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If you’re looking for the ultimate gift for a movie lover who lives in Los Angeles, you can’t beat an American Cinematheque membership. Now utilizing three venues — the iconic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, the Aero in Santa Monica, and their Eastside location the Los Feliz 3 — the Cinematheque programs over a hundred films a month ranging from restored classics and new Hollywood releases to cutting-edge independent and foreign cinema.

The stars are coming out for this year’s 38th annual American Cinematheque Awards — namely, big-name presenters Robert Downey Jr., Casey Affleck, Guillermo del Toro, Octavia Spencer, Aaron Sorkin and November Los Angeles magazine cover star Sebastian Stan.

Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” took home the Grand Jury Award. Her short film follows two sisters, Anna and Emily, as they share a rocky reunion after their mother’s passing. The two navigate Anna’s cognitive disability as they rebuild their relationship. Along with the award, Sargent also received a $60,000 camera package, courtesy of Panavision, to assist her with fleshing out a larger project from their proof-of-concept submission. Giselle Bonilla’s “The Musical” won the Audience Choice Award.

Every year is a good year to admire Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose filmography runs far and deep enough to essentially guarantee you’ve yet to discover something wondrous. 2024 is of particular note, though: it’s brought Cloud, a thrilling detour into action cinema; the French-language remake of his essential Serpent’s Path; and Chime, which spends its fleet 50 minutes hitting every key note of his greatest projects sans one dull step. Kurosawa appeared at this year’s Beyond Fest, where he took time from presenting 2024’s trio to speak with me, via Zoom, on the subjects of prolificacy, pride, and resurrecting an elder form of filmmaking.

Sandra Bullock’s Hollywood career began, as she says, with “a folding chair and a paper plate.” Before she became an Oscar-winning superstar, Bullock, 60, starred with Keanu Reeves in her 1994 breakout Speed. At the action thriller’s 30th anniversary screening, she recalled her audition for the role of bus passenger Annie Porter with perfect clarity. “I was the new kid on the block and it was nerve-wracking,” Bullock said onstage at Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre on Oct. 8. “I remember arriving there, I remember the car I drove, I remember what I was thinking.”

A folding chair and a paper plate for a steering wheel. That’s what Sandra Bullock remembered from her audition for 1994’s blockbuster “Speed,” which had a 30th anniversary screening Tuesday evening at the Egyptian Theatre as one of the final events of this year’s Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque. After the screening, during which the sold-out audience burst into cheers throughout, Bullock was joined onstage for an affectionate 50-minute Q&A with her co-star Keanu Reeves and the movie’s director, Jan de Bont. It was the first time the trio had ever talked about the film together in front of a live audience.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock reunited to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of their most famous films together on Tuesday. The pair appeared at a screening of “Speed” at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles at American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, where they were joined onstage by the film’s director, Jan de Bont, to talk about the experience of working on the beloved movie.

Beyond Fest hit overdrive Tuesday night with an electric anniversary screening of Jan de Bont’s iconic blockbuster Speed followed by an epic 50-minute Q&A with the filmmaker and his stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in a reunion 30 years in the making. It was clear long before showtime that the event — part of the American Cinematheque at Egyptian Theatre series — would be special. Reeves, Bullock and de Bont had never previously shared the same stage to discuss their work on the 1994 film, which became a surprise hit after it grossed north of $350 million worldwide on a $30 million budget.

Beyond Fest and the American Cinematheque saluted producer Roger Corman on Saturday with a four-film marathon followed by a conversation with some of the directors who began their careers working for the now-legendary genre icon. Speaking to The Times just moments before he stepped onstage at the Aero Theatre for an extended standing ovation, the 97-year-old Corman looked back on some of the changes to the film industry he‘d seen during a career that stretches back to the mid-1950s.

Sarah Paulson made a cameo on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica on Saturday night to participate in a Q&A following the Beyond Fest premiere of her new Searchlight Pictures thriller Hold Your Breath. And what a lively session it turned out to be inside the Aero Theatre, as the chat not only covered her work in the Karrie Crouse- and Will Joines-directed film (streaming Oct. 3 on Hulu) but also touched on other high-profile performances and a few notable co-stars.

Actress and Executive Producer Sarah Paulson attended the West Coast premiere of her new film ‘Hold Your Breath’ at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, on Montana Avenue, on Saturday. The film’s premiere was part of the genre festival Beyond Fest’s schedule of events at the venue that will continue until October 9.

The twelfth edition of Beyond Fest, which bills itself as “the biggest and highest-attended genre film festival in the U.S.,” will open in Los Angeles on Wednesday with the world premiere of Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot, a fresh adaptation of the 1975 novel that King himself once described as Peyton Place meets Dracula. On Saturday, King will appear as one of five interviewees in Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, a meditation on the long shadow Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has cast since its release fifty years ago.

It’s almost time again to return to Beyond Fest, the biggest annual festival celebrating the best in genre filmmaking. Only two weeks remain until doors open on September 25 for its 12th edition packed with 82 features, including 16 world premieres, 4 international premieres, 1 North American premiere, 3 U.S. premieres, and 25 West Coast premieres along with a bevy of special screenings. With the festival just around the corner, the full schedule was unveiled today with Gary Dauberman’s recently resurrected Max adaptation of Salem’s Lot set to make its world premiere as the opening title. Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film Cloud, meanwhile, has been given closing night honors.

Beyond Fest is presented exclusively by NEON and programmed and produced in partnership with the American Cinematheque.

American Cinematheque Artistic Director Grant Moninger added, “We are thrilled for the festival to return to the beloved Egyptian Theatre, broadening Beyond Fest across Los Angeles to all three American Cinematheque venues for the very first time. The biggest genre fest in the U.S. has gotten even bigger with the festival’s largest slate to date. Beyond Fest 2024 has something for every L.A. moviegoer, with even more premieres, guests, reunions, marathons and free screenings of exciting new films.”

You want more? You got more. A Shane Black movie marathon? Check. An evening with the women of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street?’ Check. Award winners ‘The Brutalist’ and ‘Anora’? Check and check. And did someone say a Ron Perlman appearance for a ‘Hellboy’ screening?

Toho International, the film distributor, partnered with Beyond Fest 2024 for an event screening for lucky fans at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on October 6, 2024. My Hero Academia: You’re Next premiered to strong critical reception and box office success in Japan on August 2, 2024. However, with the film coming to theaters with English dubbed and subbed screenings in the United States and Canada, fans of the superhero anime can voice their passion for the series as it continues its victory lap while season 7 approaches its end.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock will buckle up for a “Speed” reunion while Al Pacino will say hello with a “Scarface” tribute at this year’s Beyond Fest, returning to Los Angeles later this month and boasting 82 films in its star-studded program.

Beyond Fest, the biggest and highest-attended genre film festival in the U.S., on Thuesday unveiled its complete slate of programming for 2024.

At the 12th edition, taking place across Los Angeles from September 25th – October 9th, you can expect 82 features, including 16 World Premieres, 4 International Premieres, 1 North American Premiere, 3 U.S. Premieres, and 25 West Coast Premieres.

For the past three years, the American Cinematheque has presented “Bleak Week,” an annual festival devoted to the greatest films ever made about the darkest side of humanity. This year, the festival will not only be unspooling in Los Angeles June 1 – 7 — with special guests including Al Pacino, Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman, and Karyn Kusama — but will travel to New York for the first time with a week of screenings at the historic Paris Theater starting June 9.

Another classic is getting the restoration treatment thanks to Arbelos Films as Peter Kass’ 1961 independent feature, Time of the Heathen, has been restored to an impressive 4K and will celebrate screenings on both the East and the West Coast in May. First up, the film will make its debut in New York City, rolling across a big screen in the Big Apple for the first time in history. That showing will take place on May 10, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center. Jumping across the country, audiences in Los Angeles can expect to enjoy Time of the Heathen on May 12 thanks to the folks at American Cinematheque.

A highlight of 2024’s TCM Classic Film Festival was the world premiere of a pristine restoration of John Ford‘s “The Searchers,” one of the greatest Westerns ever made and certainly — given its impact on directors like Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Paul Schrader — one of the most influential. “The Searchers” was photographed in VistaVision, arguably the best of the widescreen formats that emerged in the 1950s to combat television’s encroachment on the film business, and to see it projected on the big screen is a transcendent experience — especially if one is lucky enough to view the 70mm print that premiered at TCM’s fest and is currently making its way around the revival circuit (it screens in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque on May 3 and 4).

Throughout the early 2000s, the rock ‘n’ roll film festival “Don’t Knock the Rock” was one of the highlights of any L.A.-based cinephile’s year, an impeccably assembled program of movies, live performances, and panels celebrating the intersection between rock ‘n’ roll and cinema. Created by writer-director Allison Anders (creator of three of the greatest movies about music ever made — “Border Radio,” “Grace of My Heart,” and “Sugar Town”) and music supervisor Tiffany Anders (who possesses the best taste in television as the curator of songs for “Reservation Dogs,” “Beef,” and “PEN15”), “Don’t Knock the Rock” was beloved for its determination to showcase difficult-to-see music documentaries and for the breadth and depth of its programming.

It’s one of several stone-cold masterpieces written by the novelist-turned-screenwriter, whose work is being properly acknowledged by the American Cinematheque in their upcoming series “Written by A.I.,” a retrospective consisting of five essential films either scripted by Bezzerides or based on his fiction. The play on words in the retrospective’s title goes beyond a cute reference to a buzzy topic; it references the intersection between film and technology that characterized Bezzerides’ best work in movies about mankind’s complicated relationship to the machines that both make life easier and ultimately lead to self-destruction.

The documentary world has been rocked by news of Participant shutting down, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival ending after a 35-year run, and the possibility this may be the final year for the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. But there is one bright spot on the firmament: the debut of a new festival in Los Angeles dedicated to nonfiction cinema.

The American Cinematheque’s inaugural This Is Not a Fiction festival began April 10 and runs through this Thursday, presenting a program of 44 feature docs and 11 shorts.

Already underway, “This is Not a Fiction” is a new festival launched by the American Cinematheque. The lineup of documentary films and attending filmmakers is quite impressive, showing both classics of the form as well as boundary-breaking newer works.

“It feels like it’s exploding and we have quite a big team now,” said Chris LeMaire, senior film programmer at the American Cinematheque, who put the series together with programmer Cindy Fernanda Flores. “And it all feels like in keeping with the goal that the Cinematheque has had for many years, which is to put on a year-round film festival.”

The screenwriting duo of Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith and Karen McCullah has produced a unique and distinctive body of work that exists in its own reality, where dreams come true, underdogs win and everyone lives with a song in their heart. It speaks to the strength of their shared vision that the films feel aligned — even though they are made by different directors and producers. Beginning Sunday, the American Cinematheque is launching a tribute series to the pair, taking place at the Egyptian, Aero and Los Feliz theaters.

The screenwriting duo of Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith and Karen McCullah has produced a unique and distinctive body of work that exists in its own reality, where dreams come true, underdogs win and everyone lives with a song in their heart. It speaks to the strength of their shared vision that the films feel aligned — even though they are made by different directors and producers. Beginning Sunday, the American Cinematheque is launching a tribute series to the pair, taking place at the Egyptian, Aero and Los Feliz theaters.

Honestly, just about any weekend could be / should be a Nancy Meyers weekend, but the American Cinematheque is celebrating the writer-director-producer with three of her films this weekend.

The American Cinematheque is kicking off a robust new Los Angeles nonfiction film festival dubbed This Is Not a Fiction, running from April 10-18. The festival opens with docuseries “Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story,” with Jon Bon Jovi in-person at the Aero Theatre for the L.A. premiere screening.

The event will include in-person tributes to distinguished documentary filmmakers including Barbara Kopple, Joe Berlinger, Brett Morgen, Bill Morrison, Kirsten Johnson, Terry Zwigoff, Jeff Tremaine and Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, as well as a virtual Q&A with Frederick Wiseman.

It’s thanks to filmmakers’ passion to keep theaters alive and a new generation of fans, says Ken Scherer, executive director of the nonprofit American Cinematheque, which runs programming at the Egyptian and other theaters.

“New voices coming to the screen, new stories being told—all of that is playing into the cultural sense of [this] generation coming into its own,” he says, noting a membership uptick in his organization since the pandemic. “And yes, they’re seeing clips on YouTube or TikTok. [But] people have discovered sitting in a movie theater is really cool.”

The American Cinematheque has launched a series on New Black horror at the Los Feliz 3. Having already opened with Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning “Get Out,” the program really kicks into gear this week with Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny,” Bomani J. Story’s “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” Mariama Diallo’s “Master” and Peele’s “Us.” This is a smartly curated series with a group of films that, taken together, show the power of the horror genre to address contemporary social issues while also providing audiences with a thrilling time.

The American Cinematheque is screening 14 films from Ghibli, which was founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and has produced “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” to name its most famous movies.

But this retrospective at the Egyptian and Aero Theatres also includes movies you probably haven’t seen.

The two are both Oscar nominated for portraying swimmer Diana Nyad (Bening) and her best friend/coach Bonnie Stoll (Foster.) In a Q&A at the Aero Theatre for the American Cinematheque, the pair revealed they had only met in passing and Bening was a bit intimidated when she heard Foster was being offered the part of Stoll.

Helen Mirren got the royal treatment a queen deserves Thursday night from the American Cinematheque in a ceremony delayed by the actors strike but finally taking place right during crunch time in the Oscar race.

Harrison Ford, Vin Diesel, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Pierce Brosnan, Alan Cumming, Andrea Riseborough and Mirren’s husband Taylor Hackford toasted the star at the event, which is an annual fundraiser for the American Cinematheque that supports its programming at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, Los Feliz 3 Theatre in Los Feliz and Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

When Dame Helen Mirren took the stage at the Beverly Hilton to accept the 37th annual American Cinematheque Award on Thursday night, she began by reciting an elegant, if cliched, declaration of gratitude for her lifetime spent working in Hollywood. It was the kind of predictable lifetime achievement speech fare that award circuit veterans have heard far too many times, so anyone could be forgiven for thinking it was genuine. But as soon as she reached the end, Mirren gleefully ripped up her papers as she announced “That was written by AI!”

When introducing Mirren with her American Cinematheque Award, Harrison Ford said of his longtime scene partner and friend, “You are the kindest, funniest, wackiest broad, and I thank you for it.” Other actors who took the stage to honor Mirren were Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Pierce Brosnan, Andrea Risenborough, Alan Cumming, Vin Diesel and Mirren’s filmmaker husband Taylor Hackford, each of them sharing fond memories of their experiences alongside the evening’s honoree.

Helen Mirren ripped AI to shreds while being honored Thursday night at the American Cinematheque Awards.

After being presented with the lifetime achievement award by her “Mosquito Coast” and “1923” co-star Harrison Ford at the Beverly Hilton gala, Mirren began to read her acceptance speech from a piece of a paper. Then she added, “And that was written by AI,” before proceeding to tear up the speech and letting the pieces of paper fall to the stage floor.

The American Cinematheque rolled out the red carpet for this year’s American Cinematheque Awards ceremony honoring Helen Mirren. One of the Hollywood nonprofit’s biggest fundraising events of the year, tonight’s ceremony was originally set for November, before the SAG-AFRTA strike forced organizers to delay.

Robert Downey Jr. still has some secrets to share, despite a life lived in public since he was around five years old. At an American Cinematheque event celebrating his filmography at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, just a short distance from where he went to high school, the actor repeatedly surprised the audience with previously untold tales about some of the most beloved movies ever made. If things had gone differently, comic book movie history could have been vastly different—with Downey playing the villain in a DC comics blockbuster, and Tom Cruise taking the lead of Iron Man.

The Sopranos creator David Chase is in Los Angeles this weekend to honor the 25th anniversary of TV’s greatest drama series this Sunday, when he joins Matt Weiner and Terry Winter to swap stories in a sold out event at the American Cinematheque. What better time to hail such an important milestone by drawing Chase out on the influences and experiences that honed the unique creative outlook, sense of humor and yes, demons, that informed the groundbreaking HBO series that changed TV in its six season run from 1999 to 2007?

For the last couple of months I’ve been working my way through Oscar contenders, and last night I managed to catch the final screening of Chilean director Felipe Gálvez’s “Los Colonos” (“The Settlers”) at the American Cinematheque. The film is a western that is also an anti-western, recounting the genocidal settlement of Tierra del Fuego by European and criollo ranching families who hired mercenaries to systematically kill Indigenous Selk’nam people to seize their land.

Directed by Nancy Savoca and adapted by Savoca and her husband Richard Guay from the novel by Francine Prose, 1993’s “Household Saints” has gotten a new restoration and re-release. The film is playing tonight at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz 3 with Savoca and Guay in person for a Q&A.

At the Aero theater on Monday, the American Cinematheque is showing Ava DuVernay’s new ORIGIN ahead of its theatrical release on Jan. 19, along with DuVernay’s 2014 drama SELMA. The filmmaker will be there for a Q&A with Black List founder Franklin Leonard.

A few years ago, filmmaker Nancy Savoca came to believe that one of her movies had been lost forever. Now, HOUSEHOLD SAINTS gets a second shot at its own canonization.

[The film] opens in Los Angeles on Friday, January 26 at American Cinematheque.

Ever since Michael Mann became one of the first A-list directors to embrace digital filmmaking with 2004’s COLLATERAL,  he’s left film behind, shooting all of his subsequent features using digital capture rather than celluloid. That might change, however; as Mann told a sold-out crowd at the American Cinematheque on January 5, he’s considering a return to film — and it will be for a sequel to his most beloved movie.

With bold renovations and new ideas, deep-pocketed investors have renewed faith in the brick-and-mortar movie business after it suffered devastating pandemic closures.

The American Cinematheque is launching a tribute series this weekend, with Mann in person for a number of Q&As. The sharpness and vividness with which he recalls production details of his older films is riveting and will make for a great series of conversations. The series will also bring into focus the ways in which Mann returns to certain archetypes throughout his work, but always brings something new, whether technically in his craft or in his ongoing examinations of masculine identity.

The American Cinematheque has programmed a retrospective to celebrate the work of three-time Oscar nominee Wim Wenders ahead of the Feb. 7 nationwide release of his latest film PERFECT DAYS, Neon announced.

The retrospective screenings and in-person Q&As will begin on Jan. 11 at the Aero Theatre with a double feature of PERFECT DAYS and TOKYO-GA at 7:30 p.m. There will be a Q&A segment with the director in between the films.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” knowingly cribs from David Lean’s 1949 drama “The Passionate Friends” for the staging of its New Year’s Eve sequence, with Anderson creating an all-timer of romantic longing. In the film, a fashion designer living in 1950s London, Reynolds Woodcock, in what for now seems to be his final screen role, falls for a woman, Alma, who upends the precise order of his existence.

The film is playing at the Egyptian Theatre in 70mm on New Year’s Eve, with a 5 p.m. showtime that means you’ll still have plenty of time for festivities after.

LONE STAR at the Egyptian Theatre, Los Angeles, December 14, 2023. At its 4K restoration premiere at the newly renovated Egyptian Theatre, I learned secrets that changed how I see LONE STAR, John Sayles’s 1996 Western.

This year, I had a few times when I went to a see a movie and got more than I expected, with surprise guests that only deepened my appreciation for the work onscreen. I went to see a rare 70mm print of Luis Valdez’s 1981 film, “Zoot Suit,” at the Aero Theatre, and the film’s star, Edward James Olmos, made an unannounced appearance, having just watched the film himself for the first time since its release.

I reached out to a handful of local film programmers [incl. Imani Davis, Cindy Fernanda Flores, Chris LeMaire]to ask them for their most memorable individual screening events from this year, whether they were ones they attended or ones they put on themselves.

Leaning into to two decades of shining a spotlight on Tinseltown’s most liked unproduced screenplays, the Franklin Leonard-founded Black List has teamed up with American Cinematheque for a screening series to kick off next month. Going into the Black List crates, a heavy hitting double bill of Emerald Fennell’s SALTBURN and PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and Ava DuVernay’s January 19 released ORIGIN and her 2014 picture SELMA are the first films in the series.

The American Cinematheque announced the honorees for the third annual Tribute to the Crafts, which include OPPENHEIMER for cinematography and editing, POOR THINGS for costume design and “I’m Just Ken” from BARBIE for song. The event will take place on Jan. 19, 2024, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.