Santa Monica Archives – Laemmle Theatres

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Every year, the Oscar-nominated short films deliver some of the boldest storytelling, the biggest emotional swings, and the most inventive filmmaking anywhere on the ballot. They’re compact, adventurous, and often unforgettable — and seeing them before the ceremony doesn’t just make you a more informed viewer; it gives you a real edge in our ongoing Oscar contest. If you want a competitive advantage (and bragging rights), the shorts are your secret weapon.

Big Emotions, Small Runtime: Why the Oscar Shorts Matter — “Retirement Plan”

Come see the 2026 slate of Oscar-nominated shorts beginning February 20th at various Laemmle locations.

This year’s nominees across the Animated, Live Action, and Documentary categories once again prove that small runtimes can deliver enormous impacts. After all, we love short things: short stories, short ribs, short naps, short lines at the concession stand — and yes, short films.

Animated Short Film Nominees

This year’s entries for animation range from historical to mythic to darkly funny:

Butterfly (France) paints the life of Olympic swimmer Alfred Nakache—from glory to Auschwitz and back again—as a flowing stream of memory.
Forevergreen (USA) delivers an eco-fable about an orphaned bear cub and its arboreal protector.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Canada) offers a haunting, handcrafted tale of love, sorrow, and avarice.
Retirement Plan (Ireland) brings wry humor to a man’s elaborate fantasies about his golden years.
The Three Sisters (Israel/Cyprus) unfolds wordlessly, following siblings surviving in isolation.

Live Action Short Film Nominees

The live-action lineup is especially wide-ranging this year as satire, dystopia, tenderness, and social tension all share the same stage:

Butcher’s Stain (Israel) centers on an Arab-Israeli supermarket worker accused of tearing down hostage posters at his workplace.
Jane Austen’s Period Drama (USA) is an Austen-inspired satire about a woman whose sudden menstruation interrupts her much-anticipated marriage proposal.
Two People Exchanging Saliva (France/USA) imagines a future where kissing is punishable by death.
A Friend of Dorothy (UK) follows a lonely widow whose routine is broken by an unexpected connection.
The Singers (USA) builds drama around an unlikely sing-off, inspired by Turgenev’s lauded short story.

Documentary Short Film Nominees

The documentary shorts continue to be a testing ground for urgent, personal, and formally daring nonfiction:

All the Empty Rooms depicts the profound grief of school shootings via the untouched bedrooms of its victims.
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud honors the life, career, and death of an American journalist killed in Ukraine.
Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” follows Israeli peace activists holding silent vigils in Tel Aviv for slain Gazan children.
The Devil Is Busy chronicles the day-to-day operations of a reproductive health clinic post-Roe v. Wade.
Perfectly a Strangeness follows three donkeys exploring an abandoned observatory.

Previous short-film winners have gone on to become cultural touchstones and launch major careers, and they frequently preview themes and talents that shape the future of feature filmmaking. Watching them now isn’t just homework — it’s discovery.

Carmen Maura Shines in Maryam Touzani’s Tender ‘Calle Málaga’

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For generations of moviegoers, Carmen Maura’s face is inseparable from the films of Pedro Almodóvar, beginning with their first collaboration forty-five years ago and continuing across seven defining features of modern Spanish cinema. In Calle Málaga, Maura reminds us why she remains one of the screen’s most expressive and emotionally generous performers, delivering a luminous late-career lead performance that is by turns funny, sensual, stubborn, and deeply moving.

Catch Calle Malaga on the big screen beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center theaters.

Director Maryam Touzani’s film centers on María Ángeles, an elderly Spanish widow living in Tangier, Morocco, where she has built a comfortable life of routine, friendship, and hard-earned independence. Her days are filled with small but sustaining pleasures: greeting market vendors by name, tending balcony flowers, listening to romantic boleros, and visiting the cemetery where her husband and friends are buried. When her daughter arrives from Madrid with urgent financial troubles and a plan to sell the apartment, María Ángeles is suddenly confronted with the loss not just of her home, but of her autonomy.

The premise may be simple, but its execution is rich in both detail and feeling. Touzani, working from a script co-written with her husband and fellow filmmaker Nabil Ayouch and inspired by her grandmother’s actual experiences, treats domestic space as emotional territory. Rooms, objects, and streets are not background but biography, containers of memory that cannot be easily boxed up and sold. The film understands how profoundly place and identity intertwine, especially later in one’s life.

Maura carries the film with masterful aplomb. The shifts in her inner life register instantly: pride wounded, resolve rekindled, mischief flashing back into her eyes. She never reduces María Ángeles to a stock “feisty elder” archetype, instead grounding her resistance in believable portrayals of dignity and desire. Even moments that do threaten to tip into sentimentality remain anchored by her naturalism and innate charm.

The mother-daughter conflict is drawn with melancholy sharpness, capturing how love and resentment can calcify over time. Yet the film makes room for surprise and renewal. After a forced move into assisted living—and a quick, cleverly engineered escape—María Ángeles begins rebuilding her prior life on her own terms, launching a small neighborhood soccer-night and gradually forming an unexpected bond with a local antiques dealer. What follows includes one of the film’s most refreshing elements: a tender, late-life romantic and sexual awakening, portrayed with warmth and wit.

Above all, Calle Málaga stands as a worthy showcase for Carmen Maura, an icon revisiting familiar themes of womanhood, independence, and reinvention, while proving she remains as captivating now as at the zenith of her career.

“A sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Screen Daily

H Is for Hawk: A Poetic Exploration of Grief, Nature, and the Human Heart

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

H Is for Hawk adapts Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir into a quietly powerful portrait of grief, healing, and the paradoxical solace of the natural world. Directed with sensitivity and a keen eye for emotional nuance, the film follows a woman’s audacious attempt to navigate profound personal loss by forging a bond with a creature that is, by nature, wild and ungovernable.

Catch H Is for Hawk in theaters beginning January 23rd at the Laemmle Monica, Town Center, Newhall, and Claremont locations.

The film centers on Helen (Claire Foy), a woman devastated by the sudden death of her father. Struggling to articulate her grief, she turns to an unexpected source of solace: training a goshawk, an apex bird of prey whose fierce independence mirrors the untamable terrain of her own emotions. In Helen’s obsessive dedication to understanding and partnering with the hawk, the film finds a natural metaphor for the disorienting, unpredictable landscape of mourning itself, wherein moments of connection coexist with bewilderment, longing, and the jagged edges of loss.

Foy’s performance is quietly magnetic, capturing Helen’s inwardness without collapsing her into cliché. She embodies a character who is determined yet vulnerable, scientifically curious yet emotionally adrift, and consistently compelling in her contradictions. In flashbacks, Brendan Gleeson, as the father who offered both practical wisdom and human warmth, complements Foy with a lived-in presence that anchors many of the film’s quieter moments. Together, their chemistry underscores the film’s central concern: that connection—whether with people, animals, or one’s own past—is every bit as nonnegotiable as eating, breathing, and sleeping.

Visually, H Is for Hawk moves with an abiding stillness. Long, carefully observed takes of misty landscapes and the hawk’s lithe flight underscore the recurring notion that healing is not linear and can unfold in unexpected ways. The cinematography allows the wildness of the British countryside to become an emotional backdrop as rich as any dialogue, suggesting that nature does more than reflect human feeling: it refracts it, alters it, and sometimes softens it.

Critics have noted the film’s success in adapting a highly introspective, literary text to the screen without diminishing its emotional weight. By embracing both the ineffable qualities of grief and the intricate rhythms of human and animal behavior, the adaptation feels faithful not just to the memoir’s chronology but to its philosophical heart.

In a cinematic landscape often driven by resolution and/or theatrics, H Is for Hawk stands out for its emotional honesty and its faith in the audiences’ capacity to sit with an open and unguarded heart. It is a quiet film with a strong heartbeat, one that finds beauty not in what is tamed, but in what is profound, wild, and enduring.

“Philippa Lowthorpe pares Helen Macdonald’s intricately layered memoir down to what she considers essential, focusing on the author’s odd choice to adopt a goshawk as a kind of emotional escapism.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“A sensitive portrayal of a person’s slide into depression… particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning.” – Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter

Culture Vulture: Big-Screen Art, Ideas, and Performance at Laemmle

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture is Laemmle Theatres’ ongoing invitation to experience world-class art, performance, and cultural storytelling on the big screen and with an audience at your side. Curated from across the ballet, opera, theatre, fine art, and documentary landscapes, this series brings exceptional works to the Laemmle Glendale, Monica, and Town Center locations on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 10:00 a.m. and Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m.

Below are the next five Culture Vulture presentations, each offering a distinct outlook on history, creativity, and human expression:

The Hell of Auschwitz: MAUS by Art Spiegelman (January 24)
Blending humor, rigor, and deep emotional intelligence, this documentary explores Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel Maus, a work that permanently transformed how the Holocaust could be represented. By recounting both his father Vladek’s survival of Auschwitz and their fraught father-son relationship in postwar New York, Spiegelman forged a new artistic language, one that made space for memory, trauma, and inherited silence. Director Pauline Horovitz approaches Maus not just as cultural history, but as a personal reckoning, examining its enduring impact through the lens of the “second generation.”

Accompanied by: EGG CREAM (short)
Screening alongside Maus is this affectionate documentary short about the iconic New York City drink that contains neither egg nor cream. Through family stories, archival material, and neighborhood rituals, “Egg Cream” is a meditation on Jewish-American identity, immigration, and the bittersweet pull of nostalgia—small pleasures standing in for much larger histories.

Hamlet – National Theatre Live (January 31)
Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy returns in a filmed presentation from London’s National Theatre. This production emphasizes Hamlet’s psychological intimacy and moral uncertainty, bringing fresh immediacy to a timeless play about grief, power, and the impossibility of clean action. Captured live for the screen, it preserves the electricity of theatre while granting audiences an unusually close encounter with one of drama’s greatest roles.

Frida: Viva la Vida (February 7)
This vivid documentary portrait of Frida Kahlo draws directly from the artist’s own letters, diaries, and writings to illuminate her life beyond the rich mythology she left behind. Moving seamlessly between themes of art, illness, love, and political commitment, the film illuminates Kahlo as both fiercely self-aware and profoundly vulnerable, tracing how pain and creativity became inseparable forces in her work.

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (February 21)
An urgent and inspiring civil rights documentary, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round examines and unpacks the first organized interracial protest in U.S. history. When Black students and white allies joined together in 1960 to desegregate a Maryland amusement park, their sustained picket line became a training ground for future Freedom Riders and a crucible for grassroots activism. Told through immersive storytelling, archival footage, and firsthand accounts, the film expounds upon a pivotal but largely forgotten chapter of American protest history.

Water Lilies of Monet: The Magic of Water and Light (March 7)
This visually sumptuous film immerses viewers in Claude Monet’s lifelong obsession with water, reflection, and light. Moving between art history and sensory experience, it explores how the Water Lilies series redefined modern painting, and how Monet’s garden at Giverny became both subject and sanctuary. Seen on the big screen, the paintings’ scale, texture, and color take on renewed power.

Culture Vulture is an ongoing celebration of art in all possible forms. Whether you’re drawn to history, performance, or visual beauty, these curated screenings offer a rare chance to encounter such landmark works on the big screen, as they were meant to be experienced. Buy your tickets today and prepare to be wowed!

Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s Quiet Meditation on Family Ties

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, winner of the coveted Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, offers a signature turn from one of independent cinema’s most distinctive voices, culminating in a gentle, contemplative triptych that quietly observes the tangled, often unspoken dynamics between children and their parents. Opening January 9th at the Laemmle Monica, Claremont, NoHo, and Glendale theaters, the film invites audiences into three subtly interconnected stories about siblings, aging, and legacy, all rendered with the iconoclastic filmmaker’s characteristic blend of wit, understatement, and emotional precision. Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Jarmusch discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut.

Structured in three chapters set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, Father Mother Sister Brother foregrounds ordinary domestic encounters over flashy, overt drama. In the first story, adult siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) make a quiet, tentative journey to visit their widowed father (Tom Waits) at his remote home, negotiating the awkwardness and muted affection that define long years of estrangement. Jarmusch’s direction attends closely to how the three characters move and speak around one another, revealing a lifetime of shared history through pauses, glances, and half-finished thoughts.

The second segment moves to Dublin, where an accomplished novelist (Charlotte Rampling) receives her rarely-seen daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) for an annual tea. Here, the emotional choreography is just as rife: politeness, competition, and unspoken disappointment circulate beneath measured exchanges, offering a quietly sharp exploration of how adult relationships with parents can continue to bear the marks of youth.

In the final story, set in Paris, twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) sift through their deceased parents’ belongings, reminiscing and confronting the traces of the lives that shaped them. Minimalist but resonant, this segment emphasizes memory, loss, and the ways shared history lingers in objects and quiet conversations.

While some viewers may find Jarmusch’s pared-back rhythms and emphasis on silence challenging, the film’s rewards lie in its textured, patient observation of ordinary life and its capacity to reflect shared human experience without forcing tidy resolutions. The cast—a blend of longtime Jarmusch collaborators and fresh faces—brings this world to life with subtle (yet thematically crucial) commonalities, underscoring the film’s unstated hypothesis that, whatever differences may exist between us, family dynamics follow a universal language.

In a cinematic landscape that often equates drama with spectacle, Jarmusch’s latest anthology stands apart as a humane, reflective study of the ties that bind us—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes silently, but always with a strange, persistent tenderness.

“What makes the triptych of thematically connected snapshots memorable is its deftly unfussy observation of the unknowability that can endure among people who share the same bloodlines.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The film’s] laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Where Myth Takes Wing: The Quiet Brilliance of The Tale of Silyan

November 25, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In The Tale of Silyan, filmmaker Tamara Kotevska—whose Honeyland helped redefine what nonfiction storytelling can look like—returns to a landscape shaped by absence. Economic migration has emptied much of rural North Macedonia, leaving behind scattered farmhouses, aging villagers, and the yawning silence of futures deferred. Into that void, she places a story that is part-documentary, part-fable, and wholly grounded in the stubborn beauty of a man who refuses to leave his land behind.

Catch The Tale of Silyan in theaters beginning Friday, December 5th at the Laemmle Monica Film Center, followed by a Q&A with Tamara Kotevska and cinematographer Jean Dakar after the 7:30 p.m. showing on Saturday, December 6th.

The film follows Nikola, a middle-aged farmer whose family has left for better prospects abroad. He stays—out of duty, love, and something older and harder to name—until one day he finds a wounded stork amid piles of landfill debris. He carries the bird home, tending to it with a patience that seems almost anachronistic, and names it Silyan, invoking a local folktale about a boy transformed into a stork. What follows is both mythic and matter-of-fact; a braiding of the imagined with the palpably real.

Kotevska’s filmmaking is light on exposition, trusting instead in textures: Nikola’s hands repairing improvised splints, fields washed in early-morning color, the slow choreography of a stork relearning balance. The camera often lingers longer than expected, inviting viewers to inhabit the rhythms of a place where time moves unevenly, marked not by fickle human whims but by the return of birds, the passing of seasons, and the persistent hum of a changing climate.

What emerges is a portrait of interdependence that extends beyond the sentimental. In caring for the stork, Nikola locates a purpose that keeps the encroaching loneliness at bay; in responding to his presence, Silyan becomes a living reminder that the natural world still holds capacity for renewal, even as its fragility grows increasingly apparent. Their relationship is never anthropomorphized, merely observed: two beings sharing space, negotiating trust, and building the kind of bond that can only develop when no one is trying to manufacture meaning.

And yet meaning accumulates. The Tale of Silyan exists in a Europe increasingly shaped by departures: the departure of people from rural regions, of species whose habitats have been reshaped or erased, and of traditions that once anchored entire communities. Through Nikola’s perseverance and Silyan’s tentative recovery, the film rejects the overly simplistic narrative of accepting the inevitable; instead, it asks whether tending to even one fragile thing—a bird, a home, a story—might still matter in a world ruled by indifference.

“An excellent documentary that also happens to be a ravishing work of poetry.” – Christian Blauvelt, IndieWire

“Part nature film, part parable, part ground-level snapshot of downward-spiraling economies.” – Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

Bearing Witness: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

November 11, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

In Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona craft a documentary of haunting immediacy. Through more than 200 days of video calls, the film charts Hassona’s life under siege in Gaza from 2024–25, capturing the everyday resilience of a young photojournalist who insists on maintaining her ideals even as bombs fall and hope frays.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Farsi discuss her revolutionary project with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its impending run at the Laemmle Monica and Glendale theaters beginning November 14th.

The filmmaking is itself quietly radical. Farsi, barred from Gaza, connects remotely via smartphone, creating a frame-within-a-frame aesthetic that reflects the imposed distances and filtered visibility of war. Critics have noted the film’s stripped-back style (mostly buffer-laden FaceTime footage, interrupted calls, and pixelated images) that tastes of unmediated reality and sorrow, making the viewer feel even more intimately involved in the events being depicted on the screen.

Through it all, Fatma Hassona emerges as the film’s beating heart: always cheerful, even when surrounded by rubble, shortage, and grief. She shares her world with a quiet strength and surprising humor, discussing photography, music, and the simple joy of eating chips while bombs echo outside. Yet in April 2025, mere weeks after the film was selected for Cannes’ prestigious ACID sidebar, Hassona and several members of her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Her death casts a permanent shadow over the documentary, leaving behind a chilling statement about what it costs to look.

For all its opportunity, the documentary refuses easy distance or objective coldness. Instead, it lingers on the interruptions—the frozen frames, the dropped calls, the unedited glitches—so that viewers can feel even a shred of what it means to live under siege. It asks what form seeing takes when the camera, the connection, and even one’s body are all vulnerable. And though the film documents devastation, it refuses to devolve into either reductionism or the fetishization of victimhood; after all, Hassona is not a number. She is smiling, stubbornly alive, a human face among many, and the film dutifully preserves her voice.

For viewers drawn to documentaries that fuse intimacy and urgency, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk stands as a testament not just to loss, but to persistence. Perhaps its greatest superpower lies in juxtaposing life’s ordinary moments—calls about electricity, photos shared with friends abroad—with the extraordinary circumstances that turn them into daring acts.

“A moving monument to this young woman and countless others like her—lovers of life who refused to be quiet as they were swept into the dehumanizing machinery of war.” – Eli Friedberg, Slant Magazine

“Farsi’s film does not necessarily expose the morbid reality of Gaza as much as it reveals what it would be like to survive through it.” – Akash Despande, High On Films

“[The film] exudes character from every frame.” – Landon Defever, In Session Film

Schindler Space Architect: A Maverick Revisited

November 5, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Schindler Space Architect is an independently produced documentary examining the works and life of a pioneer of modern architecture, R.M. Schindler, narrated by Meryl Streep and Udo Kier, and featuring testimonials by renowned architects Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, and Ray Kappe, among many others.

Having already enjoyed an August run as part of our Culture Vulture series, Schindler Space Architect is now returning to the big screen as regular engagement beginning Friday, November 7th at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in order to qualify for the Oscars’ Best Documentary race. So come check out this fascinating tale of one of architecture’s most impactful (if forgotten) revolutionaries before it’s too late. Click here for tickets.

Message from the producer/director:

“Werner Herzog once said “Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.” This has been my boat and it has taken twelve years to complete the mission.

M. Schindler’s life story is very close to my heart. He is the quintessential underdog: bohemian, rebel, working outside the mainstream, on a path of his own, unsung and quite often misunderstood. And yet, Schindler is the early modernist architect who fundamentally changed how people live, breaking the barriers between “inside” and “outside”, his architecture grew from the land and it was always in dialogue with Nature. Schindler experimented and invented over a period of thirty years, suffering the ups and downs of his creative genius, forging his own vision he left a well of inspiration. I was determined to put the spotlight on, to make a wrong right. As a first-time female filmmaker working outside the mainstream industry I had to overcome many challenges along the way. Wearing all kinds of hats: producer, researcher, writer, director, editor, to name a few, but I kept going, tirelessly fundraising, forging my own vision and attracting along the way collaborators that were inspired by Schindler and contributed their best. So, we end up with a film made with a lot of love and respect for a man who was a true original.

– Valentina Ganeva

“Viennese-born Rudolf Schindler transformed Los Angeles architecture with buildings shaped by space, light and interconnection with nature. In Schindler Space Architect, director Valentina Galena draws on rich archival material, cinematography and interviews to vividly tell the story of Schindler’s ideas, life, loves, and his complicated relationship with L.A.’s other founding Austrian modernist, Richard Neutra. Fascinating.” – Frances Anderton

“Turns basic assumptions about the birth of modern architecture upside down.” – Alan Hess, architect and historian