After weeks of speculation, Donald Trump’s inaugural committee has shared its list of performers for next week’s celebrations. Country music star Toby Keith, rock band 3 Doors Down and patriotic staple Lee Greenwood join a roster that includes “America’s Got Talent” runner-up Jackie Evancho, the...
Penny Fuller plays a well-coiffed widow in “13 Things About Ed Carpolotti,” a charming cabaret-scale one-act musical in which her character finds out that the husband she’s mourning had been keeping a few secrets. What kind of secrets? Imagine waking up to discover that your assets have all been...
Having already been a Twitter meme (and aired in its entirety overseas), "The Young Pope" arrives in all its raiment and finery Sunday on HBO. Created, directed and mostly written by Paolo Sorrentino, whose 2013 film "The Great Beauty" gobbled up awards here and elsewhere, the 10-episode series...
One of President Obama’s perhaps lesser-known achievements — the recent expansion of a national marine monument in his native Hawaii — receives a well-deserved spotlight in the lovely and vital, if decidedly brief, conservation documentary “Sea of Hope: America’s Underwater Treasures.” Director...
Cate Le Bon, “Rock Pool” video (Drag City). In the new video for “Rock Pool,” singer and songwriter Le Bon mixes filters and effects that recall 1980s public access cable with jump-cuts and repetitive edits of the artist maneuvering her body, and the result suggests a kind of Kodachrome mysticism....
SUNDAY Another blink-and-you-missed-it season of “Sherlock” concludes on “Masterpiece.” With Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. 7 p.m. KOCE An oceanographer and others work to protect and preserve undersea habitats in the new special “Sea of Hope — America’s Underwater Treasures.” 7 p.m....
It’s easy these days to think of California as a republic unto itself, declaring its political and cultural independence at every opportunity, zigging as Donald Trump’s America zags. But the state’s biggest city has at least one important thing in common with the country as a whole as we move...
Today in Entertainment: Michelle Obama's final 'Tonight Show' appearance; new 'CHIPS' trailer Jan. 13, 2017, 9:43 a.m. Here's what's new and interesting in the world of entertainment and the arts today: Things get a little awkward in the first 'CHIPs' trailer Michelle Obama's final 'Tonight Show'...
The Golden Globes kept us humming “City of Stars.” The Producers Guild shook up the field, nominating “Deadpool.” And the Directors Guild added its own wrinkle, solidifying the standing of the tear-jerker “Lion” in the Oscar best picture race. Welcome to the Gold Standard, the newsletter from the...
“America must not remain silent” — that was civil rights activist Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s plea at the 1963 March on Washington. “Bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem,” he declared in a speech that immediately preceded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s. “The most urgent, the most disgraceful,...
More honesty in criticism is one of my New Year’s resolutions, so here goes: “Sleepless,” a Las Vegas-set cop thriller starring Jamie Foxx, actually put me to sleep for a few minutes. Fortunately, like the character who bumps his head and almost drowns in a women’s spa, I wasn’t unconscious for...
From color field paintings inspired by data sets about African American life to paintings that draw from pop culture and Mexican identity, here are nine exhibitions and events to check out in Los Angeles and beyond in the coming week: Carlos Ramirez, “Complejo de Cristo y Vampiros,” at New Image...
How do you return to series television after playing the role of a lifetime? If you’re Bryan Cranston, through a side door … and with as little fanfare as possible. The actor, who won four Primetime Emmy awards for his portrayal of Walter White, America’s notorious science teacher turned meth...
The nine dancers in Jacob Jonas the Company sit in a semi-circle on a rehearsal floor and poke gentle fun at the company’s artistic director and namesake. “He kind of didn’t know what he was doing at the time,” says Anibal Sandoval of Jonas, who was 21 when he founded the company. “There was an...
It defies expectations that a film titled “Monster Trucks” bears a strong anti-corporate, conservationist message, but these aren’t the car-crunching monster trucks of yore, heralded by the siren calls of “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” There are actual monsters inside these trucks, so the punny title...
SERIES MacGyver While transporting a war criminal in Kazakhstan, the helicopter MacGyver and Jack (Lucas Till, George Eads) are in crashes and their prisoner escapes with Jack’s gun. MacGyver tries to save the day using only the helicopter’s rotor blade and a water bottle. Sandrine Holt also...
On Jan. 21, Grammy-nominated singer Katy Perry will join a growing number of celebrities and women marching on Washington to oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. Ahead of the national event she’s also lending her star power and her pocketbook to “#DontNormalizeHate” a short-film...
Moments after he was elected as the country’s first black president in 2008, Barack Obama stepped on a Chicago stage and mingled poetry with optimism, praising Americans who were not afraid to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.” Whether...
As the end draws near for NBC’s “Grimm,” its current — and final — season has unfolded with all sorts of questions lingering in viewers’ minds. In an exclusive clip from Friday's episode, members of the besieged crew of Portland crime fighters who protect innocents from Wesen creatures finally...
President Obama’s farewell speech, and Donald Trump’s first official press conference since becoming president elect, took place less than 14 hours apart. But in that brief period between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, 70 years’ worth of presidential decorum dating to the first televised...
If FX’s “People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” demonstrated that a decades-old landmark L.A. trial can feel current with its commentary on race and gender, then the network’s newest anthology series, “Feud: Bette and Joan,” is likely to ignite new conversations about ageism in Hollywood....
Buddy Greco, the jazz singer, piano player and long-running Vegas showman whose hits included “The Lady Is a Tramp,” has died. The musician, who was often associated with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin’s Rat Pack and whose lengthy career spanned eight decades, died Tuesday in Las Vegas, according...
Like a fog that corrupts your ability to be entertained, “Top Coat Cash” is genre amateurishness that neither thrills nor makes sense. A dim-witted mélange of testosterone and cliché, it begs to be treated as a “how many mistakes can you count” game for any moviegoer tired of the base competence...
San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film released its annual Celluloid Ceiling report Thursday morning, revealing that women constituted just 17% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250...
Horror films that traffic in creeping dread are generally more sophisticated than ones that just jolt audiences with jump-scares, but when done clumsily, they’re no less clichéd. Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s “The Snare” is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house...
In the summer of 2015, FX Networks CEO John Landgraf made his pronouncement that there is too much scripted TV. But that hasn’t stopped online services from making more. Judging from the latest numbers compiled by his network and released Thursday to the Television Critics Assn. press tour, Landgraf...
Nothing’s off-limits in writer-director Emiliano Rocha Minter’s “We Are the Flesh,” a gory and sexually explicit art-horror film that’s both a commentary on modern Mexico and an exercise in shock for shock’s sake. Though more likely to appeal to devotees of Carlos Reygadas (who co-produced) and...
Long a Modernist must-see on Silver Lake Boulevard, the Richard Neutra-designed VDL Research House was named one of 24 new National Historic Landmarks today by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Built in 1932, the glass box overlooking the now-empty reservoir is a classic example of Midcentury...
It’s not often that you get to experience a grimy criminal underworld thriller with sweet techno beats and sick dance moves, but the film “48 Hours to Live” is just that. The script by Gregory Ramon Anderson, Rashad El Amin and Hannah Macpherson is a Frankenstein’s monster of “Crank,” “Step Up”...
Maybe it should be called “American Renewal Story.” FX announced Thursday that it was adding two more seasons to “American Horror Story.” The news came at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Pasadena. The pickup of the anthology series from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck is in addition to...
As Warner Bros. moves into the next phase of expansion of its DC Comics cinematic universe, the studio has tapped screenwriters David Goyer and Justin Rhodes to take a fresh crack at one of the most famous DC characters: Green Lantern. Goyer and Rhodes will write the script for “Green Lantern Corps,”...
For Cannupa Hanska Luger, the protests at Standing Rock are personal. The artist, who makes sculpture, video and installations, was born on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, and he is an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, whose territory is nearby. He is in...
Several unremarkable stories set within the same square mile of London crisscross to form the ho-hum ensemble drama “100 Streets.” It’s six or so characters in search of a meaningful movie. Idris Elba, also a producer here, plays Max, a dashing ex-rugby superstar-turned-celebrity party boy whose...
New on Blu-ray: “Long Way North” (Shout! Factory DVD, $16.97; Blu-ray, $22.97) Thanks in part to Hollywood pouring so much of its animation resources into CGI, we have seen in recent years a boom in foreign and independent hand-drawn features in a variety of non-Disney styles. The charming historical...
The theme of cyber terrorism plays a timely role in “The Crash,” an intriguing if flawed techno-thriller that gets an effective boost from a high-caliber cast. Set in late 2017, the film stars Frank Grillo as Guy Clifton, a smug, federally indicted stock trader whose talents for market manipulation...
The shortage of meaty stage roles for women in their 50s is a problem that up-and-coming playwright Jen Silverman tackles head-on in her breakout 2015 dramedy, “The Roommate,” making a well-cast West Coast debut at South Coast Repertory. In the aftermath of a failed marriage and the departure...
Bruce Springsteen made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Donald Trump during the 2016 election. But a band playing the Boss’ songs will be headed to the president-elect’s inauguration. Some music fans have chuckled at the lack of A-list talent performing at Trump’s upcoming celebrations. Then...
The Directors Guild of America announced its nominees Thursday, and, as expected, the filmmakers behind the trio of the season’s most-acclaimed movies — Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and Kenneth Lonergan (“Manchester by the Sea”) — were among the five cited. Joining...
First things first, let's get it out of the way — “The Bye Bye Man” is an absolutely ludicrous title for a horror movie. However, it's pretty obvious that the filmmakers are in on the joke. If we're laughing, it's with the movie, not at it. The most fun horror movies are often the ones that deliver...
“Claire in Motion” begins with a husband kissing his wife goodbye as he prepares to leave for a solo camping trip. “Be careful,” she tells him, half-asleep. “You know me,” he says. She doesn’t, and the surprising depth of her not knowing turns out to be the key to this somber and quietly affecting...
Sequels frequently follow the law of diminishing returns, but what are you left with when even the first film didn’t make a dent? In this case, the first movie, “Bad Kids Go to Hell,” will likely draw blank stares from anyone unfamiliar with its comic book source material. The second film, “Bad...
As soon as filmmakers come up with a title as fun as “Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies,” most of their work has been done — at least as far as the marketing. It takes more effort to whip up a movie as wacky as the name. And although Austrian writer/director Dominik Hartl has the right spirit for...
Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront’s debut feature “The Ardennes” is an odd mixture of glum-chic style and emotional curiosity, a story of brotherly tensions that primarily comes off like a movie posing as a story of brotherly tensions. With elliptical brevity in the early minutes, we glean that a botched...
Ed Sheeran spent most of 2016 working behind the scenes, co-writing pop hits for Justin Bieber (“Love Yourself”) and Major Lazer (“Cold Water”). Now the British singer-songwriter is back out front with a new album. The LP, called “÷” (pronounced “Divide,” in the style of his last album, “Multiply”),...