th
century, first for bombs and then to power submarines and the United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid 20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests. This campaign would sow fear about
harmless low-level radiation and create confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, iconic director Oliver Stone explores the possibility for the global community to overcome challenges like climate change and reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy- an option that may become a vital way to ensure our continued survival sooner than we think.

We open Nuclear Now for a week-long engagement April 28 at the Monica Film Center with one-night screenings at our Newhall, NoHo, Town Center and Claremont theaters on May 1.

DIRECTORS STATEMENT:
Climate change has brutally forced us to take a new look at the ways in which we generate energy as a global community. Long regarded as dangerous in popular culture, nuclear power is in fact hundreds of times safer than fossil fuels and accidents are extremely rare.

So, how can we lift billions of people from poverty while rapidly cutting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane — and, in many countries, coal? “Renewables” like wind and solar power can certainly contribute to this transition but are limited by weather and geography. While miracle batteries are not arriving to save us, engineers have been commercializing new, smaller nuclear reactor designs that can be mass-manufactured at low cost.

We must switch over — and fast.

This is, in my mind, the greatest story of our time — discussing humanity’s arc from poverty to prosperity and its mastery of science to overcome the modern demand for more and more energy. – Oliver Stone April 2023

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Filed Under: Claremont 5, Director's Statement, Films, Newhall, News, NoHo 7, Santa Monica, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING 35th anniversary screening with guest Lena Olin April 12.

April 5, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present our first movie of 2023: a 35th anniversary screening of Philip Kaufman’s erotic masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, adapted from the acclaimed novel by Czech author Milan Kundera. Kaufman wrote the screenplay with veteran French writer Jean-Claude Carriere (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Tin Drum, The Return of Martin Guerre), and they earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1988. The film earned a second Oscar nod for the stunning cinematography by Sven Nykvist. The screening is Wednesday, April 12, at 7 PM at our Royal Theatre in West L.A. Film critic Stephen Farber will attend to moderate a Q&A with co-star Lena Olin, who will join via Zoom.

Set in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the brutal Soviet invasion that followed, the film follows the romantic and political adventures of a lusty surgeon named Tomas. Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis had his first starring role in the picture, after earning attention for his strong supporting performances in A Room With a View and My Beautiful Laundrette two years earlier. One year after Unbearable, Day-Lewis earned his first Oscar for his performance in My Left Foot. The two important women in Tomas’s life are portrayed by Lena Olin as an artist and Juliette Binoche as an aspiring photographer. Eventually Tomas marries Binoche’s Tereza, but she remains troubled by his constant philandering.

Olin had first made her mark in several plays and films directed by Ingmar Bergman, and after Unbearable, she appeared in many important films all over the world. Binoche was a newer face in 1988, but she too went on to become a major international star. A decade later she won an Oscar in another acclaimed adaptation, The English Patient. The international supporting cast of Unbearable includes Derek de Lint, Erland Josephson, Stellan Skarsgård, and Donald Moffat. Award-winning editor Walter Murch cut the film and Saul Zaentz and Paul Zaentz produced.

The story begins as an erotic comedy but takes a darker turn during the Russian invasion. Kaufman took a unique approach in dramatizing this traumatic event, blending newsreel footage of the invasion with staged scenes that were actually filmed in Paris (since Czechoslovakia remained under Soviet rule when filming commenced in 1986). When Tomas refuses to denounce his own anti-Russian writing from before the invasion, he loses his job, and he and Tereza must struggle to survive.

Critical response to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Variety called Unbearable “a richly satisfying adaptation.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley agreed that Kaufman’s film was an “eloquent adaptation of Milan Kundera’s erotic novel” and added that the film “stirs the heart, the hormones and the head.” Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert declared, “What is remarkable… is not the sexual content itself, but the way Kaufman has been able to use it as an avenue for a complex story, one of nostalgia, loss, idealism and romance.”

Lena Olin will participate in a Q&A before the screening on April 12. To recall some of Olin’s many other credits, she earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story and also co-starred in such films as Romeo is Bleeding, Havana, Night Falls on Manhattan, the Oscar-winning The Reader, and Chocolat and Casanova, both directed by her husband, Lasse Hallstrom. During our conversation Olin will also discuss her newest film with Hallstrom, the biographical drama Hilma, opening at the Royal and Town Center on April 14.

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Filed Under: Anniversary Classics, Featured Films, Featured Post, Films, News, Q&A's, Royal, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

New York Times on WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? ~ “How Cold War Politics Destroyed One of the Most Popular Bands in America.”

March 31, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

The Times just published a fascinating feature by rock critic Alan Light about the documentary we’re opening today at the Monica Film Center, with one-night screenings next week at the Laemmle NoHo, Claremont, Town Center and Glendale. (The filmmaker and a member of the band will participate in several Q&As; full schedule here.) The sub head: “A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.”

The full piece is worth reading but it begins: “Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”

“Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.

““This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.””

Read the full piece here.

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Filed Under: Claremont 5, Featured Films, Filmmaker in Person, Films, Glendale, NoHo 7, Q&A's, Santa Monica, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

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