Drama Archives – Laemmle Theatres

Daniel Roher’s ‘Tuner’: When the Piano Man Goes Bad

June 29, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

While movie industry observers have noted the surprise success of smaller movies this summer like Obsession and Backrooms, there’s another one slowly and steadily holding on arthouse screens everywhere: Daniel Roher’s Tuner. Now about to enter its third smash month in theaters, the first narrative film from the acclaimed documentarian behind Navalny and The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist blends crime, romance, jazz piano, and even a touch of real-life super power in the tale of a piano tuner whose nimble fingers and ears also serve him well at safe-cracking.

You can still catch Tuner at Laemmle’s Town Center and Laemmle’s Monica Film Center.

One key reason not to miss Tuner in theaters is the distinctive sound design by Maximilian Behrens, whose audio work on The Zone of Interest contributed greatly to that film’s overall impact. Behrens’ work puts us directly inside the head of Niki (The White Lotus‘ Leo Woodall), who has hyperacusis, a condition that makes loud noises painful and debilitating, but allows him to hear other things inaudible to most humans. As he listens for distinctions between piano notes, or for tumblers in a lock to slide into place, we feel it. Mercifully, when the sounds of the world go in the other direction, the movie only gives us a small taste of the pain that forces Niki to wear earplugs and headphones almost 24-7.

Roher takes a break from real-world existential threats like Vladimir Putin and Artificial Intelligence to focus on much more personal stakes. Niki’s irascible mentor Harry (a scene-stealing Dustin Hoffman) has angrily and temperamentally canceled his own Medicare, and refuses to eat healthy; before long, he’s stuck with a hospital bill he can’t afford. Piano tuning, even for New York’s rich and careless, doesn’t earn Niki enough to help, so he takes the slightly less legal route, working for an unethical “security” company that skims from clients’ safes.

Meanwhile, a romance is blossoming with hard-working piano prodigy Ruthie (model-turned actress Havana Rose Liu) who reminds him of himself before the hearing condition made playing literally painful. He wants to help her, but the erratic, spontaneous needs of his illegal work threaten to tear him away.

Unmoored from the demands of documentary reality, Roher treats the story like a parable; it involves some extreme coincidence, but treats it as karmic justice. The ending is designed to get audiences talking, and perhaps arguing, the moment they leave the theater. And the director couldn’t have asked for a better cast to anchor his first drama. Jean Reno shows up as a musical maestro, Tovah Feldshuh gives as good as she gets playing Hoffman’s wife, Herbie Hancock appears as himself, and Lior Raz brings lived-in menace to Niki’s criminal boss Uri. Prior to being an actor, Raz was an IDF commando and a bodyguard for Arnold Schwarzenegger; he doesn’t have to do much to persuade a viewer of his inherent threat level.

Be sure to catch Tuner in theaters while you still can. With its canny, subjective soundscapes, original numbers by Marius de Vries (La La Land), and carefully-selected jazz classics, you’ll want the premium speaker experience. But the story might just stick in your head as well.

“Roher knows that in crime flicks, as in jazz, pacing is everything: he reveals just enough but allows the audience to fill in the gaps.” – Wendy Ide, The Observer.

“It’s a thrill to watch this kind of original, adult moviemaking that’s all too rare these days.” – Katie Walsh, Tribune.

‘Romería’: Carla Simón’s Moving Portrait of Loss, Identity, and Belonging

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Over the course of three features, Carla Simón has quietly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European cinema. Following her acclaimed debut Summer 1993 and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, the Spanish filmmaker returns with Romería, a deeply personal coming-of-age drama that continues her exploration of family, memory, and the lingering impact of loss.

Catch Romeria in theaters beginning July 1st at the Laemmle Glendale.

The title translates roughly to “pilgrimage,” an apt description for the journey undertaken by Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia), an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave home to study filmmaking. Before she can begin that next chapter, however, she must travel to the Galician city of Vigo in search of documents connected to her late father, whose death years earlier left crucial gaps in her understanding of both her family history and herself.

Raised apart from her father’s relatives, Marina arrives as both an outsider and a blood relation. Her extended family welcomes her warmly enough on the surface, inviting her on boat trips, beach outings, and sprawling family gatherings, yet beneath the hospitality lies a more complicated reality. Old wounds remain unhealed, uncomfortable truths have been buried, and differing accounts of the past begin to challenge everything Marina thought she knew about her parents.

Like Simón’s previous work, Romería unfolds through intimate observations rather than dramatic confrontations. The filmmaker has a remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of family life: overlapping conversations around crowded tables, casual moments of affection, and the subtle tensions that emerge when multiple generations inhabit the same space. Yet as Marina pieces together fragments of her family’s history, Romería expands beyond a straightforward search for answers. Her mother’s diaries, camcorder recordings, and the stories told by her relatives create a layered portrait of two people she barely knew, as what begins as a realistic family drama gradually opens into something more lyrical and impressionistic. Simón incorporates dreamlike passages and flashes of imagined memory, allowing the boundaries between history, recollection, and personal mythology to blur. These touches of magical realism give emotional shape to experiences that can never be fully recovered, only reimagined.

Both tender and quietly heartbreaking, Romería confirms Simón’s status as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Drawing from deeply personal material while touching on universal questions of identity and belonging, she has created a film that is at once a family portrait, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the subtle ways that each of us carries the residue of our forebearers.

“Carla Simón’s story of a young woman untangling a web of family secrets cements the filmmaker’s aptitude for naturalism while also marking a bold new step towards magical realism.” – Sophia Satchell-Baeza, British Film Institute

“A kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

John Early’s ‘Maddie’s Secret’ Finds Heart Beneath the Camp

June 23, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

John Early has spent years building a reputation as one of contemporary comedy’s most distinctive voices, whether through scene-stealing performances in projects like Search Party and Stress Positions, or his singular stand-up and musical work. That history makes Maddie’s Secret an especially surprising directorial feature debut. While the film contains plenty of the heightened absurdity and comic precision that fans of Early will recognize, it ultimately reveals itself as something far more sincere: a melodrama about eating disorders, self-worth, and modern womanhood disguised as a campy made-for-television movie.

Catch Maddie’s Secret in theaters beginning June 26th at the Laemmle Monica.

Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a shy but gifted home cook working behind the scenes at a trendy food-media company. Her life changes overnight when a homemade cooking video goes viral, transforming her from anonymous dishwasher to the face of the brand. This sudden attention, however, reawakens her long-suppressed struggle with bulimia. Desperate to conceal her relapse from her loving husband Jake (Eric Rahill) and best friend Deena (Kate Berlant), Maddie tells an impulsive lie that quickly spirals beyond her control.

The premise sounds like the setup for broad satire, and Maddie’s Secret certainly pokes fun at influencer culture, wellness trends, online therapy apps, foodie celebrity, and other fixtures of contemporary life. Yet Early’s screenplay consistently resists easy cynicism, treating its characters with affection and finding humor in their quirks without reducing them to punchlines. Even the broadest personalities feel grounded by an underlying emotional honesty.

That tonal confidence is especially evident in Early’s performance. Playing Maddie could easily have become an exercise in caricature, but he approaches the character with remarkable empathy. Maddie is funny, anxious, talented, vulnerable, and deeply human. The film never treats her eating disorder as a joke, even as it finds comedy in the myriad social pressures, cultural expectations, and personal contradictions that surround it.

What ultimately distinguishes Maddie’s Secret is its refusal to choose between irony and sincerity. In an era when many comedies keep their subjects at arm’s length, Early allows himself to care deeply about his protagonist and the struggles she faces. The film is frequently funny, occasionally outrageous, and unexpectedly moving. By the time it reaches its emotional climax, what initially seemed like a clever genre exercise has transformed into something infinitely richer: a compassionate portrait of a woman trying to reconcile the person she is with the person she believes she should be.

For a filmmaker making his feature directing debut, it is an impressively assured achievement. Campy and heartfelt, and unlike much else in contemporary cinema, Maddie’s Secret announces John Early as a filmmaker worth watching.

“A lesser film would find more cynicism and mockery in the text, but Maddie’s Secret is a testament to the art of trying, finding optimism, and approaching life empathetically.” – Peyton Robinson, RogerEbert.com

“Brimming with style and spirit up to the final scene.” – Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times

“A film of real kindness.” – Sam Bodrojan, IndieWire

‘Honeyjoon’ and the Distance Between Grief and Connection

June 2, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milagros Mumenthaler’s ‘The Currents’ and the Performance of Stability

May 26, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents unfolds with the unnerving logic of a bad dream: not chaotic exactly, but subtly out of alignment with ordinary life. Here, the Swiss-Argentine filmmaker constructs a hypnotic portrait of psychological unraveling that feels at once intimate and strangely elusive, immersing viewers inside the fractured emotional landscape of a woman who can no longer fully inhabit the life she has built for herself.

Catch The Currents in theaters beginning June 5th at the Laemmle Royal.

There is a moment near the beginning of the film that arrives with such suddenness it barely seems real. Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a successful fashion designer attending an awards ceremony in Geneva, quietly slips away from the event, walks across a bridge, and jumps into the freezing Rhône River below. Mumenthaler films the act from such a distant vantage point that it almost feels accidental, as though the movie itself were struggling to comprehend the reality of what has just occurred.

Following the incident, Lina returns home to Buenos Aires and resumes the routines of her outwardly enviable existence: a thriving career, a handsome husband, a young daughter, a beautiful apartment. Yet something fundamental has shifted. She develops an intense fear of water, avoiding showers and baths even as rashes begin spreading across her skin. But the film wisely refuses to reduce her unraveling to a single diagnosis or symbolic condition; water becomes only one manifestation of a deeper estrangement from herself and the world around her.

The filmmaking itself mirrors that instability. Ordinary sounds grow unnervingly loud, Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography lingers on textures and surfaces until they begin to feel uncanny, and moments of surreal dislocation quietly seep into the film’s otherwise-grounded world. Before long, Lina starts imagining fragments of other women’s lives, observing strangers and acquaintances with an almost mystical attentiveness, as if desperately groping for alternate ways of existing.

Yet for all its psychological tension, The Currents is remarkably compassionate, as Mumenthaler avoids the cold detachment that often defines contemporary art-house depictions of female breakdown. Isabel Aimé González-Sola, for her part, gives a performance of striking restraint, conveying Lina’s mounting alienation through minute shifts in expression and posture rather than overt collapse. The result is a character who remains elusive but deeply recognizable: someone trapped between the expectations placed upon her and her growing inability to continue meeting them.

Like its title suggests, The Currents ultimately unfolds less as a linear narrative than as a drifting accumulation of sensations, anxieties, and fleeting moments of connection. Mumenthaler’s film resists easy explanations, trusting instead in mood, intuition, and emotional texture. What emerges is a haunting study of dislocation that feels at once mysterious and acutely human.

“Impressively composed, searching high-art cinema.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Precise and refined, but free of the self-conscious fastidiousness that often passes for style on the international festival circuit.” – Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter

The Secret Life of Trees: Ildikó Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend’

May 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What if the world around us were constantly speaking, and we simply lacked the patience to hear it? That question drifts through Silent Friend, the latest feature from Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, though “drifts” may be too passive a word for a film so alive with wonder, sensation, and absurd, unexpected connections. Moving across three timelines linked by a towering ginkgo tree in the botanical gardens of Marburg, Germany, Enyedi’s film unfolds less like a conventional drama than an act of gradual attunement: to nature, to loneliness, and to the hidden rhythms that shape human lives whether we notice them or not.

Catch Silent Friend in theaters beginning May 15th at the Laemmle Royal.

If Enyedi’s Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul explored intimacy through dreams, Silent Friend projects that fascination outward onto the natural world. The film’s modern-day thread follows neuroscientist Tony Wong, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai in a beautifully understated performance. Stranded on an empty university campus during the first COVID lockdown, Tony turns his attention away from human cognition and toward the silent life of plants, becoming increasingly fascinated by theories suggesting that trees may communicate in ways that science is only beginning to understand. As he enters into remote correspondence with a French botanist played by Léa Seydoux, the film opens itself to increasingly provocative possibilities about the porous boundary between human and nonhuman life.

Before long, Enyedi masterfully weaves Tony’s story with two earlier narratives set decades apart: one following a pioneering female botany student in the early twentieth century, the other centering on a shy student swept into the idealism and experimentation of the 1970s. The connections between these strands are less narrative-based than emotional and thematic, united by a shared sense of curiosity and by the imposing ginkgo tree quietly observing generations pass beneath its branches.

That openness gives Silent Friend much of its distinctive texture. Enyedi approaches science not as something cold or rational, but as a form of wonder and of looking more closely at the world. At times, the movie feels almost mischievous in its insistence that humans might not be as separate from the natural world as we tend to imagine.

Visually, the film is equally rich. Cinematographer Gergely Pálos shifts fluidly between varying textures and formats, moving from striking black-and-white photography to saturated color and crisp digital imagery depending on the era and emotional register. Combined with the film’s immersive sound design and score, the result is markedly sense-based, a movie less interested in driving its plot forward than in creating an atmosphere that its viewers can sink into.

Like the ancient tree at its center, Silent Friend asks for patience. But in return, it offers something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema: the feeling of slowing down long enough to see the world in a new light

“[A] beguiling, wildly original ode to better living through botany.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“A movie that thinks outside the box, proffering a world view that’s open to new, unusual connections at a time when many people seem to be shutting themselves down.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

A Life Unfiltered: ‘I Swear’ and the Story of John Davidson

April 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There’s a familiar shape to many “inspiring true story” films, but I Swear finds a way to delicately reshape that mold into something more personal, more unpredictable, and ultimately more humane. Based on the life of Tourette syndrome advocate John Davidson, this BAFTA award-winning film traces one man’s journey from confusion and isolation to self-acceptance and public advocacy without ever reducing him to a symbol.

Catch I Swear in theaters beginning April 24th at the Laemmle Royal, Newhall, and Town Center locations.

What distinguishes I Swear is its commitment to portraying not only what John experiences, but how he experiences it. His Tourette syndrome isn’t treated as a narrative device or a source of easy sentiment, but as a constant, complicated presence. The film allows for laughter, but never at the expense of John’s dignity. Instead, it invites audiences to sit with the uneasy tension between humor and hardship, asking when we laugh, why we laugh, and who gets to decide.

At the film’s center is Robert Aramayo, delivering a performance of remarkable sensitivity and control. He captures both the physical unpredictability of John’s condition and the emotional steadiness that defines him, creating a character who feels fully lived-in rather than performed. It’s a balancing act that could easily tip into caricature, but Aramayo keeps it grounded, ensuring that John’s inner life remains front and center.

Director Kirk Jones approaches the material with a clear respect for both his subject and the audience. The storytelling is straightforward, but never simplistic. Moments of pain—whether social rejection, misunderstanding, or outright cruelty—are counterbalanced by instances of connection and support. The film is especially attuned to the role that community plays in shaping John’s life, highlighting the people who choose empathy over judgment and, in so doing, help redefine what’s possible.

In the end, I Swear is less about overcoming than it is about being seen. It’s about carving out space in a world that isn’t always ready to make room, and about finding strength not in silence, but in expression, however unpredictable that expression may be.

“The film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.” – Catherine Bray, Variety

“Its mix of compassion and clarity allows it to avoid the easy sentimentality of similar tales.” – Ross McIndoe, Slant Magazine

“Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments… add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.” – Kate Erbland, IndieWire

The Art of Taking: Soderbergh’s ‘The Christophers’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

If there’s a quiet thrill in encountering a late-period film from the great Steven Soderbergh, The Christophers delivers it almost immediately. Set largely within the cluttered confines of a once-great artist’s London home, the film trades spectacle for something knottier and more intimate: a duel of personalities, ideas, and unresolved histories.

Catch The Christophers in theaters beginning April 17th at the Laemmle Monica, NoHo, Town Center, and Glendale locations.

At its center is Julian Sklar, played with ferocious precision by Ian McKellen. A celebrated painter turned cultural relic, Julian has retreated into a self-made mausoleum of past successes and private grudges. McKellen inhabits him as both tyrant and ruin: acerbic, theatrical, and faintly ridiculous, yet never less than human. His performance resists easy sentiment; whatever sympathy he manages to arouse is accomplished in spite of Julian’s relentless abrasiveness, not because of any softening.

The premise initially suggests a familiar caper. Julian’s estranged children, eager to secure their inheritance, recruit Lori Butler, an art restorer who moonlights in forgery, to infiltrate his home and complete a set of unfinished paintings that could be worth a fortune. But the film quickly pivots away from such familiar Soderberghian mechanics and toward something more elusive as what unfolds between Julian and Lori (played by an electric Michaela Coel) is less a traditional con than a prolonged negotiation of identity and authorship.

Soderbergh, working with a script by Ed Solomon, keeps the narrative in constant motion—not through action, but through nonstop reversals of power. Conversations shift, allegiances blur, and what begins as manipulation gradually takes on the contours of recognition. Lori is not merely an intruder in Julian’s world; she is, in certain respects, his reflection. Both are artists stalled in different ways, each confronting the uneasy distance between creation and self-worth.

Formally, the film is deceptively loose. The camera drifts, lingers, and reacts, giving the impression of spontaneity while maintaining a careful sense of rhythm. The confined setting only heightens the sense of volatility, as if any exchange might tip into revelation or collapse. It’s a reminder of how much Soderbergh can do with minimal space when the material gives him something to push off against.

What ultimately distinguishes The Christophers is its preoccupation with legacy—not as a settled inheritance, but as something negotiated in real time. Who owns a work of art? Who gets to define its meaning? And what do we really leave behind: objects, or impressions? These questions animate every scene, giving the film a momentum that extends far beyond its deceptively contained setting. Anchored by two exceptional performances and a script that relishes every turn of the knife, The Christophers is a sharp, engaging showcase for Soderbergh at his most quietly confident.

“The Christophers feels as rich and expansive as anything Soderbergh has ever done.” – Seth Katz, Slant Magazine

“[The Christophers] bats about ideas pertaining to art, commerce, ownership and legacy with dexterous aplomb and boasts two equally superb leads who make the material crackle.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter