Joke of the week: Jane Borden

Eat|See|Hear travels to different locales throughout the city each Saturday during the summer, showing cult flicks on an inflatable HD screen taller than your average Malibu mansion. Bring your own bites or sample snacks from the impressive roster of resident food trucks and show up early for a set from local LA bands. Parking is free at most of the venues, and tickets for screenings at the Autry even include admission to the museum. What's more? If you want to skip the crowds and stroll in casually during the opening credits, spring for an exclusive "Fashionably Late" pass. All of the events dog-friendly, and a portion of ticket sales benefit Best Friends Animal Society in support of NKLA.

It isn't summer in LA until the first cemetery screening brings hoards of movie-lovers to Hollywood Forever, toting folding chairs, picnic blankets, snack spreads and lots of booze. Each year, Cinespia brings classic cult favorites to the hallowed resting place of such Hollywood greats as Rudolph Valentino and Bugsy Siegel. An inspired concept, and one Angelenos line up for hours to partake in, enjoy DJ sets, dance parties, sleepovers and more magical mischief otherwise strictly forbidden behind the cemetery gates. It's an LA rite of passage, a quintessential summer experience and one of the best film venues in the city. Just be sure to get your ticket early, arrive early, pee early... it's getting a bit overcrowded, to say the least.

Judd Apatow’s durable formula of timid, geeky men, far-more-mature girlfriends and their huggably awkward parents gets a welcome infusion of cross-cultural tension—and some scary medical realities—in The Big Sick, a dynamite romantic comedy of intimate proportions. Apatow is only the producer here (Michael Showalter directs with a minimum of stylistic intrusion), but the creative prime mover is actor-writer Kumail Nanjiani, better known as Silicon Valley’s peevish computer coder, Dinesh. Developing a based-on-real-life script with his wife, TV producer Emily V. Gordon, Nanjiani shapes his story of a Chicago comedian’s wobbly rise, a trajectory altered by love, illness and some much-needed belated backbone. Hoodie and backpack-clad, Uber driver Kumail (Nanjiani, modulating his nerd persona with impressive depth) turns his Pakistani heritage into a source of laughs for club crowds. He has a dense one-man show involving the game of cricket, and his sarcastic jokes often exploit racial anxieties. (Loudly arguing with his brother in a restaurant, he assures onlookers, “We hate terrorists—it’s okay.”) One night, Kumail’s routine is interrupted by a smiling new fan, Emily (Zoe Kazan, completely owning her scenes), and they spark the kind of banter-crammed flirtation that movies like this have perfected. But Kumail can’t tell his fiercely attentive suburban parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff, both excellent) about the white girl he’s seeing. Instead, he stashes photos of arrang

Before seeing Wonder Woman, I had a sinking feeling. It’s been more than a decade (and Halle Berry’s 2004 bomb Catwoman) since a female star headlined a superhero film and saved the world. I had visions of middle-aged male studio execs huddled together in a conference room googling feminism and group-thinking how to make a lady-hero. Would the result feel like a two-and-a-half-hour tampon commercial? Actually, no. Wonder Woman is the real deal, a rollicking action adventure in the tradition of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a fully functioning sense of humor and the year’s most deliciously evil baddie. The film has a wobbly opening on a women-only island where hot chicks in fabulous ancient Greek sandals appear to have wandered in from a Dolce & Gabbana campaign. This is Themyscira, where the Amazon tribe has lived in peace for thousands of years. Former Miss Israel Gal Gadot (Gisele in the Fast & Furious franchise) is Diana, their princess, who was sculpted from clay and brought to life by Zeus. The island’s tranquility is broken by the arrival of a cocky U.S. soldier played by Star Trek’s Chris Pine. The actor knows he’s here as eye candy and does his spin on the usual smoking-hot sidekick with self-deprecation. The plot is functional. It’s World War I and Pine is a spy who has discovered that the Germans’ evil chemist, Maru (Elena Anaya)—a.k.a. Doctor Poison—is cooking up a dirty bomb to wipe out Allied soldiers on the front. So Diana volunteers to save humankind, strapp

Music sounds better when you’re on the road—even us poor souls without wheels know this to be true. There’s something euphoric about being surrounded by speakers, immersed in your own private La La Land, moving forward to the beat (even when traffic says otherwise). As if discovering something obvious yet essential about making movies, writer-director Edgar Wright now takes the venerable car-chase action film—loaded with tire squeals and around-the-corner drifts—and weds it to a keenly discerning jukebox playlist. The result is a supercharged piece of fun unlike any motorized choreography since John Landis destroyed a fleet of cop cars in The Blues Brothers. Wright, as you’ll know if you’ve seen Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, loves a well-chosen Queen or Stone Roses tune. (This time it’s Golden Earring’s pedal-to-the-metal “Radar Love.”) But he’s never unleashed his stylish gift for musical-visual synchronicity like he does here. And as Baby Driver’s killer stunt work makes clear, the guy has an inner Steve McQueen that requires feeding. Wright’s main character, Baby (The Fault in Our Stars’ Ansel Elgort, doing well by the role’s boyish innocence), still has a hint of peach fuzz on his cheeks, yet he’s a genius with a stick shift. Protected by sunglasses and constantly immersed in a pair of earbuds, Baby needs music to drown out the buzz in his head (caused by tinnitus), so he can jam. He’s a getaway-car driver with dreams of going straight after the proverbial One L

As lovely, mysterious and cosmic as horror movies get—maybe it’s better just to drop "horror" altogether—A Ghost Story marshals an eerie hush from the start. In its early scenes, we see a house, squarely situated behind a generous front lawn. Inside dwell two thirtyish marrieds, nameless throughout, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, well paired in scruffy intensity. From dribs and drabs of spare dialogue, we feel the slightest tension between them. Yet in the darkness of their bedroom, we feel a real connection. They kiss gently, shifting their bodies in sympathy, and the spooning session is of a piece with the movie’s skyward-tipping Terrence Malick–like grabs, composer Daniel Hart’s aching orchestral shimmers and fields of swirling stars. Writer-director David Lowery (who used Affleck and Mara in the similarly interior Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) is taking his time here, adjusting us to a slower tempo for reasons that will pay off beautifully. Widening out on another foggy morning, we take in the shocking sight of a smoldering car wreck, with Casey Affleck’s character dead behind the wheel. He’s gone, and before you brace for the clichés of typical movie grieving, we notice—well, a ghost. In a white bed sheet. With black cut-out eyes. At first it sits up on a hospital gurney, almost confused. It meanders down the fluorescent-lit hallway, unnoticed. And it turns up in the corner of the couple’s living room, like some weird lamp. Don’t be ashamed to giggle. The collisi

Everyone in Baywatch seems amused to be in a movie version of Baywatch—how could they not be? (Their expressions range from “Is this really happening?” to “This is really happening.”) The laughs in director Seth Gordon’s surprisingly fun and self-mocking comedy don’t sneak up on you so much as hail you from a mile off with an air horn and then bonk you over the head as you approach. This is a film in which lifeguard Dwayne Johnson leaps out of the water (in slo-mo) with a rescued paraglider in his arms, while porpoises flip behind him in celebration. That moment also brings the film’s title, text rising from the deep like a repressed giggle that won’t go away. The generous—radical?—thing about Hollywood’s version of the tush-ogling ’90s TV phenomenon is that, pretty quickly, it makes you feel in on the joke. Taking lessons from 2012’s wonderfully silly 21 Jump Street (in which Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill scientifically proved that bad television need not result in bad filmmaking), Baywatch owns its preposterousness with every barked line of self-serious dialogue and stuffed-to-bursting wet suit. The actors are what save it. Not only does Johnson build on his subversive 
persona of hulking, dim-witted likability, 
but he’s joined by Neighbors’ Zac Efron, today’s reigning king of the hazy one-liner, who plays cocky yet disgraced Olympic swimmer Matt Brody, nicknamed the Vomit Comet. (Confused by his bodacious lifeguard team’s role in routing out crime, Efron’s Brody says it

For dinner and a movie, all in one, just follow the food trucks. During the summer and fall, Street Food Cinema throws together a series of mostly outdoor parties that include screenings of some of our favorite movies, paired with an assortment of gourmet food trucks and even a live music performance from a cool local band. The screenings are held in venues across L.A., and  alternate from week to week, so make sure to check the schedule. Some of the outdoor venues are dog-friendly, allowing you to bring your four-legged cinema lover along. New this year are two overnight camping events that extend the movie screening into a fun summer camp experience for grown-ups. 

Bachelorette parties—and plenty of the bachelor ones, I’ve noticed—are never just about the booze and the partying. There’s always that slightest twinge of jealousy, a bruised hint of abandonment, a recklessness about to spin out of control. So it goes with the tonally uneven Rough Night, a half-borrowed comedy that quickly kicks its one night of female carousing into the realm of terrible decisions. You can feel the film’s desperation right under the surface: The script (by Broad City’s Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs) wants to join the company of Bridesmaids or Bachelorette, but respectively, it’s neither warm nor cool enough. Instead it settles for a coke-fueled mania that doesn’t cohere into anything apart from a handful of funny moments. Rough Night’s quintet of stars are dazzlers stuck in a middle gear; watching them play off each other is its own kind of pleasure, regardless of the takeaway. Scarlett Johansson is capable of a starchy kind of humor (see her SNL hosting), and that’s the energy she supplies here as Jess, an awkward state-senator candidate who’s currently losing in local polls to a competitor who's intentionally deploying dick picks. Taking a break from the combat, Jess gathers her college friends, including clingy Alice (Jillian Bell), secretive Blair (Zoë Kravitz), loud-and-proud Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Jess’s semester-abroad confidante, Pippa (Kate McKinnon, stealing another summer movie with an outrageous Aussie accent and bug eyes). The Miami Bea

The virtue of courage is high up on the list of Disney princess must-haves (just below kindness, beauty and a strapping prince in tight pants). So three cheers for Dreamgirls director Bill Condon and star Emma Watson for having the courage to make a live-action musical adaptation of Disney's adored Beauty and the Beast with 2017 gender politics and a diverse cast. Not only is this new Belle the studio's most feminist princess to date, the update boasts the first (and second) interracial kiss to ever appear in a Disney movie, as well as the first openly gay character. And it's all done with a lovely feeling of integrity. Today's Beauty and the Beast is a lavish pull-out-all-the-stops musical. Watson brings sincerity to the role of Belle, the only bookworm in an 18th-century French village. (Her singing isn’t bad either). Luke Evans is hilarious as her sexist meathead suitor, Gaston, whose charming come-ons include: "Do you know what happens to spinsters in the village when their fathers die? They beg for scraps." Josh Gad (who voiced Olaf the snowman in Frozen) is Gaston's adoring sidekick Le Fou. The pair’s one-sided bromance is a highlight. Belle’s inventor dad (Kevin Kline) is on his way to market when he takes a wrong turn and finds himself locked in the gothic castle belonging to the Beast (Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey, hiding behind a furry face and a CGI-supplanted physique). Of course, the Beast is actually a dashing prince, transformed by a kind witch as punishmen