March 2019 events calendar for Los Angeles

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.

Who would bring a children's book called Mister Babadook, rife with illustrations of toothy terrors peering around bedroom doors, into their home? The answer to that is left deliciously vague in this slow-building, expertly unsettling horror film, but it's probably safe to assume that it wasn't the broken Australian family at the heart of the story. Amelia (Essie Davis), a tired-looking caregiver working in a nursing home, grapples with single motherhood in the wake of a car accident that killed her husband while he was driving her to the maternity ward. Samuel (Noah Wiseman), the surviving child, now six, is stuck in his shrill phase, has a hyperactive imagination and is obsessed with building weapons. These are precisely the wrong people to be reading dark bedtime stories, yet mysteriously, there's the book on the shelf. And there goes your peaceful night's sleep. Maybe the better question is: Who thinks up a film like The Babadook? Actor turned debuting feature director Jennifer Kent has the narrative chutzpah to show her entire hand in the pop-up story and then make us squirm as foretold events come true. Even more impressively, Kent (expanding richly on her 2005 short, "Monster") doesn't shy away from Amelia's off-putting mental state, an internal battle between parental love and palpable resentment. (Young Sam will always be a reminder of her marital loss.) The Babadook is female-centric in ways that other horror movies, while often dominated by tough "final girls," ra

Film review by Joshua Rothkopf  The most perfect movie that will ever be made about its subject, Apollo 11 takes the purest documentary idea imaginable—telling the story of the first journey to the moon and back using only the footage captured in the moment—and rides it all the way home. Conceptually, it’s a masterstroke: Other films have leaned into narration or interviews, while Damien Chazelle’s brooding First Man took a somewhat incidental leap into personal grief. But by mining a trove of archival NASA footage (much of it unseen since 1969, or ever), disciplined filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller places an unmistakable emphasis on the thousands of people who toiled in modest synchronicity, pulling off America’s greatest mission without a hitch. Apollo 11 will bring you to tears: It’s a reminder of national functionality, of making the big dream happen without ego or divisiveness. Miller’s exhilarating first act supplies an emotional catharsis that’s rare in nonfiction (or, frankly, movies in general). Quietly, the rocket is rolled out on a massive tractor platform. Crickets chirp on a hot July night. In the astronauts’ blindingly white dressing room, the three-man crew—Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin—suit up. Their personal backstories receive flurries of silent images: wedding photos, military service, children. These flashes play like insistent memories; it’s the kind of subliminal device a dramatic director might use to reveal a character’s psychology. A

Not since Martin Scorsese followed up the mob mayhem of Casino with two hours of Buddhist asceticism in Kundun has a director made such a pronounced movie-to-movie gear shift as Jon S. Baird does with his gentle follow-up to his 2013 Irvine Welsh adaptation, Filth. Cocaine squalor gives way to Stan & Ollie, a wistful, heartfelt celebration of the friendship between comedy giants Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly), which contains plenty of cozy movie-biz nostalgia and some mishaps with hats. It’s a love song played in a minor key, and it leaves an unexpectedly lingering impression. It’s also suitable for grandmas, if you need an option. Scripted by Philomena’s Jeff Pope (working closely from a book by Laurel and Hardy historian A.J. Marriot), the story charts the duo’s final years as they embark on a grueling tour of British theaters while trying to get a new Robin Hood picture off the ground. It’s 1953, and the world has long since moved on from their brand of slapstick to new talents like Abbot and Costello. The crowds are thin and their prospects look thinner. Imagine This Is Spinal Tap with extra pratfalls. The two leads are terrific: Reilly defies a slightly iffy fat suit to give us an avuncular but creaky Hardy, bemused by his friend’s work ethic and obsessed with the finer things in life. Coogan, in particular, is a revelation as Laurel, dialing down the trademark head-scratching mannerisms and unpeeling layers of disappointment and melanchol

We’re watching an extremely luxe pocket of 18th-century life in The Favourite, which means the bewigged fops are scheming, the ducks are running (these people don’t lack for strange competitive sports) and the offscreen organist is going for baroque. Even Stanley Kubrick knew to lay off his fish-eye lens once in a while. But Greek-born director Yorgos Lanthimos can’t say no: He warps his period chamber piece—loosely based on the highly competitive court of the unstable Queen Anne—into a Lewis Carroll comic nightmare, piling cattiness upon cattiness. And what’s not to love about that? The constant visual and verbal bitchery feels like a pent-up release of something churning just under the surface. If this is your first Lanthimos movie, welcome. Know that you’re a little late to the party: Two of his prior films—the psychosexual Dogtooth, about a family that has never allowed its grown-up kids to leave the house, and the equally vicious The Lobster—went darker and deeper than The Favourite, the first that Lanthimos hasn’t personally written. But like its predecessors, the new one has an empathy that sneaks in amid all the bad behavior. What makes The Favourite work are its women, who rule, both literally within the movie and outwardly, commanding our enjoyment. Unlike the similarly set Barry Lyndon or Dangerous Liaisons, which both had strong female characters toppled by the whims of strutting cocks, Lanthimos’s latest makes the men extraneous, building a potent hothouse atmo

Tackling Harper Lee's novel, Stanley Kramer would have hit us over the head with a hammer, so perhaps we can be grateful that Mulligan merely suffocates with righteousness. The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching. In Alabama in the early '30s, Peck is a Lincoln-like lawyer who defends a black man (Peters) against a charge of rape, while next-door oddball Duvall scares the shit out of Peck's kids. It looks like a storybook of the Old South, with dappled sunlight and woodwormy porches, and Peck is everyone's favourite uncle. But screenwriter Horton Foote does less well by Harper Lee's novel than Lillian Hellman did by Foote's The Chase for Arthur Penn. That movie really was a pressure-cooker; this one is always just off the boil.

Arguably the quintessential subtitled film for people who don’t like subtitled films (it’d be a dust-up between this and ‘Cinema Paradiso’), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s rose-tinted Parisian romance is wheeled out once more to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Likely to be the role for which actress Audrey Tautou will be remembered until her dying day, the film is all the more interesting for remaining an eccentric one-of-a-kind that feels every bit the product of its writer-director’s unique sensibility and worldview. Revisiting it now, it still has the same strengths and weaknesses: the experience of watching is still like being swept along on a tidal wave of cheeky jokes and oddball observations, yet it still feels overlong and at times a little saccharine.

In her heyday, Claudia Cardinale’s default was eroticism; in her movements, expressions and affectations, she titillated not as strategy but as a matter of course. Luchino Visconti took full lurid advantage of this fact in his 1965 postwar update of Electra, in which the Italian bombshell played a woman whose return to her family’s provincial Tuscan estate with her new American husband (Michael Craig) opens scabbed-over wounds and buried secrets. She’s never forgiven her now-mad mother for remarrying after her father was murdered in Auschwitz, and her rapport with brother Gianni (Belle de Jour’s Jean Sorel) is alarmingly intense. Visconti’s approach is both classical and modern, etching tableaus of gone-to-seed opulence in high-contrast black and white while incorporating handheld camerawork, zooms and idiosyncratically framed shots. But mostly, he fixes on Cardinale, who’s often en déshabillé for little cause and pushing cinematic seduction to outright prurience. When she shares the screen with the ostentatiously beautiful Sorel, their chemistry is almost too potent to bear—which, considering they’re playing siblings, is precisely the point. Assertions that such passions are related to the state of their “race” are deeply dubious, but Visconti is ultimately after something more elemental: the glorious and fatal tension between uncontrollable desire and its necessary limits. In other words, pure cinema. Follow Eric Hynes on Twitter: @eshynes

Spoiler alert: You do know that pro wrestling is fake, right? Don’t want to crush any dreams here. The boastful, performative nature of WWE, spiked with mini dramas and constant role-playing, becomes the lingua franca of an atypical household in Fighting with My Family, the sweetest of comedies despite a sizable number of body slams. Perhaps the Knights, a close-knit clan from working-class Norwich, England, are onto something: Dad and Mom—a perfectly matched Nick Frost (tattooed and bushy bearded) and Games of Thrones’ Lena Headey (flaunting a fierce red dye job)—are former wrestling attractions who now thrill to the bouts of their grown-up children, Zak (Jack Lowden) and Raya (Florence Pugh). Together, they run a local gym and training academy, mainly for kids. But the big show eludes them, until a life-changing phone call comes, and Zak and Raya head to London for tryouts. If you’re already aware that Raya goes by the stage name Paige (from her favorite gothy Charmed character), you may know too much—the film is based on a real-life success story, turned into a 2012 documentary. Suffice to say that writer-director Stephen Merchant, a comedy legend for co-creating The Office, is happy to hit every inspirational beat. More impressively, though, he steers the material toward affectionate rudeness—this is a film that makes Mötley Crüe’s “Wild Side” sound square. Like School of Rock, the movie is about indoctrination into a subculture that, for all its surface trashiness, off

Thought we’d reached peak Spider-Man? Think again. After what seems like umpteen movie versions, here’s one that embraces the most out-there elements of Spider-Man lore and forges something new from them. Yes, it rips through yet more origin stories and sets up another villain with an evil, multiverse-opening thingamajig. But by the time it’s chucked in a Spider-pig (yes, really), a no-crap-taking Aunt May, a Banksy joke and buckets of Day-Glo–bathed spectacle, resistance will be pretty much futile. “It can get weirder,” points out one character. And it really does. Inevitably, those two giddy Hollywood animation mavericks, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie), are involved. The former is cowriter and the latter produces, and their stamp is all over an oddly endearing movie that’s supercharged with charm and just a bit unhinged. This time, the story throws the spotlight onto the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man: an Afro-Latino teen voiced by Dope’s Shameik Moore. A likable, ungainly high-schooler, he’s bitten by a radioactive spider—the filmmakers know you’re bored of this bit and speed right through it—and then reluctantly tutored by an older, jaded Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), who’s been dropped into Brooklyn from a parallel dimension, complete with a broken heart and a burger belly. Aside from the welcome sight of a superhero of color, we’re treated to a clutter of other Spider-people joining the fray. Also hailing from parallel universes, they include Spider-M