Critics’ Picks: March 11 - 17, 2016

'The Big Short'

Adam McKay, with the help of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, has made a very funny film about a very serious situation, 2008’s global financial collapse. Read more

'Brooklyn'

Impeccably directed by John Crowley, feelingly adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín's fine novel and blessed with heartstopping work from star Saiorse Ronan and the rest of the cast, "Brooklyn" is about love and heartache, loneliness and intimacy, what home means and how we achieve it. Read more

'Carol'

Impeccably acted by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as women in love, with an exquisite look captured by cinematographer Ed Lachman, “Carol” has been made under the complete and total control of Todd Haynes, a gifted director who always knows what he’s doing. Read more

'Creed'

In the hands of director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan, what is nominally a spinoff of the celebrated “Rocky” series plays like a spiritual remake of the 1976 film that retells the original story in the kind of involving way one would not have thought possible. Read more

'Embrace of the Serpent'

This Oscar-nominated Colombia film is a strikingly photographed black-and-white epic that intertwines a passionate attack on the depredations of invasive capitalism with a potent adventure story. Read more

'The Good Dinosaur'

The latest Pixar event is antic and unexpected as well as homiletic, rife with subversive elements, wacky critters, and some of the most beautiful landscapes ever seen in a computer animated feature. Read more

'Hail, Caesar!'

A droll Coen brothers tribute to and spoof of Hollywood past that amuses from beginning to end with its site specific re-creation of the studio system and the movies that made it famous. Read more

'Mad Max: Fury Road'

Words are not really the point when it comes to dealing with this barn-burner of a post-apocalyptic extravaganza in which sizzling, unsettling images are the order of the day. Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron are the leads, but the real star is filmmaker George Miller. (Kenneth Turan) Read more

'Room'

Brie Larson excels in a film able to give full weight to both sides of the emotional equation as it tells the story of a young woman imprisoned for years in a single room in a tiny shed and the young son who was born to her there and knows no other world. Read more

'Son of Saul'

This drama set in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you’ve seen, you’ve not seen one like this. Read more

Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.

'Spotlight'

The saga of how the Boston Globe won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for uncovering sexual abuse by Catholic priests, "Spotlight" is mightily impressive not only because of the importance of the story it tells but also because of how much effort and skill went into bringing it to the screen in the best possible way. Read more

Megan Fox on 'New Girl'

In case you didn't hear, Megan Fox joined the cast of "New Girl" last week, and it turned out just fine! Better than fine! Though Fox's Reagan is no Jess — Jess remains sequestered on jury duty (translation: star Zooey Deschanel remains on maternity leave) — she has an astringent deadpan that adds just the right amount of sting to the group's often overwhelming adorableness. Presented as both bombshell and no-nonsense pharmaceutical rep, Reagan is in town for an extended business trip and, after much sturm and high jinks (it turns out that she and Ceci hooked up years ago at the MTV beach house!), decides to rent Jess' room. It may be the first time in television history that a lead character has been even temporarily replaced, but if the rest of the season (Deschanel will return for the season finale) goes as well as Fox's intro did, it may not be the last. (Mary McNamara) (Fox, Tuesdays) Read more

'Super Sentai: Gosei Sentai Dairanger: The Complete Series'

Japanese pop culture has grown deeply entwined with our American own, going back to Godzilla and Mothra and Gidorah, the Three-Headed Monster; "Star Wars," then and now, is a samurai space opera; manga and anime and mecha are no longer exotic terms. And yet it remains at the same time satisfyingly foreign. The elements of Japan's "Super Sentai" TV franchise are familiar, because we have long since seen them domestically repurposed as "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers." There are color-coded masked and helmeted heroes skilled in balletic-gymnastic martial arts; giant sentient transforming mechanical animals; monsters who grow big and stomp around miniature landscapes like Godzilla before them. But the unaltered original item has a flavor of its own — at once more spiritual, if that's quite the word, and more slapstick, more romantic and more comical. Recently issued in its entirety, "Gosei Sentai Dairanger (Five-Star Squadron Dairanger)" — "dai" can be translated either as "generation" or "great," research reveals — is the 17th installment in the series, which ran weekly from February 1993 to February 1994. (The preceding series, "Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger," was the basis for the original "Power Rangers"; it has also been issued complete by Shout Factory.) The currently running "Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger (Animal Task Force Beast King Ranger)" is the 40th entry in the franchise. (Robert Lloyd) (Shout Factory DVD) Read more

David Bowie on YouTube

David Bowie is dead — still dead, sadly, though it's somehow easy to doubt it. And in the wake of his going, the cyberspace filled up with selections of his "greatest" videos — old popular favorites like "Heroes" and "Ashes to Ashes" and "Let's Dance" and new popular favorites like "Lazarus" and "Blackstar"— along with other digitally shareable shards of history. Here is a selection of Bowie clips and related clips you are less likely to have seen. YouTube, anytime. Read more

'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'

Not to be confused with the John Ford classic film, this recent take on the original Dorothy M. Johnson short story is both a nostalgic homage to the Wild West and a self-aware reflection on the double-edged civilizing tide that laid its culture to rest on Boot Hill. (Philip Brandes) (Extended to March 26) Read more

Rubicon Theatre Company, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura

'The Mongoose'

Will Arbery's “The Mongoose” details the effects of a mystical talking mongoose on a troubled Dallas family — and while overwrought and unquestionably bizarre, the play is also memorable, a fever dream that seems poised to float into the ether at any given moment. Director Michael Thomas-Visgar and a superb cast moor Arberry's disgressive sprawl into a stringently realistic construct that emphasizes the play's humanity as much as its peculiarity. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sunday, April 17)Read more

The Road on Magnolia, NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood

'Summer and Smoke'

Although it may stand less high than it merits in the canon, this exceptional Actors Co-op revival of Tennessee Williams' 1947 drama certainly redresses the balance. Avoiding clichéd pitfalls, embracing the humanity that drives this symbology-ridden study of the eternal clash between spirit and flesh, director Thom Babbes unearths the mercurial yet specific qualities that make “Smoke” a masterwork, aided by a superb design team and a pluperfect ensemble the revelatory Tara Battani and excellent Gregory James as, respectively, the play's metaphoric soul and literal eros. Don't miss it. (David C. Nichols) (Ends Sunday, April 17) Read more

Actors Co-op, David Schall Theatre, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood

‘Past Time’

As deceptively slight and hilariously quirky as a shelf of painted unicorns, playwright Padraic Duffy's intergenerational romantic comedy is generally charming, funny and effective. Director Jeremy Aldridge pulls every color from the script's metaphoric palette, and his cast — Leon Russom and Ruth Silveira, Josh Weber and Julia Griswold, and a valiant French Stewart as the functionary character who carries the seriocomic point — does yeoman work. An ideal date show. (David C. Nichols) (Ends Saturday, April 9) Read more

Sacred Fools at the Lillian Theatre, 1076 N. Lillian Way, Hollywood

‘Tempest Redux’

Purists beware: “Tempest Redux” at the Odyssey Theatre boldly transposes Shakespeare's play into a darker, more unsettling key, but its inventive staging and solid command of source text make for a vivid, memorable re-imagining. (Philip Brandes) (Ends Saturday, April 23) Read more

Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A.

‘Colony Collapse’

In this new drama by Stefanie Zadravec (a name to remember), the plight of missing children and their distraught parents lends a framework to the main canvas: the tale of a teen who’s about to go missing in plain sight as the adults in his life fail him in ways large and small. Set in rural Oregon, this is a portrait of a wounded America. Jessica Kubzansky directs with her usual magic. Jessica Kubzansky directs with her usual magic. (Daryl H. Miller) (Ends Sunday, March 20) Read more

Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena

‘Pocatello’

Samuel D. Hunter sympathetically chronicles Middle America’s quiet despair. His sorrowful yet laugh-out-loud funny tale is set in a struggling branch of an oppressively generic chain restaurant where the manager, his family and his staff are losing their sense of self and their connections to one another. The performers disappear into these very real people. John Perrin Flynn directs Rogue Machine’s production with quiet insight. (Daryl H. Miller) (Ends Sunday, April 10) Read more

Rogue Machine at the Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., L.A.

‘Louis & Keely: ‘Live’ at the Sahara’

The local watershed and genuine phenomenon returns to Southern California in triumph. Although some measure of intimate impact has been lost, the property remains original, most entertaining and frequently electrifying, courtesy of director Taylor Hackford's tightened grip on the script, a superb band and stellar headliners Anthony Crivello and Vanessa Claire Stewart. It's the most infectious show in town. (David C. Nichols) (Ends Sunday, March 27) Read more

Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

'Man Covets Bird'

The 24th Street Theatre follows up last year's award-winning “Walking the Tightrope” with another play for families that touches on struggle and loss, “Man Covets Bird,” by the Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer. If the storyline is a bit poetic and meandering, the performers are winsome and the production elements (including live music as well as charming, cartoony video projections) are beautifully designed. Both children 7 and up and adults will find something to enjoy in the experience. (Margaret Gray) (Ends Sunday, May 15) Read more

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

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: '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: 'Crosseyed Heart'

On Keith Richards' first solo album in more than 20 years the Rolling Stones co-founder crafts songs using the same tools and templates he's employed throughout his creative life: blues, early rock 'n' roll, classic country & western and a pinch of reggae. You will not find a Diplo production credit or guest verse from Chance the Rapper anywhere on this album. But as Richards' reflexes suggest, the guitarist still possesses the skills to whittle a stick into a rock song if so inclined. That's a diplomatic way of saying that our hero is a creature of habit who knows what he does and doesn't like. Recent interviews suggest he's as dismissive of contemporary music as Frank Sinatra was to the sound of the Stones. (Randall Roberts) Read more

Album: 'Hall of Records'

Lionel Williams, who makes music and visual art as Vinyl Williams, crafts sparkly electronic beat music that exists in its own curious realm. "Hall of Records" is one of 14 tracks on his new album, "Into," and makes for a good portal. Tinted with the sonic tone of an overused Maxell cassette, rich with humming frequencies that recall German Krautrock and dense with muffle-tone beats suggestive of 1990s label Too Pure, the track swirls with synthesizers and waves of untethered noise. Williams is less skilled as a vocalist, though. He quivers in pitchy falsetto throughout "Into." It hardly matters, though. The stuff is mesmerizing. (Randall Roberts) Read more

Album: 'Heaven's Room'

Guitarist Matt Mondanile is perhaps best known for his work with New Jersey guitar pop band Real Estate, but his solo project Ducktails has generated equally sublime tracks across four albums. The fifth, "St. Catherine," is filled with many languid, jangled guitar lines. Among the best is "Heaven's Room," which features Los Angeles musician Julia Holter. Mondanile, who relocated to Los Angeles, is a master of smooth, shimmering guitar tones, but "Heaven's Room" blossoms through masterful arrangements and a sonic depth courtesy of producer Rob Schnapf. (Randall Roberts) Read more

Video: 'Baltimore'

While most other superstar artists are either on vacation, on tour or otherwise removed from the conversation, Prince is spending the summer focused on protest and injustice. The artist just released the lyric video for "Baltimore," his invective against police brutality that draws attention to the deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and others. The track, released earlier this year, is one of the most searing protest songs the Minneapolis artist has recorded, and the video is just as pointed. It documents the protests that followed Gray's death in the back of a Baltimore police van, matching shots of frustrated citizens with the artist's lyrical questions. "Are we going to see another bloody day? We're tired of crying and people dying — let's take all the guns away." (Randall Roberts) Read more

Album: 'The Longest River'

On its surface, the debut album from the British folk singer Olivia Chaney, released in April, is a simple affair. Featuring her graceful hand-picked acoustic guitar and piano work and a small backing band of strings and bass, "The Longest River" highlights an artist with a voice in harmony with rich traditions and eager to add her own pure-toned phrased accents. Below the surface, though, lay grim complications. (Randall Roberts) Read more

10 best dishes of 2015

A decade or two from now, when line-caught sea bass will seem as rare and unobtainable as sturgeon caviar is now, drive-through windows sell more lentil bowls than cheeseburgers and we have gotten used to the idea of Taylor Swift as the governor of Pennsylvania, 2015 may well seem in retrospect a fairly important year in Los Angeles restaurants. Menus just seemed to be mostly vegetarian without anybody talking about it much, and even French chefs began to talk among themselves about the primacy of Mexican cooking. The differences between high and low cuisine, which had started to crumble as far back as the 1980s, were utterly annihilated. Exotic fermentation techniques began to creep out of the lab. The idea of abolishing the practice of tipping took hold. And as always, there were 10 dishes that attempted to encapsulate it all. Read more

Jonathan Gold's 101 Best Restaurants, 2015

Your next great meal in Southern California is as likely to come from that tiny storefront next to the 7-Eleven as it is from a Beverly Hills gastronomic palace. Los Angeles, which is both where American ideas about food tend to be formulated and where they come back eventually to die, can be a spectacular place to eat. Read more

Pok Pok

Is it possible to become converted in a single bite? Because with a single fried chicken wing at the original Portland Pok Pok in 2007, I dropped my prejudices about non-European cooking in Oregon, the crossover potential of extreme Asian funk, and the ability of a non-Thai to prepare anything like upcountry Thai food. So eight years, many affiliated restaurants, a James Beard award, a Michelin star and a Chinatown noodle stand later, here we are at Pok Pok Los Angeles, an enormous restaurant in the old Fu Ling space in the Mandarin Plaza at the relatively deserted north end of Chinatown. Chef Andy Ricker's gift is the ability to make Thai food seem new again, to take it out of that comfortable place in the suburban strip mall, where it has become the default takeout comfort food for a huge chunk of Los Angeles, and put it back into the roadside stands and rural villages of Northern Thailand. Read more

Pok Pok, 978 N. Broadway, Los Angeles

Five of the tastiest Chinese restaurants in the SGV with the name 'Tasty'

In last week's column, I alluded to the flood of San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants with the word "Tasty'" tucked somewhere into their English-language names. Depending on whether you count doughnut shops, burger stands or branches of the same restaurant as Tasty, Not-Tasty or Tasty in their own right – well, there are a lot of them. Here are five of the tastiest. Read more

Evan Holloway

At a time when too much half-baked art takes itself too seriously, it's refreshing to see some serious art behaving as if it's half-baked. The relationship between brains and gags takes smart shape in Holloway's six sculptures in this exhibition. (David Pagel) (Through March 26) Read more

David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Place, Los Angeles

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957

The fit is ideal: A large and absorbing exhibition analyzes a legendary school that had a profound influence on the emergence of the midcentury American avant garde, and it opens in the city now known for a proliferation of first-rate art schools that have had a profound influence on the shape of late 20th and early 21st century international art. "Leap" offers an engrossing bit of back story to where we are today. Ends May 15. Read more

Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd

'Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink'

New wave rocker, country crooner, balladeer, collaborator and showman: Elvis Costello has been all of these and more in the course of what is now a 40-year run. Of all the first-generation punkers, he remains (with Patti Smith and possibly David Byrne) among the few who can claim the longevity and diversity of, say, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, both of whom appear in this book. Like minds, perhaps, or water seeking its level. Either way, this is the company to which Costello belongs. And yet, if "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" has anything to tell us, it is that its author remains a fan. Here he is, for instance, on his first experience singing with Paul McCartney, a rehearsal duet on "All My Loving": "I locked on to the vocal harmony the second time around, as I'd done a thousand times before while singing along to the record. It never really occurred to me that learning to sing either vocal part on a Beatles record was any kind of musical education. I was just a kid singing along with the radio in our front room." Or this, recalling a good-natured cutting contest, trading lyrics with Bob Dylan: "It was just fun to be in the ring with the champ for a minute or two." Read more

'City on Fire'

A long book represents an act of faith. On the writer's part, to be sure: The faith that he or she has something to say that's worth all the hours it will take for us to hear it, that it won't dissolve in ephemera and flash. But on the reader's part, also: The faith that we can trust the writer, that there will be a payoff, that it will add up. Certainly, this is the challenge faced by Garth Risk Hallberg's first novel, "City on Fire," which, clocking in at more than 900 pages, seeks to re-create, in panoramic fashion, the New York City of the late 1970s. Hallberg's book, of course, is much anticipated, for its length, its scope and its deal (he sold the book for $2 million) — but all of that is beside the point. The only criteria worth considering is whether, or how, the narrative works, the extent to which it draws us in. Read more

'M-Train'

First, let's clear up a misconception: Patti Smith's "M Train" is not a sequel to her 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir "Just Kids." In fact, "M Train" is not a memoir at all, except in the loosest sense — a book of days, a year in the life, a series of reflections, more vignettes than sustained narrative. By saying that, I don't mean to be critical, for vignettes are what Smith does best. Read more

'So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood'

Patrick Modiano opens his most recent novel, "So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood," with an epigraph from Stendhal: "I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow." It's an almost perfect evocation of the book, not to mention Modiano's career. The French writer, who won the Nobel Prize last year for a body of work as deft and beautiful as any in postwar European literature, is an excavator of memory — not only his own or those of his characters (many of whom bear, as J.D. Salinger once observed of his fictional alter ego Seymour Glass, "a striking resemblance to — alley oop, I'm afraid — myself"), but also that of Paris. That's why his fiction resonates so deeply; it occupies an elusive middle ground between place and personality. Read more

'Firewatch'

"Firewatch," set in the quiet Wyoming wilderness, is a game in which its main character does little more than walk. Yet at its heart this is a game about running. It's about running from our pasts, running from our emotional trials and running from the unknown. It's about how avoidance often makes things worse and how the road to conquering our fears can be downright frightening. And things get pretty bad in "Firewatch." Read more

'Leo's Red Carpet Rampage'

Winning an Academy Award, it proves, can be nearly an impossible task, at least according to the lighthearted Web game "Leo's Red Carpet Rampage." The game puts players in control of a mini, vintage-style Leonardo DiCaprio in a quest for an Oscar. And while the game is pure goofiness when it starts — simply mash a couple of buttons to run the red carpet and dodge photographers — it goes dark, and quickly. Read more

'The Witness'

Draw a line. It sounds simple, doesn't it? "The Witness," from a sort of zoned-out satellite view, is a game about drawing lines. To be even more precise, it is a game populated with puzzles, the bulk of them solved by drawing a line. Again, it all sounds so simple. Yet "The Witness" just so happens to be the rare puzzle game that's less about answers and more about mysteries and epiphanies. Read more

'Unravel'

Meet Yarny. Yarny doesn't look like much at a quick glance. Yarny is red, the size of an index finger with an alien, triangular face and nimble body made up of a single piece of, well, yarn. Yarny is quite fragile. Keep Yarny out of water, and don't let Yarny near a critter. A single claw of a crab will wreak havoc on Yarny. Yarny is also full of personality, the standout star of a new video game dubbed "Unravel." Those old family photographs collecting dust on a bookshelf? Yarny wants to explore them, transport inside them and make old connections feel new again. Among Yarny's likes is nostalgia. Dislikes? Families that drift apart. Read more

'Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897'

With famed film mogul Sam Goldwyn as her grandfather, Liz Goldwyn's family name is practically synonymous with old-school Hollywood glamour. But it's Los Angeles before it became the capital of the motion picture industry that's the subject of the style maven's new book, "Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897" (Regan Arts). The work of historical fiction looks back on the city's seedier past, with loosely connected stories about the madams, prostitutes, orphans, hustlers and tramps who roamed Alameda, Los Angeles and Spring streets. I chatted with Goldwyn about what drew her to this time period in L.A., her impressions of the book's rough characters, and what role women had in a culture where prostitution was tolerated. Read more

'Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe'

Ladies, the next time you are teetering on high heels, you can blame men. But not for the reason you think. In Western fashion, high heels were popularized by men, starting in the court of Louis XIV where a talon rouge (red heel), identified a member of the privileged class centuries before Christian Louboutin made red soles the calling card of his luxury shoe brand. That's just one of the tasty tidbits in "Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe," an exhibition scheduled to run through Dec. 13 at the Palm Springs Art Museum that examines the fashion accessory we all love to hate, including its history, its relation to gender identity, sex appeal and power. Read more

Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs