What to do this weekend in L.A. Critics’ Picks: May 19 - May 25, 2017
Los Angeles Times entertainment, arts and culture critics choose the week’s most noteworthy openings, new releases, ongoing events and places to go in and around Southern California.
This week Netflix tackles another True Crime drama, and it’s a mystery, and ABC is bringing an internet comedy to the network TV.
Click through to explore more and, where applicable, find directions to venues.
‘A Woman’s Life’
Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, about a 19th century French noblewoman named Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds, was published under the title “Une Vie,” which translates simply as “A Life.” Stéphane Brizé’s piercingly sad and wise film adaptation bears the slightly embellished English-language title “A Woman’s Life” — a nice bookend to Brizé’s previous film, “The Measure of a Man,” and a moniker that would seem to invite a feminist reading. If so, the invitation feels both apt and slightly misleading. Jeanne — played to quietly heartbreaking perfection by Judith Chemla — belongs to a venerable literary and cinematic tradition, a sisterhood of fictional heroines forever struggling with the demands and deprivations of a man’s world. But Brizé knows that for his story to resonate, the specific must trump the universal at every turn. We warm to Jeanne’s plight not because it is so relatable or familiar but, rather, because every turn feels so vivid and so enveloping. Read more
Los Angeles Times Movie Critic
‘Obit’
A fun and informative documentary that interviews several of the New York Times’ most adept obituary practitioners, articulate individuals every one, who show and tell how they go about bringing the dead to life. Read more
Kenneth Turan
Film critic
‘The Lovers’
Azazel Jacobs’ exquisitely funny-sad romance stars a superbly matched Debra Winger and Tracy Letts as a long-married couple whose feelings for each other are rekindled at the most inconvenient possible moment. Read more
Los Angeles Times Movie Critic
‘Panique’
French director Julien Duvivier’s dark and compelling 1946 film is chilling to the bone, long little-seen but now widely accepted as a neglected classic. Read more
Kenneth Turan
Film critic
‘Norman: The Modern Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer’
Subtle, unsettling, slyly amusing, Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s first English-language film provides Richard Gere with a splendid role as a hustler forever on the make in Manhattan. Read more
Kenneth Turan
Film critic
Other recommendations:
'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 Lost City of Z’
Based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller about the British explorer Percy Fawcett (well played by Charlie Hunnam), James Gray’s rich, meditative and deeply transporting adventure epic is the sort of classical filmmaking that feels positively radical. (Justin Chang) 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
‘Downward Dog’
As happens more often in cable than in broadcast television, “Downward Dog,” a new ABC comedy, began as a Web series. Created by Michael Killen and Samm Hodges for Animal, a Pittsburgh advertising, production and video effects company, the original eight episodes, which last all of eight minutes combined, are still up on Vimeo to see, and though they are lovely, I would wait to watch them, in order to take the TV series fresh. “Dog” is a relatively quiet, at times almost meditative comedy with a talking animal at its center. (It’s a specialty of Animal, which made a chihuahua talk for Taco Bell and cows and sheep speak for the California Milk Advisory Board.) There are no slapstick chases, no tangled leashes. The dog, whose name is Martin (played by Ned and voiced by co-creator Hodges, with a bit of millennial vocal fry), does not throw around gratuitous pop cultural references or crack wise. Though his mouth is computer-animated when he speaks, it’s subtle — really just a small step removed from a dog staring into a camera. (Robert Lloyd) Read more
Television critic
Other recommendations:
'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
'Dear White People'
In the appealing new Netflix comedy "Dear White People," Justin Simien expands his 2014 movie about black life at a mostly white Ivy League college into a 10-part series. That this review is written by a white person would matter to some of the characters within the context of the series, but some of those characters would also wonder whether it should. It's an issues-based Socratic comedy, of sorts, in which someone is nearly always bantering, debating or arguing; but it's a romantic comedy as well, and a college comedy in a long tradition of them. (Robert Lloyd) (Netflix, anytime starting Friday) 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
'Harlots'
In “Harlots,” an engaging new period melodrama on Hulu, two whorehouses, unalike in dignity, go to war in 1763 London, ancient grudge breaking to new mutiny. Samantha Morton plays Margaret Wells, a madam attempting to move up in her world, out of her low-rent Covent Garden digs into a new, bigger, brighter house in fashionable Soho. (Her circumstances are humble but proper: “This is a decent bawdy house,” she tells a visitor.) Her well-connected rival, Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville), rules that higher world, and for reasons certain to emerge in later episodes — I’ve seen two of eight — the women are out, each in her own way to destroy the other. (Robert Lloyd) (Hulu, Anytime) Read more
‘Harlequino: On to Freedom’
Tim Robbins’ meta-theatrical Commedia dell’Arte mashup serves as an inventive and informative deep dive into a rich theatrical tradition while channeling the anarchic spirit of that tradition into an all-too-resonant contemporary social critique. Ends Saturday, May 20. Read more
The Actors’ Gang Theatre, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City
Theater reviewer
Other recommendations:
‘Dry Land’
Not for the faint of heart, Ruby Rae Spiegel’s play about the effects of an unwanted pregnancy on a tough but terrified teenage girl and her lonely new friend receives a taut and harrowing staging in this remount of Echo Theater Company’s 2016 production. (F. Kathleen Foley) (Ends Sunday, May 21) 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
‘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
'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
‘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
Single: ‘Sign of the Times’
Heeeeeere’s Harry! Months after his bandmates in One Direction launched their inevitable solo careers, Harry Styles finally released his debut single under his own name Friday. It’s a sweeping power ballad called “Sign of the Times” that strongly recalls music from the early 1970s, such as David Bowie’s album “Hunky Dory” and “All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople (which Bowie helped create). (Mikael Wood) Read more
Pop Music Writer
‘The Perfect American’
“The Perfect American” is the operatic portrait of an idealist American artist as a less-than-perfect old man, which is to say a blend of sunshine, supremacy and insecurity. In Philip Glass’ most recent portrait opera (a great lives series that has included Einstein, Gandhi, Akhnaten, Columbus, Galileo and Kepler), Walt Disney takes stock as he confronts a virulent lung cancer. (Mark Swed) Read more
Terrace Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach
Mark Swed
Music critic
What to listen to now: Ryan Adams, Fred Eaglesmith and Nikki Lane
This week’s picks include the latest from veteran singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, under-the-radar Americana artist Fred Eaglesmith and the outspoken country of Nikki Lane. Read more
Critics and staff writers
Other recommendations:
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
Mas’ Chinese Islamic Restaurant
Have you stopped by Mas’ Chinese Islamic Restaurant? Because it’s kind of wild on a Sunday afternoon, a world of head scarves and bright dresses, skinny suits and skullcaps, and children dumbstruck at the massive piles of sizzling black-pepper beef. The green-onion flatbreads — every table has one! — are as big as birthday cakes, and when you pick up a wedge you can see dozens of strata. Crisp shards of beef short ribs, cut laterally and thin in what Korean restaurants call “L.A. style,” are stacked 6 inches high. The air is heady with garlic and cumin, burnt chiles and charred meat. The tables are set with forks — you have to ask for chopsticks. Jamillah Mas’ cooking is hearty and full flavored, spicy except when it isn’t, and unafraid of excess. Read more
Mas' Chinese Islamic, 601 E. Orangethorpe Ave., Anaheim
Jonathan Gold
Restaurant critic
Holbox
In Los Angeles, Holbox is the new Yucatán-style seafood restaurant from Gilberto Cetina Jr., whom you may know from Chichen Itza, which he founded with his father. (Gilberto Sr. is back in the Yucatán at the moment, building his own island dream house.) Like Chichen Itza, Holbox occupies a corner of the Mercado La Paloma complex near USC, sharing tables with a vegan Ethiopian restaurant and a Oaxacan juice bar. Read more
Holbox, 3655 S. Grand Ave. (inside the Mercado La Paloma complex), Los Angeles
Jonathan Gold
Restaurant critic
Maestro
The morning after my last meal at Maestro, Danny Godinez’s new Mexican restaurant in Old Pasadena, I pulled the leftover barbacoa out of the refrigerator to see if I could salvage enough for a taco. There were still a few scraps of lamb left, but the container seemed half-filled with a mysterious goo. I was about to abandon the project – congealed lamb fat is no fun. I dipped in a spoon to see whether it might be worth reheating. And I was flabbergasted to discover that what I’d thought was grease was in fact beautifully jellied consommé, clear and as richly flavored as a demi-glace, without a speck of fat. This was Mexican food with a different point of view. And while I’m not sure I don’t prefer the magnificent hangover barbacoa from the beloved Aqui es Texcoco in Commerce or the dense, oily barbacoa from My Taco in Highland Park, Godinez’s version is very, very good — more delicate than its counterparts, slightly stringy, and without the insanely delicious pockets of fat that burst on your tongue, but still lovely and substantial. Read more
Maestro, 110 E. Union St., Pasadena
Jonathan Gold
Restaurant critic
Where to dine in Southern California if you love tasting menus
You can call it a tasting menu. You can call it omakase. You can call it dégustation, a banquet menu or modern kaiseki. What it tends to be is a meal made up of dozens of small tastes, served in exquisite rhythm, where the courses, their order and their precise composition has been determined for you the second you walk in the door, so that your only choice is really whether you want to gut it out with a bottle of Lodi Verdelho or submit to a relentless wine pairing. The chef is the artist and your belly is her canvas. And when a tasting menu is done well, it can be the summit of cuisine. Read more
Jonathan Gold
Restaurant critic
Other recommendations:
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
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
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
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
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The Evanesced
Hinkle’s notebook-size contour drawings in black ink on paper are rendered with a line that ranges from tremulous to direct, elegantly sinuous to jabbed or smudged. The drawings are unframed and simply pinned to one wall in a grid. Like butterflies pinned to be examined or notices tacked to community billboards, they ask for quiet scrutiny. The grid, a staple of Minimalist art, lends formal gravity and stateliness to intimate images of loss. Through June 25. Read more
California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Los Angeles
Art critic
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
The show, which includes 78 works, was organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOCA, under curators Dieter Roelstraete, Ian Alteveer and Helen Molesworth, respectively. “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” is the first time in a long time that MOCA’s exhibition program has felt essential. Don’t miss it. Through July 3. Read more
MOCA, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
Art critic
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present
Curiosity, color, wry humor, excited trial and error, prolific innovation — the artist grabbed an avant-garde sensibility and never let it go. “Future Present” asserts that this world is the best possible world, and inevitable change should be courted, its possibilities maximized. Moholy-Nagy is often called a utopian, but optimist seems a better fit. Ends Sun., June 18. Read more
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
Art critic
Architecture’s top 10 for 2016
This was a year in which Los Angeles shook off some ambivalence about its own status as a dense, tall, post-suburban city — and in which the profession of architecture continued to embrace, reassess and excavate its own history. It was also a year in which architecture critics, thankfully, saw enough completed high-profile buildings — after several years in which the aftereffects of the 2008 crisis kept that supply low — to consider putting more than one on their year-end lists. Read more
Christopher Hawthorne
Architecture critic
Other recommendations:
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
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 Painting hit rock bottom in the 1970s. The loudest voices said it was dead. Many believed that other media — sculpture, video, installation and performance — moved viewers more deeply. David Reed did not believe the buzz. As a 26-year-old who had just moved to New York City from the West Coast, he was skeptical of what he saw with his own eyes — and what people were saying about what he saw with his own eyes. (David Pagel) (Ends Sunday, May 21) Read more
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
Todd Martens
Video game critic
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
Todd Martens
Video game critic
Other recommendations:
'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
'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