Inside the Arthouse: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

A very stupid idea taken very seriously.

That’s the engine behind Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the new film from David Wain — and the premise is exactly as ridiculous as the title promises.

Gail, a Midwestern bride-to-be, has a “free celebrity pass” arrangement with her fiancé. Then he actually uses his. Heartbroken and furious, Gail flies to Los Angeles to even the score with her own pass: Jon Hamm.

From there it’s a full-blown Hollywood comedy — love, jealousy, bad decisions, psychic advice, celebrity culture, and the sheer chaos of committing to a bad idea all the way through. Wain has stacked the cast with a who’s-who of gifted comic actors: Zoey Deutch leads as Gail, alongside Jon Hamm and John Slattery.

What makes the film feel rare isn’t the premise. It’s the commitment: an original American independent comedy that isn’t apologizing for being a unicorn — a movie built, first and foremost, to be funny.

Join us for a conversation with David Wain about comedy for comedy’s sake, shooting on location in L.A., and why the dumbest idea in the room is sometimes the only one worth chasing.

Posted in All

Inside the Arthouse: American Independents

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

This Fourth of July, while so much of the industry turns to reboots, sequels, franchises, and superheroes, we’re turning our attention to a different kind of American story.

American independents.

Films driven by voice, risk, authenticity, and the courage to see the world differently.

At INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, we believe independent cinema is where some of the most challenging, surprising, and deeply human filmmaking lives. These are the films that don’t just entertain us — they ask us to look closer, feel more deeply, and think beyond the familiar.

So this week, as America marks its 250th birthday, we’re celebrating American Independents: a curated selection from our library of more than 100 conversations with filmmakers — artists who continue to prove that American cinema is at its best when it dares to be independent.

Join us for this special Fourth of July edition of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, featuring some of the filmmakers and films that remind us why the independent spirit remains essential to American cinema.  

Inside the Arthouse: ROMERÍA

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

There is a particular kind of grief that comes not only from losing someone, but from never fully knowing them.

In ROMERÍA, a young woman travels home in search of the story of the parents she barely knew. What begins as a practical journey into family history becomes something more mysterious: an encounter with memory, silence, and the parts of the past that families cannot always bring themselves to name.

Directed by Carla Simón, whose SUMMER 1993 and ALCARRÀS established her as one of contemporary cinema’s most sensitive chroniclers of family life, ROMERÍA returns to deeply personal terrain while opening onto a larger history of Spain and a generation shaped by freedom, loss, and silence.

It is a film about the secrets families keep, the shame they struggle to reconcile, and the fragile beauty of imagining a past when the truth arrives only in fragments.

Join us on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE for a conversation with writer-director Carla Simón about memory, cinema, and making peace with what can never be fully known.

 

Watch on Youtube

 

Inside the Arthouse: Peter Asher: Everywhere Man

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

From the directors of HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG comes a new portrait of a man who was somehow at the center of everything — and never quite in the frame.

In PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN, directors Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine trace the extraordinary life of a man who seemed to move quietly through the center of everything.

As one half of the singing duo Peter & Gordon, Asher was swept into the British Invasion with songs written by Paul McCartney. At Apple Records, he helped shape the early career of James Taylor. And in the decades that followed, he became one of the defining behind-the-scenes forces in American music — producing and guiding artists including Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Bonnie Raitt, Barbra Streisand, and many more.

But PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MANis not simply a portrait of proximity to greatness. It is a film about listening. About taste, trust, collaboration, and the often invisible work of helping artists find the truest version of their own voice.

Blending musical memoir, documentary, live performance, and a remarkable archive of songs and stories, the film invites us to look again at how culture is made — not only by the people standing center stage, but by those just beside them, shaping the sound, the moment, and sometimes the memory itself.

Join us for our conversation with Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

Inside the Arthouse: Unidentified

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

This week, we’re joined by pioneering Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour for a conversation about her new film, UNIDENTIFIED — a tense and haunting mystery thriller set within the hidden world of modern Saudi women.

At the center of the film is Noelle Al Saffan, a recently divorced woman beginning a new life in the city. Working a clerical job in a police station, she becomes drawn into the case of a teenage girl whose body is discovered in the desert — unidentified, unclaimed, and almost erased.

What begins as a search for the girl’s name becomes something deeper: a story about identity, shame, silence, and the expectations placed on women in a society determined to keep certain truths out of sight.

Haifaa Al Mansour, the first female filmmaker from Saudi Arabia and the director of Wadjda and The Perfect Candidate, describes UNIDENTIFIED as the completion of her Saudi trilogy — films centered on women who step outside the roles assigned to them and challenge the systems built around them.

In our conversation, we talk with Haifaa Al Mansour about crafting a thriller that is both gripping and deeply personal, the evolution of Saudi cinema, and the complicated, contradictory women at the heart of her work.

Listen to our conversation with Haifaa Al Mansour about UNIDENTIFIED on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE: THE CURRENTS

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

In THE CURRENTS, acclaimed Argentine-Swiss filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler invites us into the mystery of a woman suddenly, inexplicably, set adrift.

There is a moment early in the film when Lina, an Argentinian designer visiting Switzerland, stands at a window and looks out at a river — and something shifts. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way a life can change before you have even found the words for it.

Soon after, Lina survives a mysterious plunge into that icy river. She returns home to Buenos Aires a different woman: unable to explain what happened, and unwilling to pretend that nothing has changed.

What follows is not a conventional mystery, but an intimate psychological journey — dreamlike and quietly unsettling — about identity, memory, exile, and the parts of ourselves we try to leave behind.

Mumenthaler is one of the essential voices in contemporary Latin American cinema. Her films — Back to Stay, The Idea of a Lake, and now THE CURRENTS — share an uncommon quality: they trust silence. They trust the body. They trust the audience to feel before they understand.

Join us for a conversation with filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler about her haunting new film, THE CURRENTS, on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, starting now.  

100 Episodes of Inside the Arthouse

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

A hundred episodes ago, we started with a simple belief: that movies still matter most when they are shared.

Not just streamed, not just consumed, but experienced — in the dark, on a big screen, with other people, in the places where cinema still feels alive.

Since then, INSIDE THE ARTHOUSEhas become a gathering place for the people who believe in that experience: filmmakers, actors, programmers, distributors, theater owners, advocates, and film lovers who know that independent cinema is not just an art form, but an ecosystem.

For our 100th episode, we’re looking back at some of the conversations that have shaped the journey so far.

Across the show, we’ve had the privilege of speaking with Oscar winners and nominees, first-time filmmakers and legends, documentarians and historians, international auteurs and American independents. We’ve followed films from Brazil, Iceland, Palestine, Ukraine, France, Iran, Germany, Argentina, Israel, India, and Taiwan, and far beyond — sitting with stories of war and memory, music and resistance, family and grief, comedy and survival.

With so many extraordinary conversations, it is impossible to choose favorites. So for this special episode, we’re beginning with the Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated films and filmmakers who have appeared on our show — artists whose work reminds us what independent and international cinema can still do: challenge us, move us, connect us, and stay with us long after the lights come up.

At the center of it all is the arthouse itself: the theater as a gathering place, the screen as a doorway, and cinema as one of the last great communal arts.

Join us for our 100th episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, featuring conversations with Oscar winners and nominees — and a celebration of the films, filmmakers, and film communities that keep cinema alive.

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE: TIME AND WATER

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

What does it mean to love a place that is changing before your eyes?

That question sits at the heart of TIME AND WATER, a beautiful and deeply moving new documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Sara Dosa.

The film follows Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason as he gathers family archives, photographs, folktales, songs, and the glacial landscapes of his homeland into a kind of time capsule. What begins as a portrait of a changing natural world becomes something even more intimate: a meditation on memory, family, grief, inheritance, and the places that shape us.

Moving between Iceland’s melting glaciers and the story of Andri’s grandparents, TIME AND WATER finds a quiet, deeply human connection between the land we come from and the people we carry with us.

It is about climate change, yes. But it is also about home. It is about what we try to hold on to, what inevitably slips away, and the fragile beauty of sending something meaningful into the future.

In our conversation, we talk about the film’s emotional power, its cinematic language, and the way Sara Dosa invites us to sit with uncertainty — not as despair, but as a reminder that the future is still being shaped.

This is a conversation about what we remember, what we lose, and what we still have time to protect.

Watch the full conversation with director Sara Dosa, on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.

Inside the Arthouse: BERNSTEIN’S WALL

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

In American culture, Leonard Bernstein occupies a strange—and almost impossible—space.

A conductor. A composer. A teacher. A celebrity. An activist.

The son of Jewish immigrants, Bernstein rose to become one of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth century, bringing classical music into American homes while refusing to separate art from politics.

But BERNSTEIN’S WALL, from director Douglas Tirola, is not simply a portrait of genius.

It’s a film about contradiction.

About a man driven by enormous ambition… and equally profound doubt. A public figure standing at the center of American culture while privately wrestling with questions of identity, family, sexuality, and the responsibility of the artist in political life.

Using Bernstein’s own voice, and drawing from newly discovered archival material, Tirola creates something remarkably intimate—as if Bernstein himself were sitting beside us, reflecting on art, activism, and the complicated world he helped shape.

And perhaps what makes the story feel so contemporary is the question at its core:

What role should artists play in moments of political and social up

heaval?

Join us for a conversation with director Douglas Tirola on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, starting now.

Inside the Arthouse: The Wizard of the Kremlin

Posted on by raphaelsbarge_lf2krp

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, power didn’t disappear. It transformed—quieter, more calculated, and far more dangerous.

Starring Paul Dano and Jude Law, THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, directed by Olivier Assayas, is not simply a political thriller. It’s a meditation on influence, manipulation, and the hidden architecture of control—tracing the rise of Vladimir Putin through the eyes of the shadow strategist who helped engineer it.

Assayas brings his singular sensibility to a world of backroom deals and shifting loyalties. Dano and Law anchor the film with performances that are restrained, precise, and deeply unsettling—two men who understand the system they’re inside, and choose to remain within it.

What lingers most is the question at its core: how do ordinary people become complicit in something far larger—and darker—than themselves?

We sat down with director Oliver Assayas to talk about THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN. That conversation on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE is starting now.