Things to do in Los Angeles this Friday

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.

A dream, indeed. Sure to delight foodies and cinephiles alike, David Gelb's meditative and illuminating documentary profiles Jiro Ono, the 85-year-old proprietor of the beloved Tokyo sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro. Celebrity gourmand Anthony Bourdain has sung the chef's praises, the Japanese government has recognized him as a national treasure, and his low-key establishment has garnered the highest rating from the notoriously stingy Michelin guide. The eats are certainly the film's star attraction: There are tons of gleaming close-ups of the fish Jiro prepares, and one piece looks so translucently scrumptious, you'd swear you can see its molecules moving. It's almost enough to just sit, stare and salivate.Gelb has more up his sleeve, though. Everything about the movie seems touched by Jiro's finely honed methods of simplicity and minimalism: the fleetly focused 81-minute running time; the choice musical cuts from composers like Philip Glass and Max Richter; and the evocatively broad brushstroke characterizations of Jiro's subordinates, most notably his eldest child and coworker, Yoshikazu. The very real tensions between father and son are subtly yet perceptively hinted at: Whereas Jiro appears to have a born desire to make sushi, Yoshikazu seems to have acquired his talent by force. (When he mentions his childhood desire to be a pilot, you sense a glimmer of regret behind his casual demeanor.) Both men's genius is undeniable, but there's a lingering sense---a pleasingly p

Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession and the tendency of those in love to try to manipulate each other. Stewart is excellent as the neurotic detective employed by an old pal to trail his wandering wife, only to fall for her himself and then crack up when she commits suicide. Then one day he sees a woman in the street who reminds him of the woman who haunts him... Hitchcock gives the game away about halfway through the movie, and focuses on Stewart's strained psychological stability; the result inevitably involves a lessening of suspense, but allows for an altogether deeper investigation of guilt, exploitation, and obsession. The bleakness is perhaps a little hard to swallow, but there's no denying that this is the director at the very peak of his powers, while Novak is a revelation. Slow but totally compelling.

Review by Joshua Rothkopf A cinematic memoir of once-in-a-decade emotional precision and ambition, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir does many things so exquisitely, it’s hard to know where to begin. Hogg, a veteran British TV and feature director with a distinctly intimate style, graduated from film school in the 1980s; her fantasy thesis project starred a then-unknown Tilda Swinton (already magnetic) as a character whose obsession with fashion results in a glamorous plunge into a magazine spread. Now, completing a cosmic circle, Hogg casts the Oscar-winning actor’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, to play an autobiographical version of herself as a young film student peering through spring-loaded Bolex cameras and awakening to the pleasures and heartaches of early ’80s London. (Mama Swinton is on hand too, as Hogg’s elegant, concerned mother.) To watch Swinton Byrne’s 24-year-old Julie—angelically innocent, soft in voice, a touch embarrassed by her Knightsbridge privilege—is to make the kind of immediate, heart-to-heart connection with an actor that only the movies can broker. (Call Me by Your Name’s revelatory Timothée Chalamet was another.) Julie is still childlike enough to shower kisses on the family dog. But she’s turning serious, typing out her script ideas, interviewing earnestly with the graying, judgmental professors, mixing it up during class discussions of Psycho. The world of film school, a crucible of naivete and competition, has never been presented with quite as mu

Review by Joshua Rothkopf Arriving with the momentum that only 21 previous global blockbusters can provide, Avengers: Endgame is the multiplex-rattling and curiously emotional culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—at least until the next chapter. You know it’s going to be long (three hours, but there’s no need to sit out the end credits this time); you know it’s going to be high-level homework for even the most advanced fan. But what you don’t know is how deeply invested you may be in these 11 years of movies, a compendium of destruction and heroism that altered our culture but also reflected it, sometimes weightlessly, at other times grandly. Endgame often pays tribute to itself, which makes it as fascinating as it is self-serious. It taps into a live wire of doomy tragedy and phoenix-like rebirth that comics do so well. Working from an intricate screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely that sometimes finds a calm within the storm, the film begins (after a brief cold open for all you Hawkeye fans) just as the whole MCU did: with Robert Downey Jr.’s neurotic Tony Stark grappling with his responsibilities. Downey is the actor upon which the franchise was launched in 2008’s whiz-bang Iron Man, and there’s a symmetry to giving him the floor during Endgame’s downbeat early stretch—when it's an operatic grief drama in which half the world’s living creatures have blown away in clouds of dust. Cities are now ghost towns, dating is apparently a disaster and even

Review by Joshua Rothkopf “Prepare for war,” someone who knows Latin will tell you, if you ask about that subtitle, though it’s hardly necessary intel: In these gloriously dumb—but remarkably well-staged—gun-fu flicks, the war is already here, and it lasts for an entire film. Maybe others prefer it when Keanu Reeves talks; for me, he’s more effective when he moves. John Wick’s somber suit-clad NYC assassin has become his signature role, stripping down Speed and The Matrix into something John Woo sleek. Mob thugs killed his pet pit bull in the first installment. Those guys are long gone. Though this latest John Wick adventure brings on the usual distractions—Ian McShane’s fastidious boutique-hotel proprietor, Lawrence Fishburne’s booming king of the Bowery underworld, Halle Berry's lady with vicious dogs that leap straight for the crotch—mostly these characters stay out of the way of the main attraction. Instead, we’re here for the rigorously conceived, blessedly coherent action showdowns, the work of director Chad Stahelski (also Reeves’s longtime stunt double and choreographer). Stahelski is a fight-scene Fosse and Reeves is his Gwen Verdon: Parabellum takes the hall-of-mirrors high style of the second film and pushes it into overdrive. (Those who live in glass-walled galleries shouldn't throw anything at Wick.) The level of hard-R-rated bloodletting is so delirious, you’ll ignore how bad it is for you. A closed Manhattan Bridge is the perfect site for a sword duel on spee

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

Review by Joshua Rothkopf Save it, Generation John Hughes (yes, this is a self-own): One day, a post-apocalyptic band of hardy survivors will remember today’s high-school movies and scowl at the riches. Some of those films were good enough to land multiple Oscar nominations (Lady Bird). Some snuck heartache into comedy (The Edge of Seventeen). Some were just plain rude (Superbad). And now, with Booksmart, there’s one that could be all of those things. Co-scripted by an evidently inspired quartet of women writers (Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Katie Silberman), Booksmart plays like sweetest liberation—it invents a dorky duo, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Lady Bird’s Beanie Feldstein), then gives them walls to smash down. Socially awkward yet Ivy League bound, the pasty friends approach the final bell of senior year with a sense of accomplishment, but their smugness rings hollow: Their nerd-adjacent peers are also heading to exclusive colleges, but those classmates ripped beer bongs and had tons of underage sex along the way. How did they never learn to multitask? Actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde (shockingly, this is her behind-the-camera feature debut) shows off something rarer than technique or comic timing. She’s got loads of compassion and has somehow managed to make a high-school movie without villains. The sheer number of “types” in Booksmart—the spoiled loner, the spaced-out drama chick (Billie Lourd, princess on her own blissful planet), the stud

Film review by Joshua Rothkopf You lean forward while watching Us, the new horror film from Jordan Peele, since his last one, Get Out, rewarded that kind of attention. So, when his movie tells us early on that there are thousands of miles of tunnels under the United States with “no known purpose,” you squirrel that away in your brain, knowing it’ll be important later. When Peele shows us a TV commercial for that weirdly faceless 1986 publicity stunt Hands Across America—or when there are a bunch of bunnies in cages or an apocalyptic Bible quote on a sign—those details get stored away, too. But none of it quite adds up to the nightmare in your head. Us is too confidently made, too expert in its scene-to-scene command, to call it an example of sophomore slump. Still, after the film reveals itself to be the home-invasion thriller it is (and then the lesser Invasion of the Body Snatchers it becomes), you feel a slight letdown. Peele, as ever, blends comedy and screams like a champ—muscles he toned on TV’s radical Key & Peele—and his actors are terrific. After a brief mid-’80s prologue in which a lonely kid (Madison Curry) in a Michael Jackson T-shirt encounters something awful in a beachside carnival fun house, she becomes the grown-up Adelaide (a finely haunted Lupita Nyong’o), now with two children of her own and a dad-joke–dispensing husband (Winston Duke). For some reason, they’ve bought a summer house by that same beach, and it’s where Adelaide must return—unless, of cours

Fortunately the story of an alternative future is realised with such visual imagination and sparky humour that it's only half way through that the plot's weaknesses become apparent. Like 1984, it looks forward from the '40s to a vast urban society ruled by an oppressive bureaucracy that has developed primitive valve computers. Pryce plays a worker in the all-powerful Ministry of Information, and the best moments arise when his flat's central heating system becomes a kind of spiritual battleground between guerrilla engineer De Niro and his state opposite number Hoskins. Here Gilliam fuses terror and comedy with real brilliance; elsewhere the plot's gaping holes reduce the film to a glittering novelty.