Across our entire staff, if there was a movie we could all agree on being the definitive holiday season masterpiece of the past 25 years, it would be Todd Hayne’s Carol.
Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (are you kidding me?), the film is set in 1950s New York, and follows a shy young shopgirl and aspiring photographer, who becomes captivated by Carol Aird, an elegant woman trapped in a failing marriage. As the two grow closer, their connection deepens into a forbidden romance that threatens Carol’s custody battle for her daughter. Forced onto a road trip that becomes both an escape and a reckoning, the women must decide whether their love can survive the scrutiny and constraints of their time.
In the years since its release, Carol has become a pop-cultural touchstone that perfectly blends a holiday-season staple and queer cinematic landmark. For pop culture purposes, it’s perhaps the most GIFed slow-burn romance of the internet age. Its influence can be seen all over the rise of prestige LGBTQ+ storytelling across screens big and small. Some movies change your life forever.
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Celebrate this holiday season with Greta Gerwig’s joyful, heart-full adaptation of Little Women from 2019. Starring an A+ cast of Saoirse Ronan, Florenge Pugh, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, and Timothee Chalamet, it’s the perfect seasonal escape on the big screen.
The film follows the four March sisters—Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth—as they navigate love and heartbreak in Civil War–era New England. Told across intertwined timelines, the film traces their journey from spirited girlhood to adulthood as they fight to define their own futures.
Bring your friends, bring your family, and ring in the holidays with a film that celebrates sisterhood and the power of following your own path. Little Women has been adapted many times, but Gerwig’s version is the best interpretation yet, and might just be her magnum opus as director.
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Join us as we ring in the holiday season by playing Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday for the first time ever!
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz star as two women on opposite sides of the globe who impulsively swap homes for Christmas—one trading a cozy English cottage for sunny Los Angeles, the other escaping Hollywood hustle for snow-dusted Surrey. What begins as an experiment in escape soon turns into a chance for renewal, connection, and the kind of unexpected romance that only seems possible in December.
With Meyers’ signature warmth and gorgeous interiors (duh) and a dream ensemble (we didn’t even mention Jack Black, Jude Law, and the legendary Eli Wallach), The Holiday delivers everything you want from a seasonal favorite!
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Billy Wilder’s timeless romantic dramedy The Apartment returns to the big screen with a new 4K restoration as we celebrate what would have been Jack Lemmon’s 100th birthday.
Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he’s left with a major problem to solve.
Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, The Apartment remains one of the great Hollywood stories about the courage to choose kindness in an unkind world. It’s the perfect aperetif to our Holiday Season programming.
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Join us for a special screening of Hal Ashby’s Coming Home! This special screening will be introduced by critic and essayist, Kristen Lopez, author of Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies. Get there early at 6:00PM for a meet and greet with Kristen, who will be signing copies of her book in our lobby courtesy of our local book selling partner, Arvida Book Co.!
While her husband Bob (Bruce Dern) serves in Vietnam, Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) volunteers at a VA hospital and forms a deep connection with Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a paralyzed veteran whose outlook on the war challenges everything she knows. When Bob returns home changed, all three must confront the emotional fallout of the conflict and the lives it has reshaped.
About the author: Kristen Lopez is a pop culture essayist, critic, and editor whose articles have appeared at Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, MTV, TCM, and Roger Ebert. She was previously the Film Editor for TheWrap and the TV Editor for IndieWire where she was nominated for a SoCal Journalism Award and National Journalism Award by the LA Press Club. She is the author of “But Have You Read the Book: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films.” Her first book, “But Have You Read the Book” debuted from TCM and Running Press in 2023. A California native, Kristen was raised in a small suburb near Sacramento and graduated with a Masters in English from CSU Sacramento. She is the creator of the classic film podcast, Ticklish Business.
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Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Paulette Goddard).
With its barrage of unforgettable gags and sly commentary on class struggle during the Great Depression, Modern Times—though made almost a decade into the talkie era and containing moments of sound (even song!)—is a timeless showcase of Chaplin’s untouchable genius as a director of silent comedy.
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City Lights, the most cherished film by Charlie Chaplin, is also his ultimate Little Tramp chronicle. The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street (a magical Virginia Cherrill) and mistakes him for a millionaire.
Though this Depression-era smash was made after the advent of sound, Chaplin remained steadfast in his love for the expressive beauty of the pre-talkie form. The result was the epitome of his art and the crowning achievement of silent comedy.
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The rarely screened Four Nights of a Dreamer is Robert Bresson’s great forgotten masterpiece, a stark yet haunting ode to romantic idealism and the capriciousness of love. We are presenting it in a brand new 4K restoration via our friends at Janus Films!
Adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” Four Nights follows Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a lonely artist who roams bohemian Paris in search of the girl of his dreams. One night he saves a beautiful young woman, Marthe, from plunging into the Seine in despair over her rejection by an avoidant lover (Maurice Monnoyer). Jacques compassionately attempts to reunite Marthe with her beau, but his feelings for his new friend soon become less than platonic and his investment in her personal drama far from selfless.
Four Nights of a Dreamer has been called the French master’s “loveliest” work: with his signature minimalism, Bresson films the shimmering beauty of nocturnal Paris as it enfolds his characters in endless possibility—subtly capturing the wonder of unexpected connection and the mystery of fate.
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As a tribute to the late, great Diane Keaton, we are presenting one of her most striking and under-sung performances in Warren Beatty’s sweeping 1981 epic Reds.
Told on an operatic scale, Reds chronicles the real-life romance between radical journalist John Reed (Beatty) and writer-feminist Louise Bryant (Keaton), set against the turbulence of early-20th-century revolution. While history remembers Reed as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, it’s Keaton’s Louise who anchors the film—unwilling to live in anyone’s shadow.
Shot with the grandeur of classic Hollywood and the intimacy of a love letter, Reds earned Beatty an Academy Award for Best Director and Keaton a Best Actress nomination, cementing her as more than the quirky icon of Annie Hall. Here she is–resolute and radiant forever.
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Celebrate 20 years of Joe Wright’s iconic romantic classic Pride & Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfayden, Rosamund Pike, and Carey Mulligan!
A story of love and life among the landed English gentry during the Georgian era. Mr. Bennet is a gentleman living in Hertfordshire with his overbearing wife and five daughters, but if he dies their house will be inherited by a distant cousin whom they have never met, so the family’s future happiness and security is dependent on the daughters making good marriages.
A sweeping, sun-dappled reinvention of Jane Austen’s beloved novel that redefined period romance for a new generation, Pride & Prejudice is more popular and beloved than ever!
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