What to do this weekend in L.A. Critics Picks: Feb 23 - March 1, 2018

'Call Me By Your Name'

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer give superb performances as two young men falling in love in the northern Italian countryside in this rapturously beautiful collaboration between director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory. (Justin Chang) Read more

'A Fantastic Woman'

Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio's follow-up to “Gloria” is a compassionate and captivating portrait of a young transgender woman (a superb Daniela Vega) dealing with hostility and intolerance in the wake of her lover's death. (Justin Chang) Read more

'Hostiles'

Written and directed by Scott Cooper and powered by a dynamic trio of interwoven performances by Christian Bale, Wes Studi and Rosamund Pike, this latest example of the western revival grabs you by the throat and holds on for the duration. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Lady Bird'

As warm as it is smart, and it is very smart, this portrait of a high school senior year marks actor-screenwriter Greta Gerwig's superb debut as a solo director and yet another astonishing performance by star Saoirse Ronan. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Paddington 2'

Everyone’s favorite Peruvian-born, London-based bear is back, this time facing off against a nefarious stage actor (Hugh Grant) in this beautifully structured and executed comedy from director/co-writer Paul King. (Justin Chang) Read more

'The Post'

"The Post" goes against the contemporary Hollywood grain. Propulsive major studio cinema made with a real-world purpose in mind, it's a risky venture that succeeds across the board. Prodded into existence by Steven Spielberg, one of the few filmmakers capable of making the studio system do his bidding and of persuading major players like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks to go along with him, "The Post" takes on a particularly counterintuitive subject. That would be the Washington Post's 1971 role in publishing what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret 47-volume, 7,000-page Department of Defense study of the war in Vietnam that exposed all manner of official prevarications and outright lies extending over the terms of four presidents. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'The Shape of Water'

Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core, a sensual and fantastical "Beauty and the Beast" tale with moral overtones, Guillermo del Toro's film plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon.(Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

Building and improving on "The Force Awakens," writer-director Rian Johnson's grand space opera is the first flat-out terrific "Star Wars" movie since "The Empire Strikes Back," full of dramatic echoes of George Lucas' original trilogy but also rich in surprise and imagination. (Justin Chang) Read more

'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'

Uncommon writer-director Martin McDonagh and a splendid cast toplined by Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell present a savage film, even a dangerous one, the blackest take-no-prisoners farce in quite some time. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Altered Carbon'

“Altered Carbon” adapts Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel into a 10-episode television series starring Joel Kinnaman as space-warrior turned detective Takeshi Kovacs. Its strategy, not unique among science fiction stories, is to adapt the tone and tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction to futuristic sci-fi, which is why its rainy, neon-noir vision of San Francisco some centuries hence (now called Bay City) may remind you strongly of “Blade Runner.” In the crazy future Morgan envisions, brought to colorful life by series creator Laeta Kalogridis (“Terminator Genisys”), human consciousness is downloaded into a “stack,” a gizmo slid into every person’s cervical vertebrae at age 1. These stacks can be swapped into new bodies — or “sleeves” — when the old ones break. Additionally, the information they contain can also be “needlecast” across great distances into waiting empty vessels, allowing instant travel not merely between Atchison and Topeka, but Earth and distant planets, where there is a sort of Imperial Stormtroopers versus Rebel Alliance thing going on. (Robert Lloyd) Read more

'Queer Eye'

The latest old show to be resurrected for a new generation is Bravo's Emmy-winning "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," later, and presently, just "Queer Eye." The series took off from the premise that (some) gay men might have something to teach (certain) straight people about self-presentation and self-understanding, and that the world would be better for watching this happen. As a fan of the Bravo series, I approached the reboot with trepidation. The original cast — Carson Kressley, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia, Jai Rodriguez and Ted Allen, who have stayed more and/or less in the public eye since the show went off the air in 2007 — had a special combination of personalities and talents that added up to a greater whole. The new crew is, on the whole, not as droll as the original — the hair-flipping Van Ness is the designated Kressley, the chatterbox joker — but they are full of life and ideas, of fun and feelings, which they are ready to discuss. Indeed, the Netflix "Queer Eye" has been arranged to provide moments of revelation and education for the Fab Five as well; their own feelings and back stories have been stirred into the mix. As before, some of the best scenes take place in transit, as the week's subject and one or two of the team just talk, as they travel to or return from checking out clothes, buying a mattress, trimming a beard. (Robert Lloyd) (Netflix, Anytime) Read more

'Counterpart'

In the excellent, intriguing and occasionally action-packed “Counterpart,” a contemporary Cold War thriller has been erected on a science-fiction foundation: An experiment 30 years ago accidentally split reality into two, as lightning might split a tree. These separately evolving planes have remained connected by a passage — in Berlin, appropriately enough — a supernatural Checkpoint Charlie kept secret from almost everyone in either world. An apparatus has grown up around maintaining this portal. At the bottom of this bureaucracy are clueless “interface” men, who speak codes they don’t understand to men who don’t understand them. Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) is one of these. One day, he is called upstairs by his young, somewhat callow boss (the excellent Harry Lloyd) and introduced to his “other,” an outwardly identical Howard from the other world who is at once his twin and himself. Mind blown! (Robert Lloyd) (Sunday, Starz) Read more

'The Alienist'

Part "Gangs of New York," part "The Knick" and part "Mindhunter," TNT's "The Alienist" pairs gruesome, serial killer carnage with horse-and-carriage charm for this psychological thriller set in 19th century Manhattan. The 10-episode limited series, which premieres Monday, is as much about a murder investigation as it is about the roots of our present-day ideas on gender, mental illness and socio-economics. Adapted from Caleb Carr's bestselling 1994 novel, "The Alienist" takes viewers through the filthy tenements and opulent parlors of 1896 New York, exploring the baby stages of forensic science, modern psychology and feminism along the way. (Lorraine Ali) Read more

'Rotten'

The truth is hard to swallow. That's the tagline for "Rotten," Netflix's new original documentary series about the shady business behind the food we eat. The six-part series, to be released Friday, considers the origin of our groceries with a skepticism usually reserved for true-crime productions and detective dramas. Episodes explore a shadowy garlic business routed through Chinese prisons, the mystery behind America's sudden spike in food allergies and a global scandal called Honeygate. The common thread throughout episodes such as "Cod Is Dead," "Lawyers, Guns & Honey" and "Garlic Breath" is the exploration of how corporate greed and corruption have quite literally changed the nature and origins of the food America consumes. And as with any well researched and reasonably argued documentary about eating in the 21st century, the idea is to educate the consumer about healthier and more responsible cuisine choices. And, of course, trust no one — as if that trip to the market weren't already fraught with carb counting, organic versus natural, and decoding countless cover names for corn syrup. (Lorraine Ali) Read more

‘David Bowie: The Last Five Years’

"Doctor Who” may have got its global premieres synchronized, but it took a year for “David Bowie: The Last Five Years,” a film about Britain’s other great cultural spaceman, to make it to the United States. Francis Whately’s film, which premiered in the U.K. in January 2017, arrives on HBO near what would have been the singer’s 71st birthday and the second anniversary of his death from liver cancer. Not much has changed in that time, of course, at least as concerns us here. Bowie still feels essential, necessary and oddly present — a useful example, the global legend as inspirational outsider. This is briefly a sad story — he dies in the end — but it isn’t a tragic one. Read more

‘Wormwood’

Army scientist Frank Olson plunged to his death from a Manhattan hotel window in 1953. The authorities deemed it a suicide. His son contends he was murdered by the CIA. Director Errol Morris examines both possibilities in painstaking detail — exploring Eric Olson’s lifelong obsession with discovering the truth surrounding his father’s mysterious death — in “Wormwood,” a six-episode docu-series streaming Friday on Netflix. In Morris’ hands, it’s as much a true-crime whodunit as a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true, replete with covert, Cold War-era CIA operations, chemical and psychological warfare, government espionage and state-sponsored murder. The results are a mixed bag of gripping narratives and thinly sourced theories, firsthand accounts and cinematic re-creations, exhaustive research and flagrant conjecture. Read more

'The King and I'

This tour of the Tony-winning revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic musical, which recapitulates Bartlett Sher’s stunning original staging, features Laura Michelle Kelly as the elegant but scrappy Anna, Jose Llana as the comically poignant King of Siam, and a mother lode of classic tunes, rendered with brio by an exceptional cast. If you’re at all a fan of classic American musicals, this particular production is a joy – a real gift that proves a bracing pick-me-up in trouble times. (F.Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sunday, March 11) Read more

Segerstrom Hall, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa

'Priscilla Queen of the Desert' (2013)

The eponymous vehicle for fabulously dressed, bantering drag queens has pulled up at the Pantages at last. The heart of this jukebox musical lies, not surprisingly, in the jukebox, featuring eye-popping, drag-inflected renditions of dance-club anthems such as "It's Raining Men," "MacArthur Park" and "I Will Survive." (Margaret Gray) (Ends May 6) Read more

Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

‘Henry V’

Co-directors Julia Rodriguez-Elliot and Geoff Elliott play fast and loose with the Bard in their breathlessly truncated production, which features an authoritative Rafael Goldstein in the title role. Intrepid vandals in the high church of Shakespeare, they may spray paint out a passage or two but keep the meaning intact in a richly articulate staging that never flags in energy and style. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Fri., April 6) Read more

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

‘Violet’

Miracles abound in this musical, an underappreciated 1997 charmer that is notable for containing the first score by Jeanine Tesori (“Caroline, Or Change,” “Fun Home”). The story follows a disfigured young North Carolina woman on a 900-mile journey to seek out a televangelist she hopes can mend her. It’s given a spirited staging by director Kari Hayter and much of the rest of the team behind the Chance’s towering production of “Parade” last year. (Daryl H. Miller) (Ends Sunday, March 4) Read more

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim

‘Alright Then’

Orson Bean and Alley Mills, one of L.A. theater’s most visible couples, thank the heavens for their later-life marriage in a feel-good show about love and gratitude. They share stories from their at-times rocky upbringings to set the scene for the miracle of their meeting, making each other laugh and shedding grateful tears. (Daryl H. Miller) (Ends Sun., April 15) Read more

Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice

‘The Chosen’

Learning to see past differences and getting to know the person underneath is a lesson for all time in Chaim Potok’s 1940s-set novel, adapted by Potok and Aaron Posner. The tale of an unexpected friendship between Brooklyn teens from different strains of Judaism is given a poignant staging, with particularly fine performances by Sam Mandel as the youthful narrator and, unforgettably, Alan Blumenfeld as a charismatic rabbi. Ends Sunday, June 10 Read more

The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., L.A.

‘Sapo’

Wild and crazy guys for 30 years and counting, Culture Clash, backed by buoyant Los Angeles band Buyepongo, dishes up a fanciful melange, based on Aristophanes’ “The Frogs,” that takes dead aim at the country’s fractured immigration policies. The show is almost indescribable — hyper, nutty, bawdy, savagely hilarious — and unexpectedly wrenching. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sunday, Feb. 18) Read more

Getty Villa, Fleischman Theater, 17985 Pacific Coast Hwy., Pacific Palisades

'A Delicate Ship'

Anna Ziegler peels away the layers of her characters to their pulsing human core in this practically perfect memory play, a fateful romantic triangle that commences in the simplest situation and escalates to the dire. Under Andre Barron’s appropriately delicate direction, the cast, which includes Paris Perrault and Philip Orazio, is superb, but it is Josh Zuckerman who dazzles in a tour-de-force turn as a wayward yearner whose cheekiness covers hidden depths of anguish. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sat., March 24) Read more

‘I Am Not a Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce’

In this meticulously researched solo biography tracing the life and prosecution of the groundbreaking early 1960s comic provocateur, actor Ronnie Marmo and director Joe Mantegna offer subsequent generations not only a sense of who Bruce was but more importantly why he mattered. (Philip Brandes) (Ends Sunday, May 13) Read more

Theatre 68, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood

Album 'The Thrill of It All'

Who is Sam Smith kidding? “Every time you hurt me, the less that I cry,” he sings, vowing to guard his fragile heart, in “Too Good at Goodbyes,” the gospel-inspired opener from his new studio album, “The Thrill of It All.” But if there’s anything this young British soul star has made clear since he emerged five years ago, it’s that he’ll never, ever run out of tears. (Mikael Wood) Read more

Tim Buckley recordings

In early September 1969, the dynamic singer and songwriter Buckley played three nights at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. A tireless explorer influenced more by Nina Simone than Bob Dylan, he was accompanied during the gigs by himself and musicians playing a Fender Rhodes electric organ, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums and congas. Reissue producers Bill Inglot and Pat Thomas recently unearthed a bounty of tapes from those three nights in September, some of which already had been mined for an earlier concert recording, “Live at the Troubadour 1969.” The results of their effort can be found on “Greetings From West Hollywood” and “Venice Mating Call,” which come out Oct. 13. the two new releases, the former available on LP and the latter on compact disc, present wondrously remastered, previously un-issued versions from those Troubadour nights. (Randall Roberts) Read more

Sari Sari Store

I have stopped by Sari Sari Store five times in three days, and I’m not sure if I should be admitting this to you or to a therapist. My colleagues and I have probably adored Sari Sari Store a little too much lately, partly because we’re as likely to become crushed out on a new restaurant as a 14-year-old is on the latest Zayn track, and partly because the idea of a Filipino-style lunch counter run by République’s Margarita and Walter Manzke is just too much, especially in downtown L.A.’s Grand Central Market. Read more

Sari Sari Store, Grand Central Market, 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles

Nothingness

If you gaze long into Nothingness, or at least into the San Gabriel Sichuan restaurant of that name, the Nothingness that stares back at you is likely to include steamed whole fish, braised lamb with jelly noodle, and pig feet with hot pepper. The steam rising from hot pots may suggest an infinite void, but only for that moment before the vivid red of the roiling broth becomes visible through the mist. Also, I imagine the empty world does not smell quite so strongly of garlic and toasted chiles. Why is there something rather than nothingness? Because the presumption of nonexistence does not allow for the possibility of live crawfish steamed in chile sauce, while Nothingness the restaurant does. Does existence precede essence? I haven’t read a lot of philosophy since college, but I maintain that the snap of the shell, the softness of the flesh, indicate that it probably does. Read more

288 Nothingness, San Gabriel Blvd., Suite 103/104, San Gabriel

Rosaliné

A juane is an unusual dish in the Peruvian repertoire, a huge, overstuffed tamal from the headwaters of the Amazon, a kind of combo meal made in its area of origin as a convenient takeaway lunch for travelers. Juanes take their name from John the Baptist — the bulging roundness is said to resemble the severed head of the saint on a plate — and they are often served on his saint’s day. When wrapped in the traditional bijao leaf, the late chef Felipe Rojas-Lombardi wrote, it looks a little like a hobo’s bundle on the end of a stick. You can stow almost anything in a juane before you boil it — rice and chicken, yuca root, plantains, hearts of palm, ground peanuts, sometimes boneless fish. At Rosaliné, the buzzy new Peruvian restaurant on Melrose, Ricardo Zarate makes his with chickpeas, hard-boiled eggs and pork shanks. Bijao is a little hard to find in California, so he steams everything in banana leaves. Read more

Rosalinén, 8479 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

Favorite dishes from Food Bowl 2017

I’m not sure what you’ve been doing this month. I’ve been spending most of my evenings at the first edition of Food Bowl, The Times’ month of food events that’s been a welter of special dinners, film screenings, art displays, farmers market events, visiting chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world, panel discussions on everything from Filipino cooking to sustainable seafood to the problem of food waste, and a vast night market in the glow of City Hall. I’ve mourned dozens of dinners and events I was unable to attend. And I’ve eaten really well. Read more

Pizzana

Pizza, as every New Yorker is fond of telling you, is the food of the people; cheap, tasty sustenance sold by the slice. But in Los Angeles, pizza has another dimension, as anyone who has ever considered dropping six grand on a custom pizza oven can attest — in certain circles a wood-burning Italian-made behemoth is as necessary as a fire pit or a screening room. Famous pizza virtuosi make regular stops at the homes of talk show hosts and sitcom auteurs, who know that a perfectly made Margherita is worth its weight in osetra caviar. Pizza is also the food of the rich. Daniele Uditi, chef of the chic Brentwood pizzeria Pizzana, earned his bones at his family’s bakery near Caserta, the buffalo mozzarella capital of Italy, and in Naples, home of modern pizza, before he moved to Los Angeles. He probably became well known when actor Chris O’Donnell rescued him from a dead-end restaurant job and hired him to cook for him and his friends. Uditi’s pizza was a poorly kept secret, even among a lot of people who don’t run in Hollywood circles — he was regularly touted as a celebrity chef in Italian newspapers. So it became almost inevitable that he end up with a Brentwood restaurant of his own, in partnership with O’Donnell, wife Caroline O’Donnell, and Candace and Charles Nelson of Sprinkles Cupcakes. People line up for hours outside Pizzana’s blue, tiled dining room. Read more

Pizzana, 11712 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles

Vija Celmins

This quietly gripping show, the first in L.A. for Celmins in more than a decade, concentrates on recent work — paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. Imagery that Celmins has mined for 50 years prevails (rippling oceans and star-flecked night skies), but there are also thrilling, newer directions represented, such as “reverse” night skies, and an exquisite mapping of the veiny cracks of a glazed ceramic surface. Celmins’ focus on outward appearances registers, ultimately, as a deeply personal, interior process. (Leah Ollman) (Through March 31) Read more

Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 N. Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood.

Robert Irwin

Now approaching 90, the painter-turned-pioneering-artist-of-light-and-space continues to astonish. Irwin has reimagined the gallery’s 5,000-square-foot ground level space as an immaculate, immersive sculpture. The environment reinvents itself — or rather, we reinvent it, perceptually — through shifts in light and perspective. This is Irwin at his catalytic best. (Leah Ollman) (Through April 21) Read more

Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Blvd., L.A

The Nintendo Switch

Not since the debut of its original Nintendo Entertainment System has the Japanese company released a home video game console with as much potential to shake up how we play as the Nintendo Switch, which is out Friday. Thirty years ago, Nintendo reinvented the video game medium. Not only did the NES lead to such genre-defining interactive entertainment as “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda,” but it also liberated games from the arcade and brought them to the American living room. Where they could increasingly be played for hours, days, weeks, months. Rather than intense, cliffhanger-like action that demanded the next 25 cents, home games had pace, tempo and rudimentary stories. They were also accessible — no obscenely pricey home computer or trip to a teenage-infested arcade needed. The Switch takes that livability to another level. It is a home video game console that’s connected to a television. But it’s also a hand-held device designed for ultimate mobility. And at least one of its games barely requires the use of a screen at all. Read more

Playstation VR

I’m Batman. I’ve waited years — since the release of 1989’s “Batman” — to say those words and mean them. Considering that I’ve spent the bulk of my professional life writing rather than building a superhero’s physique, it seemed unlikely, save for Halloween, that such a day would come. This year we saw the release of the Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive, which makes it possible to put on a pair of goggles and disappear into a digital landscape — as long as you have a high-priced, top-of-the-line computer. Now with Sony’s PlayStation VR, an add-on to the PlayStation 4 so many of us already have hooked up to our TVs, virtual reality is coming to the masses. Read more

'Virginia'

The opening screen of the new Variable States video feature "Virginia" welcomes players to a small town named Kingdom. It's laid before us as if it were a board game, with little trails leading to a cave or a gas station, a schoolyard or an observatory, all presented with the simple, cheery look of a brightly filled-in coloring book. Come in, stay awhile and bask in the beauty of small-town life, it seems to say. Press play, however, and things get twisted, and not with the typical things-are-not-what-they-seem subversion. Read more

'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