Things to do in Los Angeles this Friday

After such imposing movies as Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave—those titles are punishing enough—you’d be forgiven for assuming British director Steve McQueen had a mean streak, if not toward his audiences, then his actors. Now comes Widows, which also has its fair share of suffering, mainly on the haunted face of Viola Davis. But McQueen has discovered something new. Should we call it fun? Let’s not get carried away. Still, Widows, a supercharged Chicago-set caper of consummate skill, zooms along in a way that feels peppier than usual, McQueen brewing the action and ominous municipal intrigue like he was trying to outdo The Fugitive. He comes frighteningly close. Three women dominate the film, delivering it to a poise that Ocean's 8, a high-collared pretender, can only dream of. They’re all the recent widows of a freshly deceased gang of high-stakes criminals, men who barely get any screen time. In their absence, Veronica (Davis) floats around her white-walled penthouse like a ghost, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) gets her thrift store sold from under her, and Alice, an abused blonde trophy wife (Elizabeth Debicki, running away with the movie via skittish fragility and, later, pure moxie), is urged by her own mother to become an escort. As if economic freefall and grief weren’t enough, their husbands’ unfinished business shows up on their doorsteps, thuggishly demanding payment or else. To watch them coalesce into a hard-nosed crew of heisters is the year’s most purely pleas

The unsettling latest from actor-turned-director Joel Edgerton (this is his second feature, following 2015’s impressive The Gift) works best as the prison movie it is. A chain-link fence closes in a yard; sometimes a bus drops off new “long-stayers.” The place is Love In Action, a real-life Christian facility (since renamed Restoration Path) where the unscientific work of gay-conversation therapy happens. Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 exposé-slash-memoir of the same name, Boy Erased evokes this nightmarish zone with banal, khaki-clad specificity: the cringeworthy pseudoscience (Edgerton carves out a plum role for himself as the facility’s preacher-counselor, Dr. Sykes), the physical and mental hardships (“Uncross your legs!” is a demand), the development of hatreds to replace barely understood urges. It’s certainly not the right place for Jared (Manchester by the Sea’s gifted Lucas Hedges, whose blonde eyelashes alone make you feel protective). Jared may have a “God-shaped void in his life,” per the clinic’s ridiculous guidebook, but in all other respects, this Arkansas teen is wonderful: a natural athlete, college-bound, a respectful boyfriend. Edgerton mostly steers his tale away from its more obvious dimensions (an early rape scene is a regrettable exception), focusing more on the confusion of decent people. Jared’s parents, both devout Baptists, reckon with their own insufficient tools for handling their son’s development: Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, playing a Sout

The specific New York City of 1991—somehow harsher and more wintry, and still, a place of cozy antiquarian bookstores and down-on-their-luck dreamers in overcoats—comes to life in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, based on an actual literary misadventure. Paul Simon’s percolating, anxious “Can’t Run But” dominates the movie’s soundtrack, and no number of scenes shot in Julius’s warm bar, the whiskey flowing, can shake that restless mood. It’s atmosphere brewed to an expert degree of exactitude. With $14 in her wallet and a sad existence of sleeping in her clothes in a fly-infested apartment she can no longer afford, author Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy, easing into a rich, quietly dramatic turn) has reached the end of the line. Bristly and abrasive, she can’t sell her fusty celebrity biographies anymore; she steals toilet paper from her agent’s swanky pad and pushes away her lonely dead-end reality. Your heart leaps when she meets a bitchy kindred spirit in Jack (Richard E. Grant, uncorking the performance of his career), also coasting on an air of borrowed time: another gay survivor who remembers when things were easier. Honestly, that would have been enough for a film, especially when it has acting this relaxed, a witty, sad script (adapted from the late Israel’s memoir by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Marielle Heller behind the camera directing. But the movie is also a literary-hoax thriller, a slightly busy one, with Lee learning how to tur

Timothée Chalamet, all of 22 years old and indelible as two radically different kind of boyfriends in last year’s Call Me by Your Name and Lady Bird, is doing major things in his new movie, Beautiful Boy—things that no other actor of his generation is attempting. You have to go back to Marlon Brando to see these kind of heartbreaking frowns, the angelic face turned upward, wrestling with frustration. Chalamet is playing a college-bound kid derailed by drugs: meth, pills, everything. What he’s pulling off in a diner with Steve Carell (as the panicky out-of-his-depths dad)—a combination of cajoling, breaking down, acting fake-tough—is incredibly tricky. Even subtler are Chalamet’s wordless moments: a slack-jawed, Christian Bale–like zombie walk through a campus quad; a sober drive up the sunny California coast, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” on the stereo, the dissatisfaction slowly creeping in. How much easier it would be to focus on Chalamet, doing the most overwhelming work of his young career, and not the earnest, seesawing movie around him. Beautiful Boy is perfectly fine: unflinching where it needs to be, keenly attuned to the cyclical nature of relapsing along with the deeper blows to pride, trust and identity. It sometimes feels strenuous in making its points, but you’ll be too wrecked to call that a demerit. The script, loaded with sharp details, comes from the dual father-son memoirs of David and Nic Sheff; director Felix Van Groeningen gets out of the way of his perfo

Two people—a man and his teen daughter—adopting a simpler life in the backwoods of America may sound like the beginnings of a Bon Iver concept album, but in the hands of co-writer/director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone), it forms the crux of a smart, heartfelt examination of outsiderdom in a society that doesn’t just prize conformity, but demands it. For a small story, it tackles some pretty big themes, gauging America’s reactionary social climate through the eyes of father Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), living outdoors in the misty Oregon rainforest.  Like a Bear Grylls family outing spun wildly out of control, the pair forage for food, nursing fuel supplies and essentials scrapped together with money Will makes selling painkilling meds to fellow veterans. As the title implies, the duo is ever-wary of betraying their presence to the authorities. It’s a hardscrabble rural existence that’ll be semi-familiar to anyone who’s seen Granik’s Ozarks-set drama Winter’s Bone, although here there’s an element of choice and, initially, an air of quiet satisfaction at sticking it to The Man. Of course, it doesn’t last: they’re soon sucked back into the system and processed by social workers whose uncomprehending kindnesses only rub salt in the wounds.   Unlike Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, another film that explores the quiet radicalism of disappearing off the grid, there’s no big emotional swells here. Leave No Trace is a more hushed, contemplative movie. Grani

The first Fantastic Beasts had a lot of heavy lifting to do. It needed to establish a world connected to the Harry Potter universe, but also one that was self-contained. It had to introduce several busloads of new characters and kick off a story complex enough to sustain another four movies (at least). With all that done, the second instalment should have earned itself some breathing room, a bit of time to cut loose and enjoy the possibilities of a new magical universe. But as beautiful and inventive as it is, The Crimes of Grindelwald often feels like we’re starting the world-building all over again. Trying to establish where everyone is at the beginning of this sequel without giving too much away is going to get confusing, so our apologies in advance. Fascist wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, looking rough) has broken out of jail in London and fled to Paris to lay the groundwork for an uprising. In order to stop him, the wizarding government approaches Grindelwald’s ex-friend Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law, relishing his fairly brief screen time), who refuses the mission but enlists the help of animal-lover Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) for a more secret version of the same mission. There are about eight other major characters involved, but we’ve only got so much space. Short version: A wizard war is a-brewing. Moving most of the action to Paris gives the film’s creative team the opportunity to run wild with some gorgeous production design. Visually, the world couldn

There’s an aggrieved moralist at the heart of director Jason Reitman’s movies, but on his better days, he doesn’t give in whole-hog to that inner prude. He sits down with him, savoring a tension that, in turn, supplies Juno, Young Adult and Reitman’s recent Tully with a complex sense of empathy. The Front Runner, about presidential candidate Gary Hart (a mostly plaid-and-denim-clad Hugh Jackman, pinned down by an underwritten role) and his spectacular fall from grace in 1987 after a much-publicized marital infidelity, looks to return Reitman to the political territory of his savage feature debut, Thank You for Smoking. But in a post-Trump world, the script—based on Matt Bai’s 2014 account—feels like it’s trying too hard to flatter us: Can you believe the kind of scandals we once got so cranky about? That glibness, subtle yet unavoidable, is misplaced. The film is so desperate to come off like a wry, coffee-stained media satire (à la Robert Altman’s classic HBO series Tanner ’88) that it misses the deeper story, that of a woman being treated shabbily on a man’s way to the top. Was that not timely enough? You wait—and wait—for Vera Farmiga to unleash a magnificent monologue behind closed doors, the one that presumably lured her to the role of Hart’s wife, Lee, in the first place. But it never comes. “The only thing that I asked is that you don’t embarrass me,” she says, almost gently. The Front Runner has more patience for poor Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), dragged through the mud

When a couple decides to start a family, they are inspired to pursue adoption through the foster care system. They feel like wonderful, altruistic people until they suddenly have three wild kids in their home. Now they must learn to love and parent children who have no interest in being parented in this heartwarming comedy.

THE LAST RACE is a cinematic portrait of a Long Island stock car race track as its 87 year-old owners struggle to maintain an American racing tradition in the face of a real estate development boom. The film merges image and sound in a unique narrative form to bring the audience into the world of grassroots racing culture and explores a story that subtly grapples with questions of blue collar American identity that have taken on a profound relevance in the current political era.

A shocking revelation turns a teenage boy's world upside down in this chilling look at the evil that can lurk below even the most wholesome surface. Tyler Burnside (Charlie Plummer) is a Boy Scout, a volunteer at his local church, and the dutiful son of an upstanding, community leader dad (Dylan McDermott). Only one thing troubles the quiet Kentucky town he lives in: the unsolved murders - in which ten women were brutally tortured and killed by a psychopath known as Clovehitch - that rocked the community more than a decade ago. When Tyler discovers a cache of disturbing images in his father's possession, he begins to suspect that the man he trusts most in the world may be Clovehitch and that his deadly rampage may not be over.