Lumiere Music Hall — Attraction in Beverly Hills

These reviewers are right. This theater and its staff — who are actually the owners, by accounts in the reviews — represent perhaps the purest moviegoing experience in the City of Angels. First of all, it’s plopped right alongside Wilshire effing Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is its own kind of statement. But what you think that might mean isn’t it at all. Because the theater itself, as many others have pointed out, is distinctly unglamorous — dated, past its prime, faintly musty and vaguely shabby - but not exceedingly so. Just enough to relax you and take off whatever edge you might feel because of the Wilshire effing Boulevard business. But you quickly realize that you’ve stepped out of the sunlight and 2022 into a timeless simulacrum of 1950-something where movies are respected as art films, and can be exciting, exotic, erotic and sometimes slightly guilt-inducing - as they should be. There is no self-regarding branding baggage here like a certain Texas-based dine-in theater chain that seems more pleased and preoccupied with its own image than with the films it exhibits. Here the films are the uncontested treasures. The Lumière is no doubt the closest Los Angeles will ever come to one of those neighborhood shrines to cinema that are sprinkled unselfconsciously around Paris, and if you think about its name for more than a second, you’ll realize it is no mere coincidence. The ghost of Godard and his contemporary Cahiers du Cinema critic/director luminaries may be felt haunting the faded fabric of the well-worn seats here. If you care about cinema,...

I had the most traumatizing experience here. I came to see a movie alone and there was a man that was masturbating next to me. I screamed and called him out and he ran off quickly! I went to the front to complain and one of the employees went searching for him but when I requested for camera footage of the man purchasing the ticket, one of the workers questioned what’s the point of interrogating a man. Like what—I literally just experienced something so traumatizing and you’re asking me what’s the point of filing a police report! It’s so no one else experiences this in your movie theater!!! Literally, women, please don’t go here. It’s run by men and they don’t care if you experience traumatizing in their theater. Not even an empty promise they’ll look out for him or plaster his face as a banned person.

Just an update—apparently this man frequents this theater and through BHPD, they were able to arrest this man. The theater didn’t know he was the same previous offender but to give credit—the theater did file a report and I was able to identity the sex offender. He’s been charged.

In any case—stay...

I'm really not sure why this theater has such great reviews. I used to come here as a kid, and let me tell you literally nothing has changed. It's a sick kind of preservation: rotting ceilings, missing lights, moth eaten curtains, seats so old they rattle and creak at the slightest of movements.

Furthermore, the staff is a bit vacant. The guy at concessions begrudgingly made a fresh batch of popcorn after my request, assuring me that the popcorn sitting there was fresh, not knowing I had walked by the theater 30 minutes earlier, and had taken a peek at concessions. Throughout the film, a boxing match was playing loudly in the lobby, someone older, I presume the owner, just standing there for over an hour watching it. Later, when we left the theater, we wanted to ask the guy at the box office a quick question, but left us standing there awkwardly as he continued having a conversation with a young woman.

If you want to go to a movie theater that cares about your experience, go down the street to the Fine...