April 2019 events calendar for Los Angeles

This must-visit for classic film buffs showcases four days of beloved movies—from the iconic to forgotten gems—courtesy of Turner Classic Movies. See these time-honored favorites on the big screen, the way they were meant to be seen, during this year’s festival, themed “Follow Your Heart: Love at the Movies.” Find a robust lineup of films—including When Harry Met Sally, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Steel Magnolias—and corresponding discussions, spread throughout Hollywood’s famous movie houses. Be on the lookout for celebrity guests, as well. Fesitval passholders gain exclusive access to Club TCM, a private meet-up space located at the site of the very first Academy Awards banquet in the Roosevelt Hotel.

The fourth installment of George Miller’s rambunctious postapocalyptic saga arrives in theaters like a tornado tearing through a tea party. In an age of weightless spectacles that studios whittle down from visions to products, here’s a movie that feels like it was made by kidnapping $150 million of Warner Bros.’ money, absconding with it to the Namibian desert, and sending footage back to Hollywood like the amputated body parts of a ransomed hostage.  It’s been 30 years since we last watched Max Rockatansky drift into the horizon, but the road warrior hasn’t aged a day. Instead, he’s been transformed from a reluctantly charismatic Mel Gibson into a terse Tom Hardy, the franchise shedding its skin with the serialized ease of the James Bond films. Much has changed to the wasteland that Max wanders, however. While previous episodes were set amidst the rubble of a ruined world, Fury Road finds us having faded much further into the rear-view mirror, the colorful hypersaturated landscapes locating this story closer to the dawn of a new civilization than the twilight of an old one. Things begin inside the immense mountain stronghold ruled by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a ghoulishly inbred monster who lords over a society that guzzles its citizens like fuel. Women are drained for their breast milk, girls are farmed for their wombs, and men like Max are used as human hood ornaments called “bloodbags.” Unsurprisingly, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Joe’s one-armed lieutena

The masters of alfresco rooftop movie viewing have returned for another season of screenings in Hollywood and Downtown L.A. Known for excellent film choices and a steady supply of snacks and booze, Rooftop Cinema Club is your snazzy, comfortable and less stressful alternative to other outdoor movie screenings. You don’t even need to bring your own blanket or camping chair—Rooftop Cinema Club provides you with your very own comfy lawn chair, as well as blankets on request for the ultimate cozy experience. And instead of listening to the movie over loudspeakers, you’ll get a set of wireless headphones so you never have to miss a word.

Tucked away off the coast of Scotland is a quaint little island named Summerisle, a pastoral and peaceful-looking place renowned for its abundant produce. One of this Eden’s inhabitants—a 12-year-old girl—has been reported missing, which is why sergeant Neil Howie (The Equalizer’s Edward Woodward) has traveled from the mainland to investigate. Only the locals don’t take kindly to strangers asking questions round these parts, constantly playing dumb to his inquiries when they aren’t shocking the puritanical copper with their bawdy ballads and open copulation in the woods. Something odd is afoot, and not even the island’s unswayingly polite spiritual leader, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), can convince Howie otherwise. Maybe it has to do with the vaguely pagan vibe emanating from every corner, he guesses; we’d say you’re getting warm, Sergeant. And soon you’ll be getting even warmer…. Were Robin Hardy’s mystery nothing more than an English take on the backwoods-horror genre, it would still be one of the more paranoid films to come out of the U.K. in the early ’70s, no mean feat in itself. But it’s the way this movie keeps plying viewers with jovial acoustic folk songs one moment and creepy-as-fuck images the next—umbilical cords on tree branches, fertility rituals performed at runes and, our personal skin-crawling favorite, a woman breast-feeding in a graveyard while holding an egg—that still makes this cult film/“cult” film a truly unsettling experience decades later. Hard

A sprawling, discursive fresco: three stories bookended by a prologue and epilogue. In the first story, a mobster (Travolta) is charged with looking after the irresponsible wife (Thurman) of his vengeful boss. In the second, a washed-up boxer (Willis) tries to trick the Mob by failing to throw a fight. And in the third, two hitmen (Travolta and Jackson) carry out a job, only to call on the services of a 'cleaner' (Keitel) when it gets messier than planned. It's the way Tarantino embellishes and, finally, interlinks these old chestnuts that makes the film alternately exhilarating and frustrating. There's plenty of sharp, sassy, profane dialogue, and there are plenty of acute, funny references to pop culture, though the talk sometimes delays the action, and the references sometimes seem self-consciously arch. And there are, too, the sudden lurches between humour and violence - shocking, but without moral depth. What writer/director Tarantino lacks, as yet, is the maturity to invest his work with anything that might provoke a heartfelt emotional response to his characters. Very entertaining, none the less.

Not to be excessively literal about that title, but when a movie—even one about Hitler Youth—is as saturated with visual gorgeousness as Never Look Away (the Oscar-nominated cinematography is by The Natural’s Caleb Deschanel), you can’t look away. That’s not exactly meant as an endorsement. German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, maker of the slick 2006 spy drama The Lives of Others, loves seizing upon provocative ideas, and he’s not afraid to flaunt a little showmanship—or a lot of it. That means beautiful actors, hot sex scenes and, it must be said, a nagging sense of vacancy. Never Look Away comes from the biographical details of the photorealistic painter Gerhard Richter, specifically during his maturing years in various art schools in East and West Germany. (These institutions are presented a touch comically, as places for poseurs.) Playing the film’s hero, Kurt, actor Tom Schilling has the magnetism of a young truth searcher: He’s angular, he broods and he looks like a piece of sculpture himself. In a larger sense, the film is about the postwar generation of Germans desperate for a new direction, and when Henckel von Donnersmarck focuses on the artmaking, especially Richter’s hypnotic blurring technique, it’s powerful—a persuasive statement about the transformative power of representation. There’s politics and confrontation in Kurt’s work, and the film helps you understand that. Too often, though, Never Look Away plays like overheated melodrama, especially d

Based on the seminal horror novel by Stephen King, Pet Sematary follows Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke), who, after relocating with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their two young children from Boston to rural Maine, discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family's new home. When tragedy strikes, Louis turns to his unusual neighbor, Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), setting off a perilous chain reaction that unleashes an unfathomable evil with horrific consequences.

We all have a superhero inside us, it just takes a bit of magic to bring it out. In Billy Batson's (Angel) case, by shouting out one word SHAZAM! this streetwise 14-year-old foster kid can turn into the adult Super Hero Shazam (Levi), courtesy of an ancient wizard. Still a kid at heart inside a ripped, godlike body Shazam revels in this adult version of himself by doing what any teen would do with superpowers: have fun with them! Can he fly? Does he have X-ray vision? Can he shoot lightning out of his hands? Can he skip his social studies test? Shazam sets out to test the limits of his abilities with the joyful recklessness of a child. But he'll need to master these powers quickly in order to fight the deadly forces of evil controlled by Dr. Thaddeus Sivana.

A murder has been committed at the palatial Parisian residence of Benjamin Ballon (George Sanders). All the evidence points to sexy, wide-eyed housemaid Maria Gambrelli (Elke Sommer). Police inspector Dreyfuss (Herbert Lom) is prepared to make an arrest -- and then the gloriously, monumentally inept Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) arrives on the scene. Clouseau may have difficulty getting through the day without falling into ponds, knocking people cold with opened doors, and pocketing flaming cigarette lighters, but his instincts are right on target when he decides that Mme. Gambrelli is being framed by someone else in the Ballon household. Even as the murder victims pile up, Clouseau is determined to prove Mme. Gambrelli's innocence. As he cuts a bumbling, destructive swath through Paris, Clouseau drives Dreyfuss literally insane. This fact leads to the literally explosive climax, and to the ultimate vindication of Mme. Gambrelli. While we first met Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther, Shot in the Dark is the film that truly established the Clouseau mythos: the festive clumsiness, the convoluted dialogue (You shot him in a rit of fealous jage!), the Fractured French (A beump on zee head!), the twitching lunacy of poor Inspector Dreyfuss, the unexpected judo lessons of Clouseau's houseboy Kato (Burt Kwouk), and of course the hilariously macabre jokes involving dead or seriously injured bystanders. You'd never know it, but A Shot in the Dark was inspired by a standard th

An urban crime thriller which won undeserved acclaim for its efficient but unremarkable elevated-railway chase and its clumsy, showy emphasis on grainy, sordid realism. The performances are strong, although Hackman has done far better than this portrayal of a hard-nosed cop obsessively tracking down a narcotics ring in New York, using methods disapproved of by his superiors. The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry, the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its "loveable" hero's brutal vigilante psychology.