Things to do in Los Angeles this Sunday

It isn’t summer in L.A. until the first cemetery screening brings hoards of movie-lovers to Hollywood Forever, toting folding chairs, picnic blankets, snack spreads and lots of booze. Each year, Cinespia brings classic cult favorites to the hallowed resting place of such Hollywood greats as Rudolph Valentino and Bugsy Siegel. This year’s first batch of screenings includes Beetlejuice, The Matrix, Legally Blonde and Rear Window. Angelenos line up for hours to partake in the concept—and to enjoy DJ sets, dance parties, sleepovers and more magical mischief otherwise strictly forbidden behind the cemetery gates. It’s an L.A. rite of passage, a quintessential summer experience and one of the best film venues in the city. Just be sure to get your ticket early, arrive early (doors open at 6:45pm), pee early… it’s getting a bit overcrowded, to say the least.

It isn’t summer in L.A. until the first cemetery screening brings hoards of movie-lovers to Hollywood Forever, toting folding chairs, picnic blankets, snack spreads and lots of booze. Each year, Cinespia brings classic cult favorites to the hallowed resting place of such Hollywood greats as Rudolph Valentino and Bugsy Siegel. This year’s first batch of screenings includes Beetlejuice, The Matrix, Legally Blonde and Rear Window. Angelenos line up for hours to partake in the concept—and to enjoy DJ sets, dance parties, sleepovers and more magical mischief otherwise strictly forbidden behind the cemetery gates. It’s an L.A. rite of passage, a quintessential summer experience and one of the best film venues in the city. Just be sure to get your ticket early, arrive early (doors open at 6:45pm), pee early… it’s getting a bit overcrowded, to say the least.

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

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 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