Dream Factory

Los Angeles has an inferiority complex when it comes to film appreciation—anyone will tell you that. The hang-up is exacerbated by comparisons with New York, where repertory cinemas abound and there seems to be a Bresson retrospective in constant rotation. We undoubtedly lack a festival culture; the city has reportedly only ever screened a full Cannes lineup once, in 1974. The best film critics all live in New York; really, the entire critical infrastructure is there. It can be a real quest to find new releases from outside the United States in this “AMC-dominated multiplex environment,” as programmer K.J. Relth-Miller put it to me when we spoke in October.

A strange bifurcation tends to arise in these conversations: LA produces, New York consumes. LA creates; New York appraises, judges, critiques. That sense was only heightened, during the spring and summer of 2023, by the simultaneous strikes of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA. The country has learned of the nitty-gritty contract details of both unions: the way they use digital technology and artificial intelligence; the che…