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

The post Babysitting the Void: Stalled Adulthood in ‘Fantasy Life.’ appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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Catch filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa for a series of live Q&As regarding his latest work following the 7 p.m. showing at the Laemmle Glendale on March 24th or the Laemmle Royal on March 26-27th.

Kornyev’s journey begins in Bryansk, where Loznitsa immediately establishes the film’s governing logic: obstruction not through force, but through delay. Doors remain closed, officials are perpetually “unavailable,” and requests are met with polite deflection. Kornyev merely waits, wielding his patience as a bureaucratic weapon. When he finally gains access to the prisoner, Stepnyak (Aleksandr Filippenko), the encounter is shocking not only for the man’s physical deterioration but for the clarity of his accusations. A former legal mind himself, Stepnyak describes a system that has turned inward, devouring its own architects in order to sustain the illusion of order. Convinced this must be an isolated case of local corruption rather than a structural reality, Kornyev travels to Moscow to bring the case to higher authorities, placing his faith in the idea that somewhere, at the top, justice still exists.

Loznitsa, whose background in documentary filmmaking informs his rigorously controlled style, stages much of Two Prosecutors in long, static takes that deny the audience conventional emotional cues. The camera rarely moves; instead, dread accumulates within the frame. Offices, corridors, and waiting rooms become indistinguishable from prison cells, suggesting that confinement is not a matter of walls but of systems. Even moments of apparent absurdity—a talkative stranger on a train, an encounter with a man too frightened to move—carry a disquieting sense of design, as though every interaction is part of an invisible web closing around Kornyev.

Though rooted in Stalinist history and adapted from a suppressed work by dissident writer and gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, Two Prosecutors resonates far beyond its period setting. Loznitsa is not simply reconstructing the past, but mapping the anatomy of authoritarian logic, where procedure replaces morality and complicity is cultivated through cynicism and inertia.

By the time Kornyev begins to understand the true nature of the system he has appealed to, the film has already made its devastating point. This is not a story about whether justice will prevail, but about how long one can believe in it once the evidence proves otherwise.

“A very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“[A] compelling, meticulous, mordantly relevant historical drama.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

The post Law as Labyrinth: Loznitsa’s ‘Two Prosecutors’ appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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Cort first attracted attention in two films directed by Robert Altman, the Oscar-winning black comic hit M*A*S*H and the eccentric comedy Brewster McCloud. He also played one of the student protestors in The Strawberry Statement, one of a handful of movies about student rebellion produced in the early 1970s. Yet it wasn’t until he joined forces with Ruth Gordon, Oscar-winning co-star of Rosemary’s Baby, to play one of the oddest couples in movie history, that the talented young actor was launched into what would ultimately develop into a decades-long career.

Cort plays Harold, a death-obsessed young man determined to commit suicide, at least until he meets the vibrant 79-year-old Maude and gradually falls in love with her. Before their chance encounter, Harold spends his days staging elaborate fake suicides to shock his wealthy, emotionally distant mother and attending strangers’ funerals for entertainment, drifting through life with a morbid detachment that borders on performance art. Maude, by contrast, lives with mischievous spontaneity: stealing cars she fancies, rescuing trees slated for demolition, and approaching each moment with irreverent wonder. Their unlikely friendship grows (while sneakily developing into the most improbable of romances) through a series of adventures that gently dismantle Harold’s fascination with death, as Maude introduces him to the pleasures, absurdities, and quiet rebellions that make life worth living. Set against a rich backdrop of early-1970s countercultural whimsy, their relationship challenges social expectations and invites Harold (and, ultimately, the audience) to reconsider what it means to truly embrace being alive.

Written by Colin Higgins as the basis for his Master’s thesis at UCLA and directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude was a critical and financial flop when it first opened in December of 1971. Major critics like Roger Ebert, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, panned the film, and it struggled to find an audience. Pauline Kael gave it a mixed review, noting that it flaunted a bizarre concept, but granted that it had “been made with considerable wit and skill,” also noting the considerable impact it had on young viewers: “Many young moviegoers have returned to this eccentric film repeatedly (in 1974, one 22-year-old claimed to have seen it 138 times).” The venerable New York Review of Books called it “a philosophical black comedy for grandparents and grandchildren.”

It wasn’t until 1983, twelve years after its initial release, that the film finally turned a profit, and that Cort, Gordon, and the filmmakers received their long-overdue royalty checks. In the years that followed, the critics, too, gradually gave the film a second look, and in 1997 it was tagged for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. By 2004, Entertainment Weekly ranked it #4 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Rarely has the phrase “aged like fine wine” been a more apt descriptor for a work of art.

Ashby and Higgins, for their part, also went on to much bigger successes, the former directing a number of acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, while the latter penned the smash-hit comedy Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, followed by a successful directorial run with Foul Play and 9 to 5.

With a deep and memorable cast including Vivian Pickles and the prolific Cyril Cusack, as well as an iconic soundtrack by Cat Stevens—filling in admirably for Elton John, who recommended him for the project after dropping out—Harold and Maude has plenty to offer its viewers, whether seeing it for the first… or 139th time.

Join us in remembering Bud Cort, in his most iconic role, at Harold and Maude‘s one-night-only screening at the Laemmle Noho.

The post Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting the Cult Classic ‘Harold and Maude’ appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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Catch Late Shift beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, and Town Center theaters.

At the center of the film is Leonie Benesch, an actor who has developed a reputation for portraying capable professionals under extreme duress. After her acclaimed performance in The Teachers’ Lounge—which earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature—and memorable roles in September 5 and The Crown, Benesch once again plays a woman trying to maintain her composure in an environment that threatens to overwhelm her.

In Late Shift, she is Floria, a single mother and dedicated nurse beginning a long night in the surgical ward of a Zurich hospital. The film unfolds almost entirely over the course of one exhausting shift. From the moment Floria pulls on her blue scrubs and steps onto the floor, the pace is relentless. The ward is understaffed, one colleague has called in sick, and the list of patients requiring attention seems endless.

Volpe structures the film as a breathless procession of urgent tasks and interruptions. Floria rushes through corridors, checks charts, administers medication, and tries to keep dozens of patients calm while juggling the demands of doctors, relatives, and a nervous trainee nurse.

The film’s tension comes not from a single dramatic crisis but from the constant accumulation of small ones: An elderly man awaits test results from an overbooked doctor; a patient’s medication allergy threatens to slip through the cracks in the rush of rounds; a terminally ill woman’s worried sons demand updates that Floria scarcely has time to give. Every encounter matters, and every minute lost with one patient means someone else must wait.

Volpe captures this controlled chaos with brisk, fluid filmmaking that keeps the camera close to Floria as she moves through the hospital’s sterile corridors. The effect is immersive: viewers experience the shift as she does, racing from one urgent call to the next with barely a moment to breathe, faithfully mirroring the rhythms of hospital life, where emotional highs and lows arrive in rapid succession.

Amid this constant motion, Benesch gives a performance of remarkable control. Floria is compassionate and efficient, but the strain is always visible just beneath the surface. In small gestures—a weary pause in the hallway, a flicker of frustration when another demand arrives—Benesch reveals the human cost of a job that requires endless patience and emotional endurance.

Returning to theaters for a second go, Late Shift remains a tense, empathetic reminder of the unseen labor that keeps hospitals running, and of the quiet heroism that’s required to endure it.

“Benesch could be cornering the market in tough, competent, hardworking young women doing their best in a stressful situation.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Perhaps the slickest example yet of [Volpe’s] mainstream but character-oriented storytelling sensibility.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

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Catch Miroirs No. 3 in theaters beginning March 20th at the Laemmle Royal, or from March 27th at the Glendale or Town Center 5.

The film opens with Laura (Paula Beer), a piano student in Berlin who seems adrift even before tragedy strikes. After reluctantly accompanying her boyfriend Jakob on a weekend trip out of the city, she asks to turn back almost as soon as they set out. What follows is sudden and violent: a car crash that leaves Jakob dead and Laura, miraculously, alive. Shaken and disoriented, she is taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a middle-aged woman who witnessed the accident and lives nearby in a modest rural home.

Rather than heading to a hospital, however, Laura asks if she can stay with Betty while she convalesces. The arrangement is unexpected but quietly welcomed. In the days that follow, Laura drifts into Betty’s daily routines: helping paint a fence, working in the garden, preparing meals in the kitchen. Freed from the pressures of her former life, she appears almost relieved to inhabit this temporary refuge.

Yet Petzold’s films rarely settle for simple emotional recovery, as subtle signs suggest that Betty’s generosity is tied to deeper wounds of her own. Her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a nearby auto repair shop, seem wary of Laura’s presence. Their unease hints at unresolved family tensions and a past loss that still reverberates through the household.

Visually, Miroirs No. 3 carries the director’s familiar elegance. Shot in natural light by Petzold’s longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm, the Brandenburg countryside becomes a place both serene and uneasy, where summer warmth never quite dispels the lingering chill of grief.

At the center of it all is Paula Beer, continuing her remarkable collaboration with Petzold. Her performance balances opacity with vulnerability, making Laura both enigmatic and deeply human. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Miroirs No. 3 is less about solving a mystery than about watching people tentatively reshape themselves after suffering a loss.

Quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant, the film offers another example of Petzold’s penchant for uncovering profundity within the smallest moments of everyday life.

“A compact, masterful film, with affecting performances.” – Dustin Chang, Screen Anarchy

“A quietly haunting domestic drama that remains cloistered in its pastoral setting.” – Brad Hanford, Slant Magazine

The post A Summer of Echoes: ‘Miroirs No. 3’ and the Art of Starting Over appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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Catch Pompei: Below the Clouds in theaters beginning March 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Rosi is no stranger to immersive, place-based filmmaking. The Golden Lion-winning Sacro GRA and the Golden Bear recipient’s Fire at Sea established him as one of contemporary cinema’s greatest observers, an artist whose documentaries feel at once intimate and planetary. Shot over three years in and around Naples, Pompei: Below the Clouds may be among his most humane works, yet it hums with unease. Vesuvius does not dominate the frame; instead, it lingers in the background, a calm but potentially devastating fact of life.

Working in luminous black-and-white cinematography, Rosi captures a Naples veiled in silvery cloud and sea mist. Fumaroles exhale pale steam near the volcano’s summit while, down below, the city exhales its own brands of smoke: industrial plumes, street fires, and the everyday combustion of urban existence. The threat of disaster, natural or human-made, never quite recedes.

Elsewhere, archaeologists carefully brush dirt from newly unearthed bones in Pompeii’s ruins, while police pursue tomb robbers tunneling through the storied soil. In a museum basement, a curator tends to long-buried statues and fragments as if they were old friends. “Time destroys everything, but it also preserves everything,” one historian reflects, a sentiment that becomes the film’s quiet thesis.

With its spare, tactile soundscape—blending music with the subterranean murmurs of earth and water—Pompei: Below the Clouds listens as much as it observes. Rosi isn’t interested in spectacle; he’s attentive to rhythms, textures, and the fragile balance between endurance and collapse. The film ultimately suggests that living beneath Vesuvius is less about fearing apocalypse than about negotiating coexistence with it. Past and present aren’t opposites here but layers, compacted together like geological strata. In patiently recording how people work, worry, study, remember, and simply pass the time, Rosi masterfully paints a portrait of a community suspended between memory and possibility, where history is not a distant chapter but a daily companion.

“An intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his [Italy-focused] triptych.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“As a filmmaker, Rosi acts as both guide and preservationist, making movies that may one day be uncovered like statues below ground, dug up by future archeologists trying to grasp how we lived.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and this humming, keen-eyed film is interested in all of them.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

The post Living With the Volcano: Rosi’s Mesmerizing ‘Pompei: Below the Clouds’ appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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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

The post ‘Charliebird’: When the Music Doesn’t Fix Everything appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear directors Mohammadreza Eyni, Sara Khaki, and Ryan White discuss their latest films with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge, or catch them in person when Cutting Through Rocks returns to the Laemmle Royal on February 26th, kicked off by a live Q&A with Eyni after the 7 p.m. showing, followed by Come See Me in the Good Light on February 28th, beginning with a pair of Q&As featuring Ryan White following the Saturday night and Sunday matinee showings at the Laemmle Noho.

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks introduces us to Sara Shahverdi, a headscarf-clad former midwife in northwest Iran who opens the film wrestling a metal door back into place with a buzzsaw. It’s an image that doubles as a thesis, as Shahverdi has spent her life defying expectations: riding motorcycles, working construction, advocating for girls’ education, and pushing back against child marriage in a deeply conservative region. When she runs for village council, hoping to become its first elected councilwoman, the film embeds with her over several years, capturing both the grassroots thrill of her campaign and the backlash that follows.

Shahverdi is no abstract symbol; she’s charismatic, funny, impatient, and strategic. She rallies women in living rooms, challenges men in council chambers, and leverages her past as a midwife into political capital. The result is a rousing, clear-eyed portrait of incremental revolution, proving Shahverdi’s own personal mantra that, sometimes, one small step can make all the difference in the world.

If Cutting Through Rocks is about carving space within rigid systems, Come See Me in the Good Light turns inward, illuminating the interior landscape of love and mortality. Directed by Ryan White, the film follows celebrated spoken word poet Andrea Gibson and their longtime partner writer Megan Falley after Gibson is diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer. Yet what might sound like familiar “cancer documentary” terrain quickly becomes something far more singular: funny, profane, luminous, and fiercely alive.

Gibson, once a touring poet who commanded stages like a rock star, meets their illness not with platitudes but with radical candor. The film moves between chemotherapy appointments and kitchen-table laughter, between whispered fears and bawdy jokes. The lovers measure life in three-week increments between blood tests, yet refuse to surrender their intrinsic biases toward joy. White interweaves archival performance footage with scenes of present-day intimacy, building toward a final public reading that lands with the emotional force of a championship game.

Taken together, these two nominees remind us not only of the documentary genre’s extraordinary range, but of the commonalities that unite us from across the world. Catch these Oscar-nominated documentaries back on the big screen at Laemmle Theatres and see for yourself why they’re among the year’s most celebrated nonfiction films.

The post From ‘Cutting Through Rocks’ to ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’: Two Oscar-Nominated Portraits of Courage and Willpower appeared first on Laemmle Theatres.

      

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