What to do this weekend in L.A. Our critics’ picks

‘Truman’

A success in Spain, this life-affirming film about a terminally ill man and his lifelong best friend features top acting by stars Ricardo Darín and Javier Cámara. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'After the Storm'

A sublimely simple family drama from the Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, a filmmaker assured enough to hide his mastery in plain sight. Nothing is overemphasized, and nothing escapes his attention. (Justin Chang) Read more

'I Am Not Your Negro'

The best thing about February as a moviegoing month is that films that played for a week in December for Oscar consideration return for extended runs, including the superlative documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” which is in fact one of the five docs up for the big prize. As directed by Raoul Peck, this trenchant examination of the life and thought of James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of film language, not only spoken words but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals. They’re all employed with a formidable cinematic intelligence to create a film essay that’s powerfully and painfully relevant today even though its subject died almost 30 years ago. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'I Called Him Morgan'

Artistic, obsessive and intoxicating, this documentary on the tragic story of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan has a creative soul, and that makes all the difference. Whether you care about jazz or not, the poetry of the filmmaking by Kasper Collin and the poignance of the story will win you over. Read more

'Frantz'

Beautifully shot in black-and-white with the occasional warm burst of color, French writer-director François Ozon's intricately layered post-World War I drama puts a feminist spin on Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 anti-war film, "Broken Lullaby." Read more

'La La Land'

Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same. (Justin Chang) Read more

'Personal Shopper'

Kristen Stewart gives her most accomplished screen performance to date in Olivier Assayas’ shivery paranormal thriller — a haunted-house movie, a murder mystery and, in many ways, Assayas’ most surprising film yet about the anxieties of modern life. (Justin Chang) Read more

'Their Finest'

Genial and engaging with a fine sense of humor, this story of making movies in World War II Britain stars Gemma Arterton and a marvelous Bill Nighy and makes blending the comic with the serious look simpler than it actually is. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'The Women’s Balcony'

An Israeli box-office hit about a Jerusalem clash of religious cultures, this is an unapologetically warm-hearted comedic drama, a fine example of commercial filmmaking grounded in a persuasive knowledge of human behavior. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Your Name.'

The highest-grossing anime of all time and winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.'s animated feature prize, Makoto Shinkai's thrillingly beautiful film juggles an out-of-body farce, a time-traveling romance and a terrifying epic of survival. (Justin Chang) Read more

'Brockmire'

When baritone baseball announcers such as Vin Scully or Bob Uecker weren’t at work, did they still speak in ball parkisms? Apparently actor, comedian and show creator Hank Azaria also pondered this question, and IFC’s “Brockmire” is the indirect result. With Azaria’s fictional character Jim Brockmire, the play-by-play monologue continues outside the stadium – be it at the bar, in the bedroom or within the confines of his own head. Brockmire and his banter, originally made for the Web series “Funny or Die,” are now at the center of a new comedy debuting Wednesday that follows a former Kansas City Royals game announcer after a very public fall from grace a decade earlier. (Lorraine Ali) (IFC, Wednesdays) Read more

'13 Reasons Why'

“Mean Girls.” “Freaks and Greeks.” “Heathers.” Perhaps you’ve heard: High school is a treacherous place. Students are ruthless to one another. Hormones are bad-behavior accelerants. And adults? Utterly clueless. Now throw in social media-shaming, sexism and suicide, and you have the basic building blocks for the addictive mystery that is “13 Reasons Why.” Directed by Tom McCarthy (“Spotlight”), this Netflix original series is based on Jay Asher’s 2007 young-adult novel of the same name. A girl ends her own life, but why? The answer slowly unfolds over 13 episodes, each an hour long and all of which begin streaming Friday. Stock up on provisions because you won’t be leaving the couch for half a day. (Lorraine Ali) (Netflix, Anytime) Read more

‘Trial & Error’

In the new NBC comedy “Trial & Error,” the mockumentary sitcom as once practiced by “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” meets the true-crime legal procedural, as lately exemplified by “The Jinx” and the podcast “Serial.” It was bound to happen. John Lithgow plays Larry Henderson, a poetry professor whose wife has died after somehow crashing or being forced through a glass window. Did she fall? (Robert Lloyd) (NBC, Tuesday) Read more

‘Man of La Mancha’

Set against a gritty, contemporary backdrop, this accomplished revival reminds us why the 1964 musical adaptation of the Don Quixote story endures as one of the most substantive entries in the musical theatre canon. (Philip Brandes) (Ends Sunday, June 4) Read more

A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena

'Failure: A Love Story'

Death pays frequent, usually untimely visits to a 1920s Chicago family in a remount of Coeurage Theatre Company’s 2015 staging of this whimsical, sweetly philosophical tale by Philip Dawkins; part of Center Theatre Group’s new Block Party series. (Daryl H. Miller) (Ends April 23) Read more

Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

‘Pie in the Sky’

Nothing much happens in Lawrence Thelen’s deceptively simple new play. Then again, everything happens. Simply put, an elderly mother and her daughter (K Callan and Laurie O’Brien, respectively) bake a pie from start to finish (courtesy of Evan Bartoletti’s fully functioning kitchen set) as the smell of apples and cinnamon fills the theater. Callan and O’Brien deliver modestly scaled performances that sneak up on you with the emotional equivalent of a sucker punch, while director Maria Gobetti keeps things resonantly truthful in this precisely rendered and memorably aromatic show. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sunday, May 28) Read more

The Little Victory Theatre, 334 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank

'Hansel & Gretel Bluegrass'

Imaginatively integrating video, animation and live performance, Bryan Davidson’s new adaptation set in Depression-era Appalachia links the fairy tale horrors of child abandonment with real-world dire poverty. (Philip Brandes) (Ends Sunday, May 21) Read more

24th Street Theatre, 1117 W. 24th St., L.A.

‘Ah, Wilderness!’

A tender coming-of-age comedy sporting a well-adjusted family and a happy ending is the last thing one might expect from gloomy Gus playwright Eugene O’Neill, but this charming, impeccably staged revival stands in upbeat contrast to the nihilistic despair of his iconic tragedies. (Philip Brandes) (Ends Saturday, May 20) Read more

A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena

Album: 'Bob Dylan — The Cutting Edge'

Among the many things Thomas Edison famously said, he remarked that "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration," and he also insisted that "I have not failed once. I have simply found 10,000 ways that do not work." Both precepts are clearly evident in "1965-1966: Bootleg Series Vol. 12," the revelatory latest release of Dylan archival recordings that comes out Nov. 6. Culling a mind- and ear-boggling wealth of outtakes, alternate versions and rehearsal snippets during sessions over the 14 months of an astonishingly fertile period for Dylan, which yielded three of the most influential albums in rock history — "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" — the new set throws open a panoramic window into the creative process of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. (Randy Lewis) Read more

Album: '25'

When Adele sings on her new album, "25," about an emotional experience so vivid that "It was just like a movie / It was just like a song," she's probably thinking of a tune by one of her idols: Roberta Flack, say, or Stevie Nicks. But for fans of this 27-year-old British singer, such a moment could only be captured by one thing: an Adele song. With her big hair and bigger voice, Adele broke out in 2008 as part of the British retro-soul craze that also included Duffy and Amy Winehouse. Her debut album, "19," spawned a hit single in "Chasing Pavements" and led to a Grammy Award for best new artist. Yet she outgrew any style or scene with the smash follow-up, "21," which presented Adele as a great crystallizer of complicated feelings, an artist writing intimately about her own life (in this case about a devastating breakup) in a way that somehow made the music feel universal. Clearly, the pressure is on to duplicate that commercial success with "25," which comes after a long period of public quiet in which Adele recovered from throat surgery and gave birth to a son (and tweeted no more than a few dozen times). "Hello," the record's brooding lead single, set a record when it was released last month, racking up 1.1 million downloads in a week. But the song's enthusiastic embrace only underscored the other, more pressing demand on the singer as she returns: that her music still provide its trademark catharsis. Put another way, Adele's fans have been waiting for years for new Adele songs to explain their experiences to them. And they get a worthy batch on "25." (Mikael Wood) Read more

Album: 'Blackstar'

There's something delightfully perverse that David Bowie waited until he was 69 to release what's being described as his first jazz album. It was at that age too when veteran rock stars who include Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney took up with big bands or reached for the Great American Songbook to demonstrate their taste and hard-won stature. Even Bob Dylan got in on the act last year with "Shadows in the Night," his lovely (if desolate) tribute to Frank Sinatra. So when you hear that Bowie hooked up with a New York saxophonist and his crew for “Blackstar,” out Friday (just two days before his death from cancer), you think perhaps that Bowie has joined the club — that after cycling through countless styles and personas over his half-century career, he’s finally become a finger-snapping crooner with Count Basie on his mind. Ah, no. (Mikael Wood) Read more

Single: 'A Living Human Girl'

Out of the gate, teen band the Regrettes aren't holding back. The group's first major single, "A Living Human Girl," takes aim at the patriarchy in one verse and societal expectations of beauty in another, with lead singer Lydia Night rattling off perceived faults as if they're cause for celebration. Pimples? Check. Stretch marks? Bring 'em on. "I can dress how I want, not looking for a show of hands," she snarls over a snappy, '60s-inspired groove. Although the 15-year-old says the song was inspired by her first few days of high school in downtown Los Angeles, the tune's worldview transcends adolescence. (Todd Martens) Read more

The Tsujita

Have you, by chance, tasted tonkotsu ramen? Because the Kyushu-style noodles may be at their peak in Los Angeles at the moment: thin, straight noodles served in a pork broth of maximum intensity. Tonkotsu ramen is often layered with slices of soft braised pork, garnished with simmered bamboo shoots and served with a soft-boiled egg. It is invariably a gut bomb that will stay with you longer than a double chili-cheese from Tommy’s. A Tokyo-based friend claimed that he once dropped 20 pounds just by cutting tonkotsu ramen out of his diet, and I believe him. The king of tonkotsu ramen in Los Angeles is probably Tsujita, a branch of a well-regarded Tokyo noodle shop that has clotted traffic on Sawtelle Boulevard since it opened half a dozen years ago. And now there is the Tsujita in Glendale’s Americana at Brand mall, a severely modern restaurant that gleams like a Tokyo dessert parlor, a place of long banquettes, long tables and coffered ceilings; theatrical lighting and a waitstaff that seems slightly stunned by the crowds. Read more

The Tsujita, 769 Americana Way, Glendale

6 Great Restaurants for Spicy Food

Spicy food is glorious stuff, particularly in times of duress or when the weather is unreasonably chilly or when you’ve misplaced that bottle of Double Chicken Brand Sriracha you still keep in your bag. So which restaurant to head for when the need for a dose of chiles calls? Here are a half-dozen places around town where what’s on the menu can blow both your mind and the Scoville scale. Read more

Here’s Looking at You

Here’s Looking at You is a corner bistro from Jonathan Whitener and Lien Ta on the site of a former cheesesteak shop, all Edison bulbs, neo-midcentury cabinetry and a blend of post-punk and old-school hip-hop that has become to this kind of restaurant what Sade and David Byrne’s Brazilian compilations were to the last generation. Whitener comes to Here’s Looking at You from a stretch as chef de cuisine at Animal, the meaty, eclectic restaurant that redefined Los Angeles cuisine. And it is easy to see traces of Animal in Whitener’s cooking. Read more

Everson Royce Bar

Everson Royce Bar isn’t really a restaurant. To be fair, it doesn’t even try to be a restaurant – the word Bar is in its name. When you glance at the menu, the food takes up slightly less real estate than its shortlist of shots, and if you are a drinker of a certain bent, your attention is likely to linger on the sherry-cask Japanese whiskey than it is on the shrimp roll and the chicken thighs. Beard Award-winning chef Matt Molina is more or less serving regular bar snacks here, but superbly well, like the kitchen equivalent of a band like Metallica doing a covers set just because it can: steamed buns with pork belly, smoked potato taquitos, shrimp rolls and flaky, extra-rich biscuits with maple butter that happen to be about the best things it is possible to eat with bourbon. Read more

Everson Royce Bar, 1936 E. 7th St., Los Angeles

Gus’s Fried Chicken

You’re probably going to want to try Gus’s Fried Chicken. Because it’s pretty remarkable stuff, even in chicken-obsessed Los Angeles: a burnished red-gold, pieces bigger than they are small, whose peppery heat at first seems mild, even nonexistent, until it starts creeping up a few bites in, a heat that makes you glad you have a pint of sweet iced tea by your side. You may be thinking of Nashville hot chicken, the kind you can stand in line for at Howlin’ Ray’s in Chinatown, but this isn’t that — you don’t worry whether you’ve renewed your life insurance after a wing or two, and the crunch, although considerable, is of a completely different sort. Classic Nashville chicken has a complex, multilayered crunch that maintains much of its integrity even after a day or two in the fridge. Gus’s chicken is more of a batter-fried phenomenon, with a thin, fragile crust that shatters under your teeth, releasing a flood of scalding juice. Read more

Gus’s Fried Chicken, 1262 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles

Favorite Asian fried chicken joints

Does Los Angeles live by Nashville hot chicken alone? No — not as long as there’s a universe of Asian fried chicken too. Read more

Kettle Black

Kettle Black is a new Italian restaurant from Beau Laughlin and his team, who also own Sawyer and the juice bar Clover on the block. The chef is Sydney Hunter III, who has been cooking in Los Angeles for 15 years or so, many of them at the right hand of Ludovic Lefebvre. Hunter’s Italian cooking is sure but eccentric, hewing to no particular regional cuisine and slightly edgy in its way, favoring a sweet-sour flavor palette, lots of crunch, and chiles used as much for fragrance as they are for heat: pizza, good handmade pastas, and fat purple slices of Japanese eggplant passed through the fire just long enough to add a bit of smokiness. Read more

Kettle Black, 3705 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles

Group Show: Power: Work By African American Women From the Nineteenth Century to Now

This pageant of a show, featuring 37 artists, is scattershot but earnest, and dense with barbed beauty. It mimics a museum exhibition in scope and scale (even if it lacks its scholarly structure). Indelible images abound, among them, an excruciating, nude self-portrait by Nona Faustine taken on the site of a colonial slave market. (Leah Ollman) (Ends Saturday, June 10) Read more

Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Jennie Jieun Lee: Seizure Crevasse

Lee’s sculptures, in themselves, are enough to quicken the pulse and enthrall the eye, but their manner of installation doubly ensures that our full selves — body and mind — avidly attend and engage. For this riveting show, she has roughed up the standard, white cube gallery space and brought it in line with her work’s own rugged provisionality, its tenor of risk. (Leah Ollman) (Through April 23) Read more

The Pit, 918 Ruberta Ave., Glendale

Kenny Scharf: BLOX and BAX

If you’ve always thought of Scharf as a Pop artist, you’re in for a big surprise when you visit his exhibition at Honor Fraser Gallery. The exhibition makes it clear that Scharf is a folk artist. (David Pagel) (Through April 22). Read more

Honor Fraser Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles

'No Man's Sky'

Fourteen minutes and 54 seconds. I'm on a distant planet, and I need to get to my spaceship. Yet "No Man's Sky" is telling me that the vessel is a 14-minute, 54-second hike away. So I settle into the couch. But after three minutes of strolling through a salmon-colored rocky surface — and admiring some lavender plant life — I need a break, perhaps for good. This was the second time in one week I had quit "No Man's Sky." That's because there's another, more important number to mention when it comes to discussing "No Man's Sky": 18.4 quintillion. That is, there are more than 18.4 quintillion planets to discover in "No Man's Sky." You will not live long enough — here on Earth, that is — to collect them all. Read more

'Abzu'

There are peculiar stone structures in the shape of sharks throughout the game "Abzu." They exist not to be investigated or warn of foreboding territory ahead. Instead, these objects are built for meditating. Have a seat, they beckon, and take in marine life. Play voyeur to a whale, a jellyfish, a shark or any number of undersea inhabitants. While "Abzu" is far from a documentary or a simulation, perhaps no other video game has ever been so singularly focused on re-creating the vast, majestic and mysterious nature of an aquatic universe. It does this with no voice, no text and no conflict. Your character in "Abzu" cannot "die" in the traditional video-game sense. Instead, the game centers on postcard-worthy imagery — swarming, silver schools of fish or sparkling green leaves or warm, orange coral — and Austin Wintory's thoughtful, patient score. Read more

'Mirror's Edge Catalyst'

Imagine if the world were filtered through the home screen of a smartphone. Picture opening your eyes to an image overloaded with headlines and messages. Notifications no longer buzz, they flash before you. "Warning," the display blinks in the lower right, "your bank balance is low." This is the view of Faith, early in "Mirror's Edge Catalyst." Having just been released from prison, Faith may not be happy with her financial prospects, but she definitely isn't too keen with the sensory overload of this futuristic, uncomfortably modern society. "Is this what the employees see all the time?" she wonders. In the world of "Mirror's Edge Catalyst," there aren't citizens so much as employees — workers for one of a handful of conglomerates that controls the world. You are identified not by your ethnicity or your interests but your job. Read more