Things to do in Los Angeles this Friday

Josh and Benny Safdie, the indie filmmaking brothers whose New York City movies shudder with attitude, tell fast, grubby stories that harken back to the 1970s, when Sidney Lumet ruled sets. Their vigor is an instant rush: Why creep a camera down a hallway when you can fling it behind equally unhinged characters? In Heaven Knows What, the Safdies turned uptown heroin junkies into wild, unkempt angels. Then, in Good Time, they gave Robert Pattinson all the confusion he could handle as a Pacino-like Queens hustler out of his depth. There’s no nostalgia to these films, no cuteness, only the mania of urban survival, improvised on the fly with a side of trash talk. Uncut Gems, the Safdies’ electrifying and abrasive latest drama, flirts with becoming a headache. (For some, it will feel like more than flirting.) But the film gets closer than the brothers ever have to developing a genuine affection for their various schemers, and that makes all the difference. Tenaciously, it follows a week in the 2012 life of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants Diamond District dealer, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, channeling his obnoxiousness into something magically right, even moving). You may be overwhelmed by the Safdies’ spiky sound design—filled with yelling, sports betting, the jewelry shop’s constantly buzzing security door and an overcaffeinated, Tangerine Dream–like synth score—but Howard thrives in this chaos. It’s his normal. Beyond his bling salesmanship, Howard dreams of a big score, which

A pure adrenaline hit of a movie that takes place mostly in the lethal glare of daylight, Sam Mendes’s stunning, sorta-single-take 1917 hits its greatest heights when darkness falls. A single British soldier dusts himself off from a glancing wound, wanders to the window of a broken-down house and, in one invisible cut, emerges magically into the skeletal, hellish remains of a French town. The abandoned settlement glows with orange hues as Thomas Newman’s score hits a rare crescendo. It’s at once an epic piece of filmmaking, the launchpad for the second half of the movie, and possibly the greatest “person walks into a town” moment in cinema since Claudia Cardinale strolled into Once Upon a Time in the West. Needless to say, in a film that only stops to reload, the soldier is soon running like hell. Once Upon a Time on the Western Front—as you could subtitle Mendes’s nerve-fraying rollercoaster of a war movie—is a simple men-on-a-mission drama dressed up with all the technical bells and whistles at the director’s disposal. The men are Lance Cpls. Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are summoned into the trenches for a hurried briefing with Colin Firth’s General Erinmore. The entire German army, it turns out, has hit reverse to the tune of about 8 miles, holing up behind the Hindenburg Line and waiting secretly for an unsuspecting British attack that will cost the lives of 1,600 men, including Blake’s brother. The mission? To deliver a message to sto

Greta Gerwig has directed only two films that are solely her own but she’s already become a brand. It’s in evidence within the first five minutes of Little Women, a huggably self-deprecating take on the Louisa May Alcott classic: Brashly confident Jo (Lady Bird’s Saoirse Ronan, still uncorking those soulful stares that outclass the competition) sits in the office of a New York publishing house. Because it’s the 1860s, she has to pretend she’s trying to sell the work of a friend. But a parental editor (Tracy Letts, also from Lady Bird) sees through this and has mercy on her. He reads, pencil in hand. “Make sure she’s married at the end—or dead,” he concludes, somewhat approvingly. Jo, elated, runs down a city block, just like Gerwig did in Frances Ha. If this isn’t the Little Women you remember, either on page or screen, that’s understandable. But it’s likely the one you felt, and that’s more important. Gerwig, who should be celebrated as both an evolving screenwriter (the bold adaptation is hers) and a shrewd formal stylist, cuts to the thematic essence of the novel—sisterhood and coming of age, but also nostalgia and mourning your own past—and finds a visual language for it. Alcott’s saga of the four March sisters has been divided and restitched by Gerwig into two interwoven halves. Girlish energy suffuses the warmly lit scenes of their Massachusetts teenhood (Daddy’s away, fighting the Civil War), days chockablock with attic theatrical productions, boy crushes and rivalrie

Hazarding a wildly speculative guess, I think Stanley Kubrick would have loved Gravity. He would have been knocked out by Alfonso Cuarón’s zero-G realism and long-take panache. Secretly, he would have envied the movie’s grosses (Kubrick knew about the power that money could buy). He would have called someone in the middle of the night to talk about it. And finally, Kubrick would have leaned back with a sly smile (his only smile), knowing his classic’s reputation was safe. It’s not that 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t look dated—it does, a touch—but rather, it feels as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming. Until today’s equivalent of novelist Arthur C. Clarke commits a hefty chunk of time to envisioning the beginning of human civilization, as well as the far ends of the future, there will be no new film that supplants it. Though it was showered with technical praise, 2001 lingers on the mind like a tall, black riddle: Where are the new bones, the new tools, that will take us higher? Do we even deserve them? And if The Shining can grow as a black comedy, so can this one. Douglas Rain’s clammy voice work as HAL 9000, the murderous machine, remains one of Kubrick’s snazziest pieces of direction. Of course, he’d tell us, Gravity is great. But I prefer Her. Follow Joshua Rothkopf on Twitter: @joshrothkopf

It's the laugh that gets you: Joaquin Phoenix’s half cackle, half rasp has all the soothing music of a vulture in a blender. It’ll be ratting around in your head long after the old-school “The End” card flashes up on this unrelenting, grimly funny and brilliantly visceral reinvention of the DC supervillain. Joker is a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism—arguably the best “social horror” film since Get Out—and Phoenix is magnetic in it. He runs Heath Ledger cigarette paper-close as the finest screen Joker. Like everything in this drum-tight movie, the title’s lack of a definite article is no accident: It’s not the fully formed Joker being introduced here, but Arthur Fleck, a man whose ambition to tell jokes professionally is at odds with the living he scraps as a clown for hire on Gotham’s grimy streets. Judging by posters of the movies playing—Excalibur and Blow Out—it’s 1981, but it feels more like the ’70s of Death Wish. He lives with his frail mom (Frances Conroy) in a broken-down tenement, eking out a little joy watching a TV chat show hosted with oily relish by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Arthur’s on seven types of medication and has a neurological condition that causes him to laugh—okay, cackle—uncontrollably. In these domestic early scenes, Phoenix establishes Arthur as a man who sees himself less as an underdog than a mutt waiting to be put down. “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore,” he says. And no wonder: It’s a seriously bleak world he inh

Review by Dave Calhoun The sort of high-wire, playfully enjoyable riff on movies that only Quentin Tarantino could get away with, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a massively fun shaggy-dog story that blends fact and fiction, inserting made-up characters at the heart of real, horrible events (Charles Manson horrible) and then daring history to do its worst. Sitting at the mature, Jackie Brown end of Tarantino’s work, the film is also a love letter to Los Angeles and the film industry, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next. Tarantino starts with Hollywood in the era of the Manson murders—specifically, the slaying of starlet Sharon Tate and her friends in August 1969—and retells the story on his own terms, first over a few days in February 1969 and then, six months later, over the weekend of the killings. That means we’re spending nearly the whole movie wondering how this director is going to deal with the actual historical tragedy. For the answer to that, you’ll just have to sweat it out. Let’s just say this: Tarantino somehow manages to carve good taste out of bad. Nonfictional characters pop up throughout: the doomed Tate (Margot Robbie), Nixon-era celebrities Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), the Manson gang (one of whom is played by

A gorgeously crafted memoir about a jaded filmmaker past his prime, Pain & Glory could be Pedro Almodóvar’s most autobiographical work since Law of Desire. The grand irony is that there’s nothing jaded about the filmmaking on display: It’s drenched in a passion for cinema and shows Almodóvar right at the peak of his powers. There’s no sense of waning creativity, only a mood of longing and nostalgia that’s unmistakably from a deeply personal place. You could call it Almodóvar’s Cinema Paradiso. The man at its heart is Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a Madrid filmmaker suffering from all sorts of aches, pains and maladies that make him a prisoner in his own body. He questions his mortality as a matter of routine, but his immortality—professionally, at least—is guaranteed by Taste, a big arthouse smash from the ’80s that’s being celebrated with an upcoming screening. He’s been invited, along with the film’s stormy star Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), and asked to participate in a Q&A afterward. The wrinkle is that the pair fell out making the movie and haven’t spoken since, and when Salvador initiates a reconciliation it ends in a heroin-addled fug with the aging auteur availing himself of Crespo’s supply. The Q&A, inevitably, doesn’t go well. Banderas is terrific. He’s Almodóvar’s onscreen alter ego right down to the graying rebel hairdo and strikingly colored outfit of polo shirt and trainers. He inhabits the character with a sense of haunted distraction: a man in his sixties

Review by Joshua Rothkopf Because it would have been unbearable otherwise, Noah Baumbach begins his churning, deeply felt divorce drama Marriage Story—easily the wisest film of his career—on a note of sweetness. Wedded Brooklyn parents Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) introduce themselves via a double diary of sorts, co-narrating as we watch snippets of their urban life: pizza slices scarfed down, bedtime stories told, subway stops missed. Both of them are unfailingly generous. Nicole makes people feel comfortable, Charlie says. He rarely gets defeated, she tells us. Each calls the other deeply competitive. Alas, that’s the trait Marriage Story is about. It’s a movie that slowly leeches itself of tenderness, of endearments small and large, climaxing in a ferocious, Bergmanesque verbal showdown (one that goes from cautious chat to wall-punching) that represents a triple triumph for the actors and their director. Rarely has Johansson, pared down and deglammed, been this aching. Never has Driver, even with his Star Wars rage monster Kylo Ren under his belt, torn into his lines with such ruined viciousness. And Baumbach transcends his own The Squid and the Whale, mounting a complex moment in a small apartment that’s almost abstract in its blankness—there’s nowhere to hide. (Presumably, he lived out some version of this scene himself. Let’s not speculate on what Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach’s ex and an obvious inspiration for Nicole, will think.) Charlie 

Rarely does a movie combine cinematic fireworks and social commentary as mischievously as Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite does. It’s a slick home-invasion drama that mirrors the masks worn by its characters: The film is polite until it drops all pretense. The director of The Host and Snowpiercer is no stranger to genre gymnastics, and in this story about a poor Seoul family that infiltrates a super-rich one, he allows moments of pure terror, quiet observation and baroque comedy to sit happily alongside each other. Impressively, the film never jars you as it glides from one state of being to the next. Parasite plays upon primal, age-old themes that never lose appeal: inequality, class, manners and how we behave to protect what’s ours (or to gain that which we believe should be ours). We meet a hard-up family living in a semi-basement that has a view of an alleyway where drunks like to take a piss. The husband Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their twentysomething kids, son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam), are all scraping together a living doing odd jobs like assembling pizza boxes. The film’s spark is lit when Ki-woo fakes his résumé and starts tutoring the daughter of Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun), a rich young businessman, and his equally alluring wife, Yeon-kyo (Jo Yeo-jeong). One by one, the rest of the family play the same game and ease their way into the Park household—as a maid, a chauffeur—and the black humor of

Martin Scorsese pulls off a killer self-own at the top of his overstuffed, frequently electrifying The Irishman. As the Five Satins’ gorgeous “In the Still of the Night” casts its timeless doo-wop spell, the camera creeps forward—not into the bowels of the Copacabana or anywhere near as glamorous, but down the boring carpeted hallway of a nursing home. Is this where all of Scorsese’s gangsters end up? Only the unlucky ones, the film suggests. Too-generously adapted by Steven Zaillian from the 2004 crime memoir I Heard You Paint Houses, the nearly three-and-a-half-hour The Irishman—spanning the decades like an extra-long Cadillac—isn’t about still nights so much as the dying of the light, the end of one’s years and the belated, unarticulated guilt that’s inherent to mob life. Or at least it gets to that guilt. Eventually. When we first sidle up to the wheelchair-bound Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, building a performance that becomes more interesting as it quiets down), he’s a white-haired oldster narrating his life. Just for a second, you wonder if he’s rambling to himself. He steers us back to the late 1940s, when, as a married WWII vet and union truck driver, he meets mafioso Russell Bufalino (the much-missed Joe Pesci, these days dropping crafty little smiles) on the side of a Pennsylvania road. It doesn’t matter how many times Pesci calls De Niro “kid” (and it’s several): Nothing will fully sell you on Scorsese’s biggest gamble, digitally de-aging his cast so that they c