The best things to do in Los Angeles this week

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

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

All of Stanley Kubrick’s films – be it ‘The Killing’ or ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ – demand to be seen on a big screen. They’re about people trapped in huge, indifferent machines gone wrong, from a heist plot to a spaceship, and only the huge indifference of the cinema does them justice. In ‘The Shining’, the machine is a haunted house: the Overlook Hotel, created by Stephen King and turned by Kubrick into an awry environment in which mental stability, supernatural malignance and the sense of space and time shimmer and warp to terrible effect. The story sees Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) drag his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) up a mountain to be the hotel’s winter caretaker. Things go badly. This is the original 1980 US version, 24 minutes longer than the one familiar to UK audiences. On the upside, it fleshes out the family’s city life and includes an intriguing TV-watching motif; on the downside, there are some daft scare shots and it didn’t ever exactly feel short at two hours. Still, a masterpiece.

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.

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.