The best things to do in Los Angeles this week

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.

The fog is thick in Under the Silver Lake—but it’s neither the funk of pot smoke (though there is some of that) nor bad weather. Rather, it’s the confusion located somewhere behind Andrew Garfield’s brow. His character, Sam, prowls the streets like a Scooby-less Shaggy in search of answers to a riddle he only half comprehends. Hypnotic, spiraling and deliriously high on its own supply of amateur-sleuth–movie references, writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s deeply personal follow-up to his relentless meta-horror film It Follows vaults him into Big Lebowski territory, by way of several Lynchian side streets. It’s the kind of raggedy-ass thriller that only happens when a young filmmaker, emboldened by success, throws away discipline, hoping to summon the full, meandering spell of a paranoid nightmare. Don’t hold it against him. We’re in Los Angeles, because of course we are. The secret-history-of-L.A. movie, burrowing under the city’s sunny haze to an underlying meanness, has a long and glorious history. Before it becomes Chinatown for millennials, Under the Silver Lake sets up Sam as just another sleepy guy in line at the coffee shop, the laid-back Cali-pop perfection of the Association’s “Never My Love” completing his morning mood. Someone is scrubbing away a piece of ominous graffiti on the storefront window (BEWARE THE DOG KILLER) but Sam, jobless, has more pressing concerns. There’s a frequently topless neighbor to spy on from across the courtyard—Sam’s a bit of a perv—

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

If you wanted to point to the perfect Hollywood Western—not necessarily the most complex or delicately shaded, but tallest in the saddle—John Sturges’s iconic 1960 oater would be hard to outgun. It sweeps you up in manly camaraderie, has a killer cast of rising action stars (Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn) and gallops along to the most exhilarating opening theme ever composed for a movie. Don’t blame Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua for wanting to remake it. His sturdy new version, starring a flint-eyed Denzel Washington as bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (a role once filled by Yul Brynner, passing for “Cajun”), plays closer to the original’s source material, Akira Kurosawa’s smoky Seven Samurai. Like the best Westerns, it's also timely: A tale about a black hero and his six men who clean up a besieged town from rapacious businessmen, it feels like an unambiguously fond farewell to the Obama years. And if Peter Sarsgaard’s villain isn’t in the same league as the first film’s Eli Wallach, he brings some serious scowl to the proceedings. Today’s Magnificent Seven is a vehicle for wall-to-wall action, including one devastating sequence with a hand-cranked Gatling gun that calls to mind Sam Peckinpah’s gory The Wild Bunch. If Fuqua and his screenwriters (including True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto) slightly botch the underlying theme of redemption—Ethan Hawke’s haunted ex-Confederate sharpshooter could have been more developed—it still makes good on its ideas of community pri

Review by Joshua Rothkopf If you think superhero movies are essentially about overgrown children (boys, to be exact, despite some recent lip service to the contrary), Shazam! is here to prove you absolutely right. Be ready, though, for it to win you over with its goofy Freaky Friday–ness: It’s a story in which young Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a wayward 14-year-old foster kid with serious abandonment issues, suddenly becomes a full-size man with abnormally pumped biceps, lightning-spouting fingers, a ridiculous white cape and a giggly sense of invincibility. (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Zachary Levi plays it perfectly, with bounding, immature glee.) Sneakily, the movie both pokes fun at itself and redeems the genre with guilelessness and heart—which isn’t a first. Still, if you’re evoking the lovably awkward Christopher Reeve, you’re doing it right. Swiftly, director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) gets the quasi-hallucinogenic origin nonsense out of the way: There’s an ancient cave in another dimension, where an ultraserious wizard (Djimon Hounsou, loving it) needs to find a hero. Initially, in the film’s 1974-set prologue, a boy fails this test—he’ll become the bad guy (Mark Strong, doing his bald-villain thing). Then it’s Billy turn: “Gross,” he says, when commanded to grab the wizard’s magic staff. But the transformation works, and the movie explodes into its riotous midsection, thanks to It breakout star Jack Dylan Grazer. He plays Billy’s painfully neurotic foster bro