Inside The Arthouse Archives – Laemmle Theatres

‘Peter Asher’: The Man Behind the Music

June 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For many music fans, Peter Asher is one of those names that seems to appear everywhere once you start paying attention. A member of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon, head of A&R for the Beatles’ Apple Records, producer of landmark albums from James Taylor to Linda Ronstadt, and a trusted collaborator to generations of artists, Asher has spent more than six decades helping shape popular music from both center stage and behind the scenes.

The new documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man traces that remarkable career, revealing how one seemingly modest figure repeatedly found himself at pivotal moments in music history. Helmed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, the film combines archival footage, contemporary interviews, and performances from Asher’s acclaimed live storytelling show to create a portrait of a life that often feels stupefyingly interconnected.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear co-directors Goldfine and Geller discuss their fascinating new release with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning with a special Q&A on June 22nd at the Laemmle Royal.

Asher’s story begins in an unusually artistic household in London. His sister Jane Asher’s relationship with Paul McCartney brought the Beatles directly into the family orbit, with McCartney at one point living in the Ashers’ home. Numerous songs that would become part of popular music history were written there, and the documentary delights in recounting how Peter found himself witnessing events that would later seem legendary.

Yet Everywhere Man makes clear that Asher was never merely a bystander. As one half of Peter & Gordon, he scored international hits, including “A World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, as an executive at Apple Records, he signed a young James Taylor, beginning a partnership that would help define the singer-songwriter boom of the 1970s.

The documentary is particularly compelling when examining Asher’s influence as a producer and manager. Working with Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, and many others, he helped shape the polished California sound that dominated popular music throughout the decade. Along the way, he pushed for greater recognition of studio musicians, insisting that the talented players behind classic recordings receive proper credit on album sleeves—a practice that seems obvious today but was far from standard at the time.

What emerges is not simply a history of one career, but a tour through several eras of popular music, featuring everyone from the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to Elton John, Diana Ross, and Randy Newman. The result is an entertaining and affectionate documentary about a man whose influence extends far beyond the spotlight. Even viewers who don’t immediately recognize Peter Asher’s name may discover that they already know much of the music—not to mention the stories—that he helped usher into the world.

“The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong.” – Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The] film does an amazing job tracking the arc of a career of an artist who was really just about everywhere.” – Brad Auerbach, Entertainment Today

The Living Archive: ‘Time and Water’ and the Disappearing Glaciers of Iceland

May 26, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean for a glacier to die? That haunting question lingers at the center of Time and Water, the lyrical new documentary from filmmaker Sara Dosa. Following her Oscar-nominated breakthrough Fire of Love, Dosa once again turns toward humanity’s relationship with the natural world, though this time through a quieter, more meditative lens. Drawing from the writings and personal archives of Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, the film becomes at once a climate documentary, a family memoir, and a message to the future.

The Living Archive: 'Time and Water' and the Disappearing Glaciers of Iceland — Icelandic Glaciological Society member, Árni Kjartansson, sits overlooking a glacier in Iceland. (Archival Materials Courtesy of Andri Snær Magnason)

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear documentarian Sara Dosa discuss her latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it on the big screen beginning June 5th at the Laemmle Royal.

Structured as a kind of cinematic time capsule, Time and Water moves fluidly between personal memory and geological history. Magnason narrates much of the film himself, reflecting on both his family’s past and Iceland’s rapidly changing landscape. Central to the story are his grandparents, early explorers of Iceland’s vast glaciers whose photographs and home movies from the 1950s lend the film a remarkable tactile intimacy. Dosa blends these archival fragments with sweeping contemporary imagery of ice fields, volcanic terrain, waterfalls, and black sand coastlines, creating a film that feels suspended somewhere between documentary and dream.

Yet beneath its beauty lies an unmistakable sense of grief. The glaciers of Iceland, once thought to be eternal, are disappearing at an alarming pace. One glacier in particular, Okjökull, became the first in the country to be officially declared dead in 2019 after losing the movement that defines a living glacier. That event hangs over the film as both ecological warning and existential reckoning. If glaciers function as archives of the Earth, storing centuries of environmental history within their layers of ice, what happens when those archives vanish?

Rather than relying on statistics or conventional talking-head interviews, Dosa approaches climate change through memory, language, and emotional inheritance. The film repeatedly returns to the idea that landscapes shape not only ecosystems but culture itself: words, stories, songs, and identities passed across generations. Magnason reflects on Icelandic traditions, ancient oral histories, and even the changing meanings of words tied to the natural world as species disappear and environments transform. Perhaps, Magnason contends, memory itself functions like a glacier: accumulating layer upon layer, fragile yet enduring until suddenly it begins to melt away.

By the end, Time and Water becomes less a film about glaciers alone than about the responsibilities we inherit from the past and pass onto the future. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done,” Magnason writes in his somber epitaph to the Okjökull Glacier. “Only you know if we did it.”

“A pensive, reflective film which combines striking Super 16 archive material with a deft exploration of the way the narratives of our lives are intertwined with the lands we inhabit.” – Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

“A poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.” – Marya E. Gates, IndieWire

The Last Great Maestro: Inside ‘Bernstein’s Wall’

May 19, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

There was a time in American culture when a conductor could become something close to a national celebrity: part educator, part activist, part showman, and part mystic. Few embodied that role more completely than Leonard Bernstein, whose larger-than-life presence animated concert halls, television screens, political movements, and Broadway stages alike. Douglas Tirola’s Bernstein’s Wall revisits that extraordinary life not through conventional talking-head retrospection, but almost entirely through archival footage, home movies, and Bernstein’s own words, allowing the composer and conductor to narrate his story at his own impeccable tempo.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Douglas Tirola discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch one of his live post-screening Q&As running May 21-23rd at the Laemmle Glendale, Royal, and Town Center theaters.

Rather than unfolding as a straightforward cradle-to-grave biography, Bernstein’s Wall assembles an impressionistic portrait of a man whose myriad passions—for music, politics, teaching, sociology, and more—were inseparably intertwined. The result feels less like a summary than an attempt to capture the restless energy that made Bernstein such a singular public figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

For audiences primarily familiar with Bernstein as the composer of West Side Story, the film offers a broader look at the figure who became one of the defining cultural personalities of postwar America. Bernstein was not merely a conductor but a communicator, someone who approached classical music with evangelical enthusiasm and a rare ability to make it feel accessible without diminishing its complexity. The documentary’s many clips from his televised lectures and Young People’s Concerts reveal his innate talent for speaking about music with warmth, humor, and genuine conviction, treating audiences not as passive listeners but as treasured participants in something emotionally and spiritually vital.

The film also captures the sheer physical electricity of Bernstein as a performer. Watching him conduct, drenched in sweat and completely consumed by the music, one understands why he inspired such devotion. Tirola repeatedly emphasizes Bernstein’s ability to embody music rather than simply direct it, transforming orchestral performance into a kind of emotional theater all its own.

Bernstein’s Wall also thoughtfully explores the tensions that shaped Bernstein’s personal life, addressing his sexuality with unusual candor while drawing from deeply personal letters that illuminate the emotional strain placed upon his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein’s outspoken activism, too—from civil rights advocacy to antiwar protests—remains central to this portrait of artist-as-advocate, particularly in relation to his now-infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers that inspired Tom Wolfe’s term “radical chic.”

Yet for all its historical scope, Bernstein’s Wall is ultimately less about legacy than vitality, as the film continually returns to Bernstein’s overwhelming appetite for life itself. The result is a moving reminder of a singular artist who believed deeply in the power of music not merely to entertain, but to awaken something larger within us.

“A lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.” – Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“A thoughtfully constructed tribute that lacks neither cultural and political context nor intimate personal perspective.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

The Architecture of Influence: Assayas’ ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

May 5, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Power rarely announces itself outright; more often, it is constructed—carefully, incrementally, and just out of view. In The Wizard of the Kremlin, director Olivier Assayas turns to the machinery behind modern political mythmaking, tracing how influence is shaped not only through force, but through narrative. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s widely discussed novel, the film approaches recent Russian history less as a fixed record than as something actively being authored, revised, and performed. The result is a work that peers behind the curtain to examine the uneasy relationship between image and authority.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Assayas dissect his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning May 15th at the Monica, Town Center, and NoHo 7.

At the center of the film’s world is Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former artist whose creative instincts find an unexpected outlet in the realm of political strategy. Through his eyes, the film moves from the cultural upheavals of the late Soviet period into the consolidating power structures of the Putin era. Baranov is less an ideologue than an architect, someone who understands that, in a media-saturated age, perception can be even more decisive than policy.

If Baranov provides the film’s perspective, it is Jude Law’s Vladimir Putin who supplies its gravitational pull. Eschewing caricature, Law delivers a performance that captures the controlled, often inscrutable presence of a leader who communicates as much through restraint as through declaration. Small gestures—a pause, a glance, the measured calibration of distance—become telling indicators of authority. Rather than attempting to decode the man entirely, the film uses these moments to suggest how power can be projected through absence as much as through expression.

Assayas, whose previous films—from Clouds of Sils Maria to Personal Shopper—have explored identity and performance in more intimate contexts, here scales those concerns up to the level of geopolitics. His collaboration with writer Emmanuel Carrère foregrounds dialogue and ideas, particularly in the film’s extended exchanges between Baranov and the many oligarchs, financiers, and political operatives who orbit him. These conversations, often laced with dark humor, become the film’s engine, illustrating how competing ambitions gradually coalesce into a singular, rigid system.

In this sense, The Wizard of the Kremlin positions itself less as a definitive account than as an inquiry into how such accounts are formed. It suggests that the real story lies not only in what happened, but in how those events were framed, disseminated, and ultimately absorbed. For viewers drawn to political dramas that prioritize ideas alongside performance, the film offers a dense, thought-provoking exploration of power that resonates beyond its immediate setting.

“A sharply-written, and often surprisingly funny, look at power in one of the most unique nation-states in the world.” – Chris Harrison, Shifter Magazine

“Essential viewing for understanding the highly sophisticated workings of a totalitarian propaganda state.” – Travis Jeppesen, BFI

No Silence, No Sponsors: Amy Goodman and ‘Steal This Story, Please!’

April 15, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

At a moment when the boundaries of journalism feel increasingly unstable, Steal This Story, Please! makes a compelling case for returning to the fundamentals. The documentary follows Amy Goodman across decades of reporting, but it resists the familiar arc of a career retrospective. Instead, it focuses on the daily discipline of the work itself: the persistence required to ask difficult questions, to verify what others would rather obscure, and to keep attention fixed where it is most needed. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin frame their subject not as an outlier, but as a practitioner, someone committed to a method in a media landscape that often rewards speed over substance.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to catch Amy Goodman and co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin discuss their latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it live beginning April 15-17th at the Laemmle NoHo, Royal, and Glendale theaters, kicked off by a series of post-viewing Q&As.

What distinguishes the film is its emphasis on process. Rather than assembling a greatest-hits reel, it lingers on how reporting actually gets made: the calls, the research, the careful construction of segments piece by piece. This attention to labor grounds the film, turning “independent media” from an abstract label into something concrete and observable. Through archival footage and present-day scenes, the documentary collapses time, suggesting that the pressures journalists face—political, corporate, cultural, and more—are less cyclical than continuous.

The portrait that emerges is neither hagiographic nor detached. Goodman’s on-air clarity is paired with glimpses of the toll such work can take: the physical risks of field reporting, the emotional weight of bearing witness, the constant recalibration required to maintain focus in a shifting news environment. Yet the film also makes space for the little moments of humor, collaboration, and shared purpose that sustain such work over time. The newsroom is not presented as a platform for a single voice, but as a collective effort shaped by many hands.

Running beneath it all is a larger argument about what journalism is for. The film challenges the notion that neutrality requires distance, instead suggesting that rigor and empathy can (and perhaps must) coexist. By centering those most affected by policy and power, Goodman’s approach offers a different kind of orientation, one that prioritizes context over spectacle and accountability over access.

If the title carries a note of provocation, the film earns it. Steal This Story, Please! is less concerned with ownership than with circulation, an insistence that information only matters if it continues to move, to be tested, and (ideally) to ripple outward. In that sense, the documentary functions as both portrait and invitation: a reminder that the work of journalism is ongoing, collective, and, at its best, indispensable.

“A profile in courage, presenting Goodman as an unrelenting voice of the voiceless who is never afraid to get arrested or make an enemy in her pursuit of telling her truth.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“Steal This Story, Please!… builds a convincing case for the ability of dogged, courageous reporting to mobilise pressure against injustice and effect change.” – Lee Marshall, Screen Daily

François Ozon’s Cool, Unsettling ‘The Stranger’

April 7, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What does it mean to bring The Stranger—a novel defined by absence, detachment, and interiority—into a medium built on appearances? In his new adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, François Ozon approaches that challenge not by radically reimagining the text, but by making its silences visible. The result is a film that feels at once faithful and interpretive, attuned to both the enduring power of Camus’s text and the historical context it left largely unspoken.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Ozon discuss his latest film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch it in theaters beginning April 10th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

Set in 1930s Algiers under French colonial rule, the film follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a clerk whose emotional detachment shapes every aspect of his life. He receives news of his mother’s death with little visible reaction, carrying out the rituals of mourning with a kind of mechanical precision. In Ozon’s retelling, it’s as if Meursault has only just arrived in the world at that moment: unformed, unmoored, and curiously untouched by the social expectations that surround him.

That sense of dislocation extends into his relationships. He begins an affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), responds to her questions with indifference, and drifts into the orbit of his volatile neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault rarely initiates; he responds. Yet this passivity proves deceptive as he repeatedly declines to perform basic gestures that would mark him as a passable member of society while simultaneously slipping into patterns of behavior that align him with its ugliest assumptions.

Ozon captures this tension with remarkable precision. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film emphasizes texture and physical sensation: sunlight on skin, the rhythm of breath, the weight of heat pressing down on bodies. These tactile details root us in Meursault’s immediate experience even as his inner life remains opaque. Voisin’s performance is key here: controlled, watchful, and withholding, he becomes a figure defined as much by what he doesn’t express as by what he does.

At the same time, Ozon subtly expands the frame of Camus’ story. Where the novel treats its colonial setting as a given, the film foregrounds it, allowing the social and political tensions of French Algeria to register more clearly. The people who exist at the margins of Meursault’s awareness take on a greater presence, not through overt revision but through subtle shifts in emphasis. The result is a quiet but meaningful rebalancing, one that reframes Meursault’s indifference as something shaped not only by temperament but by environment.

As perhaps the quintessential work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger endures not because it offers answers, but because it resists them. Ozon’s adaptation honors that resistance, even as it invites us to look more closely at the world surrounding it, and at what it means to move through that world without fully engaging with it.

“The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“Ozon’s The Stranger keeps the spirit of its source material alive as a timeless warning in a modern world of stark polarization, ongoing colonialism, and plenty of Meursaults ignoring the suffering of others.” – Monica Castillo, The AV Club

Babysitting the Void: Stalled Adulthood in ‘Fantasy Life.’

March 31, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is the kind of modest, perceptive character piece that sneaks up on you: initially breezy, even familiar, before revealing a deeper ache beneath its carefully arranged surfaces. A lightly comic drama about stalled adulthood and second acts, Fantasy Life centers on Sam (Shear), an anxious, recently laid-off paralegal whose life has quietly collapsed. Through a combination of desperation and social proximity, Sam takes a babysitting job for a wealthy, creatively inclined couple, David and Dianne, and finds himself drawn into their fragile domestic ecosystem.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Matthew Shear discuss his directorial debut with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see it at the Laemmle Royal, NoHo, Glendale, or Town Center theaters beginning April 3rd.

The premise has the makings of farce, but the film resists easy escalation. Instead, Shear builds a tone of low-key, accumulating discomfort, where every interaction feels slightly off-balance. Sam’s crippling anxiety isn’t played for charm; it’s awkward, limiting, and at times frighteningly disruptive. Yet it also becomes the unlikely bridge between him and Dianne, a former actress who now drifts through her own life with a kind of numbed disillusionment. Their connection—tentative, intimate, and ethically precarious—forms the film’s emotional core, less a conventional romance than a mutual recognition between two people who feel they’ve missed their moment.

It’s here that Amanda Peet delivers what many have called a career-best turn. As Dianne, she is at once brittle and luminous, exuding the residual magnetism of someone who once commanded attention while allowing the cracks in that persona to show. There’s no vanity in her performance: Peet leans entirely into Dianne’s dissatisfaction and flashes of need, and the result is both funny and devastating. In the context of Peet’s long absence from major film roles, the performance carries an added resonance; a meta-textual echo of the character’s own sidelined career. That poignancy deepens further given Peet’s recently disclosed breast cancer diagnosis, lending her return an added layer of vulnerability that subtly accentuates the film’s themes of resilience and reinvention.

Shear, pulling from a historied lineage of New York-based neurotic comedies, crafts dialogue that feels lived-in and unforced, with a sharp ear for the rhythms of privileged but emotionally adrift lives. The ensemble, anchored by Alessandro Nivola’s charmingly self-involved musician, creates a dense social web where everyone seems both deeply connected and fundamentally alone. The stakes are, on paper, relatively small, but Shear understands that for his characters, these life developments and emotional entanglements feel seismic. Ultimately, the film is less about dramatic transformation than about the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day, and the uneasy realization that those stories might be all we have.

In that sense, Fantasy Life more than lives up to its title. It’s about the gap between the lives we imagine and the ones we inhabit, and the strange, fleeting moments when those two begin, however imperfectly, to overlap.

“Shear eloquently portrays the ways that near-misses can still feel like cataclysmic life events.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire

“The kind of quiet film about life’s little moments, insecurities, and challenges that we rarely see… Peet reminds us that she is a bona fide star.” – Phil Walsh, Geek Vibes Nation

‘Charliebird’: When the Music Doesn’t Fix Everything

March 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

How do you make space for joy inside a children’s hospital? In Charliebird, winner of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival’s US Narrative Feature Prize, the answer is neither grand nor sentimental. It’s a ukulele carried from room to room, a pop song request taken seriously, or a willingness to sit beside someone who doesn’t feel like singing.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear director Libby Ewing discuss her new hit film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or come see Ewing, lead actors Samantha Smart and Gabrielle Ochoa Perez, and production designer Emily Li participate in live Q&As following the film’s one-night stay at the Laemmle Royal on March 5th, or to kick off its theatrical run at Glendale beginning March 6-8th.

Charliebird centers on Al (Smart), a music therapist working with seriously ill young patients. Her job description ranges from lullabies for restless five-year-olds to tracking down the right track to coax a guarded teenager into cracking a smile. It’s delicate work—sometimes playful, sometimes devastating—yet the film resists any temptation to frame it as miraculous. Music here doesn’t cure; it connects.

That connection proves hardest to forge with Charlie (Perez), a sharp, funny seventeen-year-old who has spent years in and out of hospitals. Convinced that adults are shielding her from the truth about her condition, Charlie has little patience for forced cheer. What unfolds between her and Al is not a tidy inspirational arc but a gradual, hard-earned friendship. They talk about sex and regret, about fear and boredom, about the awkwardness of being young in a body that won’t cooperate. Their conversations are by turns irreverent and raw, sidestepping clichés about generational divides or saintly caregivers.

The film’s power lies in that restraint. Rather than building toward sweeping melodrama, Charliebird offers glimpses: a Snow White costume that doesn’t quite land, a hospital corridor that feels too narrow, a moment of laughter that catches both women off guard. Cinematographer Luca Del Puppo shoots in an unusual, vertically compressed frame that at first feels constricted, then intimate, as though we’re being invited into a private space. This visual approach mirrors the story itself: focused, uncluttered, attentive to faces.

Smart’s performance as Al reveals a woman whose devotion to her patients coexists with her own unresolved struggles. Perez, meanwhile, delivers a breakout turn, allowing Charlie’s sarcasm to soften into vulnerability without losing her edge.

Ewing makes bold choices in the film’s second half, embracing ambiguity instead of easy answers. Not every question is resolved. Not every outcome is spelled out. The film trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty—much as its characters must.

Ultimately, Charliebird argues for the value of presence over perfection. It suggests that even when one’s circumstances can’t be changed, a shared joke, an honest confession, or a song played slightly off-key can resonate the longest.

“An emotional roller coaster that will inspire viewers to cherish every day.” – Thomas Duffy, Film Book

“A simple, elegant look at friendship and finality.” – Christian Zilko, IndieWire