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The official blog of Laemmle Theatres

“Accountability is a big issue in the world right now. This is a film about people in power being held accountable.” ARGENTINA, 1985 opens September 30 at the Royal.

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Argentina, 1985 is inspired by the true story of public prosecutors Julio Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo, who dared to investigate and prosecute Argentina’s bloodiest military dictatorship in 1985. Undeterred by the military’s still considerable influence within their fragile new democracy, Strassera and Moreno Ocampo assembled a young legal team of unlikely heroes for their David-vs-Goliath battle. Under constant threat to themselves and their families, they raced against time to bring justice to the victims of the military junta.

Ricardo Darín & Peter Lanzani

The journey to making Argentina, 1985 began with a meeting of two old friends. Director Santiago Mitre and producer Axel Kuschevatzky are long-time creative collaborators, on films including Paulina (2015) and The Summit (La Cordillera) (2017). Argentina, 1985 was devised while discussing their love of cinema. “We love to pick each other’s brains,” says Kuschevatzky. “We were sitting in a bar in Buenos Aires having a conversation about movies we adore. We were talking about political thrillers we love, like All The President’s Men or Judgment At Nuremburg. We wondered why there was no equivalent in Argentina. We talked about what might be the subject of such a film. Santi said, ‘It has to be the Trial of the Juntas.’”

Ricardo Darín

The Trial of the Juntas was one of the most seismic moments in Argentinian history. During the dictatorship of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, from 1976 to 1983, Argentina was ruled by a pitiless military government. The country lived in a state of terror, with supposed enemies of the government tortured, killed or ‘disappeared’ on an unimaginable scale. In 1985, two years after the government had collapsed and democracy had been tentatively restored, nine of the former military leaders were tried for war crimes. The Trial of the Juntas was the largest such case since the Nüremberg Trials. Securing a judgement against the dictators seemed close to impossible given how much power they still wielded.

Peter Lanzani & Ricardo Darín

Trying the case fell to veteran public prosecutor Julio Strassera and a young and eager deputy, Luis Moreno Ocampo. With few people willing to assist on a surely unwinnable case, they had no choice but to gather a team of very young, very inexperienced assistants. As much as the majority of the country wanted them to succeed, they had little faith in their
chances. The trial last five months, during which time 833 witnesses gave their testimony. The country was on a knife-edge through the trial. Strassera and Moreno Ocampo received multiple death threats. Bomb threats were regularly made and several bombs were detonated at government buildings. It was an extremely dangerous time. Despite all the odds stacked against them, Strassera and Moreno Ocampo never gave up. It was a story with all the makings of a political thriller.

“This was an event that had a big impact on my family,” says Mitre, who was just five years old when the trial took place. “My mother worked in the justice system her whole life. Beyond that, it had a huge impact on me as an Argentinian and the way I see my country. I’ve always wanted to tell this story. These were just ordinary men doing their jobs in the best way they could. It’s a story about how regular people can change society.”

Mitre also saw that this story had a lot of relevance today. While it’s about a specific time in Argentina, this inspiring tale of people fighting back against oppressive leaders, and fighting for democracy, will resonate with audiences everywhere. The story of Argentina in 1985 has many echoes in what’s happening around the globe right now. “This is a story that speaks to Argentinians, but it will speak to people anywhere in the world,” says Mitre. “Strassera achieved this extraordinary thing for Argentina, which also sent a message about justice to people all over the world.”

Santiago Mitre

“Accountability is a big issue in the world right now,” says Kuschevatzky. “This is a film about people in power being held accountable.” With such a rich historical story and such contemporary resonance, both Mitre and Kuschevatzky were surprised they were the first to bring The Trial Of The Juntas to film. “We wondered why nobody had made this story before,” says Kuschevatzky. “It’s like a superhero film. These are everyday guys who are facing a seemingly insurmountable force. It’s a very complex story and it’s a period piece, which brings extra complications, so we knew it was going to be a challenge, but it is such an amazing story that we knew we had to make it.” Neither man realised quite how much of a challenge, and quite how rewarding, it was going to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xOqgolOHPg

Time to say goodbye. The end (for now) of Laemmle Virtual Cinema.

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After helping Laemmle Theatres survive the pandemic and theater closures, the last day to secure a rental on Laemmle Virtual Cinema will be Sunday, October 9. Thank you to everyone who rented movies and brought world cinema home to feel less isolated during dark days. Highlights among the several hundred titles we were proud to feature are Shiva Baby, the Eric Rohmer series A Tale of Springtime, A Tale of Summer, A Tale of Autumn and A Tale of Winter, Berlin Alexanderplatz; The Man Who Sold His Own Skin; and Murina. We continued LVC after reopening in April 2021 for those who enjoyed and found it useful but our core mission is and always has been theatrical exhibition. We firmly believe movies are simply better seen on a big screen with an audience and want to encourage and focus on that.

“A touching, sensory-driven new chapter to the cinema of escape and loss,” Mathieu Amalric and Vicky Krieps’ HOLD ME TIGHT opens September 23.

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Laemmle Theatres is pleased to present Mathieu Amalric’s deeply emotional drama Hold Me Tight, a selection of the Cannes International Film Festival, nominated for Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay César Awards. We open Hold Me Tight opens Friday, September 23 at the Laemmle Royal. With 1.05 million Americans dead from COVID in the past two-and-a-half years, art about grief is crucial right now, and this film explores the subject brilliantly.

Adapted from a stage play by Claudine Galéa, Hold Me Tight stars Vicky Krieps as Clarisse, a mother coping with great emotional upheaval, and Arieh Worthalter (Girl) as Marc, the husband she leaves behind. Krieps gives a riveting performance as a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Amalric’s sophisticated narrative alternates between scenes of Clarisse’s road trip and of Marc as he cares for their two children, Paul and Lucie, a pianist prodigy. While giving clues along the way, Amalric keeps viewers uncertain as to the reality of what they’re seeing until the film’s final moments.

With a dual career as an acclaimed actor (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument, The Grand Budapest Hotel) and a writer-director (Barbara, The Blue Room, On Tour), Amalric’s sixth directorial outing is a daring, poignant and unpredictable story about love, absence, grief, and memory. Luxembourg-born actress Vicky Krieps came to international attention with her performance opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and has since starred in Bergman Island by Mia Hansen-Love and Old by M. Night Shyamalan.

Hold Me Tight’s soundtrack includes piano pieces by Ravel, Debussy, Messiaen, Beethoven, Rameau, Schönberg and Rachmaninov; the film features clips of legendary pianist Martha Argerich performing Ravel, Mozart and Chopin.

“One of the best films of the year…a powerful piece of work with poetic direction and incredible work from Krieps, an actress who increasingly feels like she’s never going to miss.” ~ Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

“Hold Me Tight deftly unsettles what it means to “leave”—emotionally, physically, and spiritually—when staying put may prove impossible to bear.” ~ Eileen G’Sell, Reverse Shot

“A touching, sensory-driven new chapter to the cinema of escape and loss…with Amalric’s alert, empathetic stewardship and Krieps’ gripping portrayal, [Hold Me Tight] sets aside the banality of grief’s burden for something more alive and elusive, but no less affecting.” ~ Robert Abele, The Wrap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAi7xe8FvTg

Akira Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD 65th Anniversary Screenings September 21.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present this month’s installment in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Akira Kurosawa’s unique Shakespearean adaptation, Throne of Blood. The Japanese auteur was always an admirer of the Bard. His late film Ran offered a variation on King Lear. The power, majesty and craftsmanship of a film like Throne of Blood can only fully appreciated in a theatrical setting: with an audience, with a big screen, and sound you can feel. We’ll be showing a DCP.

For many years Kurosawa dreamed of adapting Macbeth, and he put the film together in 1957, with his favorite actor Toshiro Mifune starring as the ambitious, murderous leader. Isuzu Yamada co-stars as the Lady Macbeth character, with Takashi Shimura as the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Macduff. Kurosawa wrote the screenplay with Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Ryuzo Kikushima. They transposed the story from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan and Kurosawa came up with striking visual concepts to revitalize the classic story. The castle exteriors were filmed on the slopes of Mount Fuji and the memorable climax—with a massive array of arrows aimed at the deranged protagonist—remains one of the greatest images in any Kurosawa movie.

Writing of this climactic scene, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane declared,“No stage production could match Kurosawa’s Birnam Wood, and, in his final framing of the hero — a human hedgehog, stuck with arrows — he conjures a tragedy not laden with grandeur but pierced, like a dream, by the absurd.” British critic Derek Malcolm of the Guardian acclaimed Throne of Blood as “a landmark of visual strength… possibly the finest Shakespearean adaptation ever committed to the screen.”

On its original American release, Time magazine praised the film as “a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition.” In his four-star review, Leonard Maltin called the film a “graphic, powerful adaptation of Macbeth in a samurai setting.” It was not simply film critics who endorsed the film. Renowned literary critic Harold Bloom said that Throne of Blood was “the most successful film version of Macbeth.”

Laemmle Theatres will screen Throne of Blood on September 21 at our Glendale, Newhall and Royal theaters on Wednesday, September 21 at 7 o’clock.

Watch Laemmle Theatres’ Isaac Wade on Spectrum News 1 for National Cinema Day + a Cinema Day poll!

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     Saturday’s National Cinema Day was such a success, drawing more than eight million moviegoers for the best moviegoing weekend of 2022, that it might become an annual event. Laemmle Royal and Monica Film Center General Manager Isaac Wade and a theater customer even got interviewed by journalist Nathalie Basha of local station Spectrum News 1. Isaac spoke about the experience of welcoming big crowds back to his theater: “To see people back and in line and excited to be here and wanting to support the industry, I think…that’s incredible. It’s exciting, it’s moving.”
     We are so pleased about the day’s results that we want to learn more, so here’s a poll. Did you take advantage of National Cinema Day? What movie did you see? Was Saturday your first return to the movies since before the pandemic? Inquiring minds want to know! Thank you and see you at the movies!

Vincent D’Onofrio in Person for FULL METAL JACKET 35th Anniversary Screening Sept. 13

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 35th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s savage anti-war drama Full Metal Jacket, which scored a box office success in 1987 and also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Kubrick, celebrated Vietnam author Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford adapted Hasford’s 1979 novel, The Short-Timers. The acclaimed cast includes Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and R. Lee Ermey. D’Onofrio will join for a Q&A after the 7 PM screening at the Royal on Tuesday, September 13.

Kubrick came late to the Vietnam war movie cycle, after such Oscar-winning films as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon. But he added his own sardonic and biting slant to his dissection of the terrible war. One of Kubrick’s early celebrated movies was his 1957 drama Paths of Glory, set during World War I. And his 1964 Oscar nominee, Dr. Strangelove, took a unique black comic approach to the terrifying subject of nuclear annihilation. Some of the same dark humor freshens Full Metal Jacket, though it also contains deadly serious depictions of brutal basic training as well as the horrors of a misguided, doomed war.

The first section of the film dramatizes the basic training of a platoon of Marine recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina. Former real-life drill instructor R. Lee Ermey portrays the savage sergeant in charge of the soldiers’ training. Ermey improvised much of the scathing and scatological dialogue, based on his own personal experience as a sergeant during the Vietnam War. He bullies and brutalizes all of the recruits but takes special pleasure in tormenting the overweight soldier played by D’Onofrio, whom he nicknames Gomer Pyle. Modine tries to protect D’Onofrio, with little success.

When the action shifts to Vietnam during the Tet offensive, it retains its hard-edged, nihilistic spirit. The entire film was actually shot in England, but Kubrick and his technical crew did an extraordinary job of recreating an American military base and the cities and jungles of Southeast Asia without ever leaving the English countryside.

Critical reactions to the film were very strong. Gene Siskel called Full Metal Jacket “a great piece of filmmaking.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “Aiming for minds as well as hearts, Kubrick hits his target squarely.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum raved, “This is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called it “a film of immense and very rare imagination.” Canby’s Times colleague Janet Maslin added, “No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film’s last glimpse of D’Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick’s latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.”

After his breakthrough performance in Full Metal Jacket, D’Onofrio went on to co-star in such films as Mystic Pizza, JFK, The Player, Ed Wood, The Whole Wide World, Men in Black, Jurassic World, and Steal This Movie, in which he played Abbie Hoffman. He had a ten-year run in Law and Order: Criminal Intent. More recently he has appeared in the series Daredevil, Godfather of Harlem, and Ratched. Last year he had a major role as Jerry Falwell in the Oscar-winning The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

THE STORY OF FILM: A NEW GENERATION, an epic, hopeful tour of today’s most innovative world cinema, opens September 9 at the Royal.

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A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of  moviemaking in the 20th century, filmmaker Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of  cinematic innovation from around the globe. In The Story of Film: A New Generation, Cousins turns his  sharp, meticulously honed gaze on world cinema from 2010 to 2021, using a surprising range of works —  including Frozen, The Babadook, and Cemetery of Splendour — as launchpads to explore recurring themes  and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to  shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema. Touching on everything from Parasite and The Farewell to Black Panther and Lovers Rock, Cousins seeks out films, filmmakers and communities under represented in traditional film histories, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as  well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways. And as the recent  pandemic recedes, Cousins ponders what comes next in the streaming age: how have we changed as  cinephiles, and how moviegoing will continue to transform in the digital century, to our collective joy and  wonder.

“Cousins is an omnivore extraordinaire, sharing choice morsels from the far corners of the form. And for those who appreciate the director’s wide-eyed and open-hearted way of looking at cinema, the documentary is brimming with clips sure to expand their horizons.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“A discursive love letter to cinema. Restless and impassioned. A welcome voice in cacophonous times.” – Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

“Another engaging documentary [from Mark Cousins], a journey around the cinematic world over 160 minutes that’s clever and informative.” – Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

“Ferociously eclectic, Cousins makes connections as he singles out films we’ve seen and ones we haven’t … He possesses an idiosyncratic cinematic imagination” – Steve Pond, The Wrap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYlPJWcDc2w

Celebrate moviegoing this Saturday, National Cinema Day: $3 tickets for all films, all day.

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Celebrate moviegoing and enjoy some monetary time travel this Saturday, September 3 by participating in National Cinema Day when movie theaters across the nation will charge prices circa 1980 — three bucks per ticket! This applies to any film at any time on Saturday, from François Ozon’s latest, Peter Von Kant, to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man: No Way Home – The More Fun Stuff Version, from the new A24 comedy about the underground comics scene, Funny Pages, to Javier Bardem’s Goya-winning The Good Boss. Catch the summer sleepers Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Fire of Love, RRR or Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song while they’re still on big screens.

They say you can’t get something for nothing, but National Cinema Day is close! Super cheap movie tickets and, oh, did we mention the air conditioning?