The best things to do in Los Angeles this week

It’s famous for that spaghetti kiss—a legendary scene that Walt Disney almost cut out. But Lady and the Tramp has many other charming moments: the script evolved out of years of personal pet stories shared by the studio's animal-loving writers and executives. A true labor of love. See it at El Captian around Valentine's Day and you'll be treated to a candlelit dinner before the movie, catered by Miceli’s (sold separately; call 818-845-3110).

There’s a twinge of heartache in seeing our actors age (or, defiantly, not age) onscreen. To watch Jeff Bridges pull out all the crusty stops in 2010’s True Grit is to mourn his golden god in Against All Odds (1984), washed away in the sea surf. Clint Eastwood is an institution to the idea of battered masculinity; even if his plots keep him on top, the face tells another story. Rarely, though, have films embraced the ravages of time as fully as director Richard Linklater’s “Before” collaborations with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, two performers who can’t be called vain. Before Sunrise (1995), the trio’s first outing, had indie friskiness on its side: a Europass romance imbued with collegiate drive. The same lovers showed up again, dreamily, in Linklater’s animated Waking Life (2001), and when we next hooked up with novelist Jesse (Hawke) and his one-night stand, Celine (Delpy), in a pink-hued Paris for 2004’s Before Sunset, a beautiful regret had dawned in their eyes.Nine years have again passed. Before Midnight may be the most superheroic sequel of the summer, as middle-aged Jesse and Celine grapple with foes many adults can appreciate: thwarted ambitions, work distractions and the pressures of rearing kids together. (As before, Hawke and Delpy share in the screenwriting.) In a relaxed opening sequence, we take in the changes: a strained goodbye at the airport between now-divorced Jesse and his adolescent son; then, a casual drive with sleeping twins in the backseat. We reac

Too often dismissed as the bland, cutesy, cakey-bakey face of the modern romcom, the late Nora Ephron was an unacknowledged genius when it came to screenplay construction – and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remains her finest work. This is a film where everything works: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s just-this-side-of-smug central couple, the gorgeous photography of New York through the changing seasons, even Harry Connick Jr’s jazz-lite soundtrack. And it’s all rooted in that flawless script. The story is simple: Crystal and Ryan meet after college, and loathe one another on sight. As the years pass the random meetings pile up, and dislike turns to reluctant friendship. But, as the film insistently, infamously asks, can men and women ever really be just friends? It’s not just that Ephron poses these kinds of obvious-but-important questions. It’s that she does so while circumventing romantic clichés left and right, creating unforgettably loveable characters and throwing in some of the most fluid, insightful and witty set-piece conversations ever written (the diner orgasm is the most famous, but it’s the tip of a very large iceberg). ‘Perfect’ is a big word to use about any film, but in this case no other will do.

After 30 years, the “Boo!” and gross-out moments are permanently cemented in the cultural psyche—from the face-hugger’s leap out of the translucent egg to John Hurt’s dinner-table stomach burst. So what’s left to discover about Ridley Scott’s great deep-space horror show? Mainly it’s the sense of pace and craft that the once-promising director would soon trade in, post–Blade Runner, for empty, pretense-laden spectacle. When Scott introduces us to the crew and corridors of the interplanetary mining ship Nostromo, he emphasizes silence and languor, the better to immerse us in the cavernous physical and mental playground that the alien (designed by Oscar-winning Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger) will use to its merciless advantage. It’s the creature’s instinctual murder spree that makes the immediate impression, but that would be nothing without the simmering tensions among the human counterparts. At times, Alien plays like an upstairs-downstairs comedy of manners, complete with disenchanted, proletarian grunts (Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto’s union-men mechanics) and effete, eye-rolling snobs (Ian Holm’s above-it-all science officer) trading class-specific aspersions. What it all comes down to, of course, is Sigourney Weaver in her underwear facing off with a drooling, phallus-shaped nightmare made flesh. The dissertations practically write themselves.

If you’ve ever been stuck hundreds of miles from the love of your life, wondering if it’s really worth all the heartache and phone-checking, Pawel Pawlikowski has made the movie for you. With this monochrome love story spanning two decades and four countries in post-WWII Europe, the Polish filmmaker has conjured a dazzling, universal odyssey through the human heart and all its strange compulsions. It could be the most achingly romantic film you’ll see this year, or just a really painful reminder of the one that got away. Beginning in 1949, twentysomething singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and middle-aged pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) meet in the least auspicious of settings—an austere Polish musical academy that could easily double as a prison. Wiktor is tasked with assembling a troupe of folk musicians to extol the greatness of the motherland, but he’s had his fill of songs about agricultural reform and the global proletariat. Zula’s defiant spirit catches his eye, they fall for each other and he promises her a new life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But when he defects to Paris, she surprises him by staying behind, setting in motion a 20-year love affair that plays out like a swinging ’60s version of Doctor Zhivago. Chemistry is not in short supply between the two. There’s an age gap—that hoary old bugbear—but Pawlikowski semi-subverts it by making Wiktor the more lovelorn of the couple. They meet and part on Parisian boulevards, in smoky jazz clubs and at concerts in Yugo