As moviegoers, there are certain things we've come to expect from concert documentaries. There's almost always a ton of grueling rehearsal footage. Old home videos revealing how a performer was destined for fame. And then maybe one emotional scene in which the pop star breaks down, meant to indicate...
Exhibitions for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA are beginning to open up all over Los Angeles and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Plus, The Times pays a visit to the Salzburg Festival, a prominent TV actor takes on the life of Dick Gregory for the play “Turn Me Loose” and it’s time for our Fall Arts...
Don Williams, an influential and award-winning country singer of hits including the love ballad “I Believe in You,” has died. He was 78. A statement from publicist Kirt Webster said Williams died Friday after a short illness. Williams had 17 No. 1 hits before retiring in 2016. His mellow sound...
“I happen to believe in simplicity,” Los Angeles architect Gin Wong once told an interviewer. In aesthetic terms it’s easy to see what he meant. As a lead designer for William Pereira’s firm and later as the head of his own office, Wong, who died Sept. 1 at 94, often pared down the buildings he...
SERIES Planet Earth: Life BBC America offers a marathon of its landmark environmental series: “Beyond: Challenges of Life,” noon; “Beyond: Reptiles and Amphibians,” 1:10 p.m.; “Beyond: Mammals,” 2:20 p.m.; “Beyond: Fish,” 3:30 p.m.; “Beyond: Birds,” 4:40 p.m.; “Beyond: Insects,” 5:50 p.m.; “Beyond:...
Jane Campion knows as well as anyone the desperate longing to become a mother — as she puts it, the “battlefield of dashed hopes and dreams” — presented by infertility. As her career was flying high in the early 1990s, the filmmaker suffered a series of miscarriages. Her haunting period piece “The...
Timing is a funny thing. If noted psychologist William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth Marston had not both fallen in love with the woman Olive Byrne, would he have gone on to create the character of Wonder Woman? And if writer-director Angela Robinson had not worked for years researching...
The once-famous acoustic showcase 'Unplugged' is returning at a moment when teens and twentysomethings are abandoning old-fashioned television. First up: Shawn Mendes.
SUNDAY Keep on trekkin’: “Family Guy’s” Seth MacFarlane captains a spaceship called “The Orville” in this new sci-fi sitcom. Adrianne Palicki and Norm Macdonald also star. 5 and 8 p.m. Fox The old Highland fling is back on with the return of the fantasy drama “Outlander.” With Caitriona Balfe and...
The straightforward production of “Iphigenia in Aulis” that opened Wednesday at the Getty Villa’s outdoor Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater might be retitled “Clytemnestra,” so enlivening is Sandra Marquez’s performance as the mother of the young woman whose life must be sacrificed so that...
If it were a standard thriller set on any other day in any other building, the film “9/11” would be laughable. Lame characterization, painful overacting and clunky lines would happen, but it wouldn’t cause any reactions beyond giggles and eye rolls. Making a film about an event that is still so...
Film critic Justin Chang's diary of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
Jeffrey Tuchman, a prolific filmmaker who helped introduce Bill Clinton to America and won awards for exploring topics such as civil rights and the evolution of modern medicine, has died. Tuchman died Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 62 and was being treated for pancreatic...
The new ICA LA opens with a Martín Ramírez show, but two other site-specific installations are worth a look.
Bobby Moynihan has seen a lot of changes in quick succession. Fresh from his dream job at “Saturday Night Live”— his comedic home-away-from-home for nine years— he’s shifted to “Me, Myself & I,” a new sitcom on CBS due Sept. 25. As if that weren’t enough, Moynihan married in 2016 and soon after...
Before Maggie Gyllenhaal agreed to play Candy, a Times Square prostitute in the 1970s-set HBO series “The Deuce,” she had one condition: She needed to be a producer on the series too. While Gyllenhaal was excited to work with co-creators David Simon and George Pelecanos, she’d only seen scripts...
UNDERRATED The anthology series: Call it the “Black Mirror” effect, or maybe the result of so many daunting long-form series narratives available to stream, but single-episode storytelling has been enjoying a boost of late. Recent shows include “Room 104,” the Duplass Brothers’ barbed hotel room...
FALL PREVIEW: Talking the do's and don'ts of reboots with the new 'Dynasty' showrunner.
In 1989, Edie Falco paid little attention to the sensational murder case dominating the headlines involving the wealthy Menendez family. “The case was in the background of my life,” says Falco, when asked about the national fascination with the brutal Beverly Hills living room slayings of entertainment...
A chat with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about their epic new documentary series, "The Vietnam War."
There are no easy outs in the Grove Theater Center revival of David Harrower’s “Blackbird” — not for its two characters locked in brutal psychological warfare, nor for anyone in the audience wishing for a moral framework that makes sense of their tortured relationship. That’s because Harrower’s...
With DACA ending, a Dreamer's tale of navigating the American immigration system leads our list of small-theater picks for the week.
SERIES Third Rail With Ozy Carlos Watson hosts this new seven-part cross-platform series featuring experts and celebrity guests debating a provocative topic. Up first: “Is Truth Overrated?” 7:30 p.m. KOCE Masters of Illusion Michael Grandinetti, Chris Korn, Jeff McBride, Barry and Stuart, Kyle Marlett,...
A longstanding manhood ritual reveals some sobering, unintended truths in the South African drama “The Wound” from director John Trengove. Issues of sexuality, generational divide, class and self-loathing are cross-stitched into a compelling patchwork of edgy masculinity in this tale of a gay Xhosa...
Turns out you can touch this. As he strode through the Hollywood & Highland complex on Wednesday afternoon, MC Hammer was approached by a group of young men who looked surprised to have crossed paths with the flamboyant rapper famous for his 1990 smash “U Can’t Touch This.” Could they shake Hammer’s...
When Geert Chatrou whistles, it’s easy to picture the birds trilling and flitting around Snow White in the classic 1937 film. The two-time world champion from the Netherlands stands onstage in the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, demonstrating his considerable talents as part of a prep class during the...
Film director Andy Muschietti stood on a soundstage and swiveled his head around the subterranean world he’d created. The boyish-faced Argentine was attempting to bring “It,” the epically scaled Stephen King novel, to cinematic life. Behind Muschietti, a winding set of constructed sewer tunnels...
The 1950s small-town America of Stephen King’s youth provides a deceptively wholesome backdrop for the author’s nightmarish 1986 novel “It,” about a group of adolescent misfits in Derry, Maine, who band together to fight an evil, shape-shifting clown. But transplant the timeline to the summer of...
High school junior Kokone Morikawa (voiced by Mitsuki Takahata), the heroine of the animated Japanese film “Napping Princess,” would rather spend the summer dozing and looking after her widowed mechanic father than watching the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which are only a few days off. But she finds herself...
The name "Meyers" has come to signify a very specific type of film in Hollywood — the shiny, gentle, comforting and aspirational romantic family comedies that writer-director Nancy Meyers has perfected: "Something's Gotta Give," "The Holiday," "It's Complicated." Her daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer,...
Writer-director Ryan Frost was a freshman in college on Sept. 11, 2001 (full disclosure, so was this critic). It’s a unique situation — away from home for the first time, living with a group of people you’ve just met and trying to process the surreal, history-altering terrorist attacks on the U.S....
The indie science-fiction movie “Anti Matter” sets itself apart from similar arty genre exercises by adopting a screwball comedy pace, and a visual style akin to a hyperactive action film. Writer-director Keir Burrows’ rapid-fire dialogue and barrage of images ultimately prove too exhausting, though...
The rousing Indian drama “Lipstick Under My Burkha,” co-written and directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, takes on the repressive traditions around gender and sexuality in that country with refreshing candor and humor. Leela (Aahana Kumra), Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah), Shirin (Konkona Sen Sharma) and...
“Dolores” is a documentary that celebrates a hero, but it's no hagiography. Its subject wouldn't stand for that. That would be Dolores Huerta, a legendary activist who at age 87 defines indefatigable, a woman whose experience shows what a life of total commitment means — as well as the price it...
Known for big-budget action blowouts like “Con Air” and “The Expendables 2,” Simon West brings both bombast and self-awareness to the smaller action comedy “Gun Shy.” While it doesn’t bring the explosions — or the laughs — of previous films by the director, it features an all-out performance from...
Set along a particularly downtrodden stretch of Memphis, Tenn., Jake Mahaffy’s bleakly spare, powerful “Free in Deed” focuses on a pair of damaged souls who seek salvation beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting of a converted storefront Pentecostal church. A single mother, Melva (Edwina Findley),...
Chilean writer-director Fernando Guzzoni’s unnerving drama “Jesús” is no Christ-like parable, but spiritual emptiness is certainly the prevailing mood. The title figure, played by Nicolás Durán, is a sexually fluid high-schooler in Santiago with a disinterest in education or his future, and a frosty...
Amid all the horrors of World War II, those visited on the women of China by the Japanese occupying forces are often overlooked. Director Ke Guo’s “Twenty Two” rectifies that, giving voice to the surviving “comfort women” in this Chinese documentary. Though there are just 22 women left, the Japanese...
America’s long-standing history of strained relations with Cuba is documented in the self-explanatory “Embargo,” an earnest first film by Jeri Rice that lacks an incisive point of view. Rice, who spent three decades in the high-end clothing business, traveled to Cuba in 2002 with a group of influential...
It’s a given that what cops experience day in and day out is difficult for citizens to fully comprehend, especially when most news about them covers their worst moments, either their deaths in the line of duty or the violence of their own actions. Ex-lawman Thomas Marchese’s documentary “Fallen”...
Those with the fortitude to relive the events of the morning of 9/11 should find the documentary “Man in Red Bandana” a powerful and inspiring experience. This brief film, from first-time writer-director Matthew J. Weiss, is a deeply moving tribute to Welles Remy Crowther, a young man credited...
In a perfect world, a movie version of Teri Woods’ novel “True to the Game” would be a bigger deal. Woods’ pulp thriller has reportedly sold more than 2 million copies since the ’90s and pioneered a new literary form: a cross between gangster melodrama, glamorous romance and hip-hop-scored slice-of-life....
Alfred Hitchcock’s only movie to win the Academy Award for best picture, “Rebecca” (1940) may not be the first film that leaps to mind when we think of the Master of Suspense’s signature achievements. But this precise and luxuriant rendition of Daphne du Maurier’s masterful gothic romance is still...
“Dear Evan Hansen,” the heart-wrenching Broadway hit that dominated this year’s Tony Awards with six wins including best musical, will come to Los Angeles as part of Center Theatre Group’s 2018-19 season, company Artistic Director Michael Ritchie and Broadway producer Stacey Mindich announced Thursday....