Personalities may have overshadowed policy during this presidential campaign, but one issue has dominated virtually every news cycle: He said, she said, he interrupted. Whether she wins the White House or not, Hillary Clinton has already changed American discourse. If it has done nothing else,...
New on Blu-ray “Star Trek Beyond” (Paramount DVD, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99; 4K 3D, $49.99; also available on VOD) After the complicated and oppressively heavy “Star Trek Into Darkness,” the series gets back to basics for the fan-friendly “Star Trek Beyond,” a straightforward planet-hopping adventure...
In her 30-plus year career in television, Tracey Ullman has done more to boost the wig-making economy than any other woman except perhaps Dolly Parton. Beginning with “The Tracey Ullman Show,” the groundbreaking sketch show that helped establish the fledgling Fox network back in the late ‘80s and...
With our divisive presidential election just days away, historian Kevin Baker reminds us of the innovation and tenacity that made our nation great in “America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World.” More than 100 black-and-white illustrations by Chris...
An unusually slick and well-acted slasher picture, the Dutch-made “The Windmill” brings a touch of class to a typically brutish genre. Director Nick Jongerius can’t entirely keep the story from feeling warmed-over, but fans should be too pleased by the movie’s professionalism to complain much. ...
SERIES Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Todd (Elijah Wood) finds himself dragged further (and against his will) into Dirk’s (Samuel Barnett) case as they learn more about who kidnapped Patrick Spring’s daughter (Alison Thornton). Hannah Marks, Richard Schiff and Jade Eshete also star. 9...
Eric Smidt was a peddler’s son, rattling through the morning light in his father’s van, hawking jewelry, tape and electrical cords in the San Fernando Valley. He endured a troubled home life and spent two years in an orphanage. But a restless need for the flash of a deal made him a rich man by...
George Lucas goes museum-happy. A telenovela on stage. A sumptuous (if rather strange) Reniassance Madonna. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, culture writer for the Los Angeles Times, and here’s your guide to the week’s most intriguing arts stories: Lucas hedges his bets Now that Chicago has proved inhospitable...
On a warm Friday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, the ground floor of the Hellman Building on East 4th Street is awash in the scrape and bang of construction. A repairman patches holes in the floor with cement, while a painter rollers the walls a universal shade of art-world white. This lobby...
Barry Socher, a violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 35 years and a prolific composer, has died, the orchestra said. He was 68. He died after a long battle with brain cancer, the L.A. Phil said. Socher retired as a first violinist from the orchestra in 2015. He was hired by then-Music...
Today in Entertainment: Bob Dylan accepts Nobel Prize win and 'Rambo' will return without Sylvester Stallone Oct. 28, 2016, 4:05 p.m. Here's what's new and interesting in the world of entertainment and the arts today: 'Rambo' will return but without Sylvester StalloneBob Dylan finally responds...
Today in Entertainment: Bob Dylan accepts Nobel Prize win and 'Rambo' will return without Sylvester Stallone Oct. 28, 2016, 4:05 p.m. Here's what's new and interesting in the world of entertainment and the arts today: 'Rambo' will return but without Sylvester StalloneBob Dylan finally responds...
“It’s just baseball.” So I’ve been told. So I have told myself. The Chicago Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945, and it is not “just baseball.” I was nervous when the Cubs played the Dodgers, concerned about living in enemy territory. I visited Dodger Stadium last week,...
The Los Angeles debut of the provocative Chicago collective Ensemble Dal Niente on Thursday night came courtesy of a new music curatorial dream team, composer Ted Hearne and violinist Anna Bulbrook, who have begun a pop-up series called Poolhouse. Hearne is the composer of the Chelsea Manning opera,...
The three-part program from the local dance troupe BodyTraffic at the Broad Stage on Thursday resembled one of those television series in which nothing consequential ever happens but you keep watching because everyone in the cast is so unfailingly deft and endearing. Founded nine years ago, BodyTraffic...
Hard Day of the Dead used to be the high-water mark for fall raves in L.A. But now that Hard has shuttered that event (for now) following fan deaths in years past, there’s room for other dance music promoters to try new ideas. And have they ever. This weekend is one of the year’s best and busiest...
AT&T’s blockbuster bid for Time Warner Inc. might be a boon for investment bankers, lawyers and lobbyists, but it is anyone’s guess whether investors, employees and consumers ultimately would benefit from the combination. Since the $85.4-billion deal was unveiled last weekend, AT&T Chief Executive...
James Corden and Stephen Colbert are looking to expand your Halloween playlist. Corden, “The Late Late Show” host, teamed up with One Direction’s Niall Horan to debut a music video for “Candy,” the sultry Halloween-themed slow jam you didn’t know you needed. Set to the tune of Ginuwine’s “Pony,”...
The first thing to know about a Lady Gaga club show is that there are rules. Rules about branding. Rules about social media. Comical, impossible-to-enforce rules about — lemme consult my notes here — “the integrity of the event.” One of the biggest pop stars on the planet, Gaga was in Silver Lake...
SUNDAY A bushy-bearded David Letterman helps raise awareness about climate change in the return of the docu-series “Years of Living Dangerously.” Then Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio does likewise in the documentary “Before the Flood.” 8 and 9 p.m. National Geographic Channel They’re down to their...
Forget for a moment about whether the Chicago Cubs can break the 71-year-old Curse of the Billy Goat by winning its World Series bid against the Cleveland Indians. The team’s very presence in the World Series is already a victory of sorts for the late Steve Goodman, the Windy City singer-songwriter...
“Good Girls Revolt,” a late ’60s-set newsroom drama on Amazon Prime, shows that a woman’s place in creating the first draft of history was as a “researcher” — doing most of the grunt work (and serving the coffee, to boot) while the male reporters got all the credit. But early in Season 1, which...
Always a super-trouper, rarely a stand-alone star, Joan Blondell is an unexpected choice to be the focus of a full-dress Barbara Stanwyck/Greta Garbo-style UCLA Film & Television Archive career retrospective. But here she is front and center in "Blonde Crazy: Joan Blondell," a five-week, 14-film...
Theatre 68 has taken on an ambitious enterprise with Rupert Holmes’ stage adaptation of John Grisham’s 1989 novel “A Time to Kill,” the group’s inaugural production in its handsomely refurbished North Hollywood space. In a clever and keenly paced staging, director Ronnie Marmo valiantly copes with...
The musician Iggy Pop declared himself “a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” in the lyric to the song “Search and Destroy” on the 1973 album “Raw Power.” That visceral statement of intent was relatively little heard on its original release, though the song is currently in a luxury...
If Elvis Presley were alive today, he would not be on Twitter. “No. No. No, no, no. He wouldn’t.” That, at least, is the firm position of Priscilla Presley, who’s likelier than anyone to know. As the former wife of the late rock ’n’ roll pioneer — and the most visible steward of his creative legacy...
Josef Leimberg, “Celestial Visions” (World Galaxy/Alpha Pup). Few could have imagined a decade ago that Los Angeles would drive a jazz renaissance that fluidly mixes free jazz, post-bop, hip-hop and spiritual jazz. Yet the arrival and influence of artists including Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar,...
UNDERRATED ‘High Maintenance’ on HBO: For fans of this former Web-only favorite who wondered whether the absurdist-leaning series could make the leap to premium cable, worry no longer. This show about a bicycle-bound New York City pot deliveryman, developed by the husband-wife team of Ben Sinclair...
In a blue-collar bar in Reading, Pa., a onetime factory worker contemplates the news that management has locked out his former union colleagues. “One day life is good, the next you’re treading water,” he says. “That’s not supposed to happen to folks like us.” Solid job, dependable middle-class...
In the documentary “The Eagle Huntress,” Nurgaiv Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl in Mongolia, counters centuries of male-dominated tradition to pursue her dream of participating in the honored ritual of eagle hunting. Directed by Otto Bell, the film opens Wednesday, nine months after charming...
Playwright Jon Robin Baitz looked happy but tired. Rehearsals had just started for his new play, “Vicuña,” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and he had been going back and forth between the rehearsal hall and an office across town where he’s working on a TV project. After 30 years in New York, one of...
The makers of the new sports mockumentary series “The 5th Quarter” wanted to create a show tailored to the viewing habits of young mobile phone viewers — short episodes under 15 minutes, standalone plot lines that can be viewed in any order and plenty of famous faces such as the Los Angeles Clippers’...
Avenged Sevenfold fans thought they were in for an early Christmas present. Turns out they should’ve been thinking about Halloween. On Thursday evening, as the clock ticked past midnight on the East Coast, this long-running Orange County metal band revealed that its new album, “The Stage,” was...
Jenny from the Block is heading to Sweet Apple, Ohio. NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt announced Thursday that the network has its sights set on “Bye Bye Birdie” as its 2017 live musical and it has tapped Jennifer Lopez to star. Greenblatt made the announcement during a speaking engagement...
The former head of a Hollywood payroll company that collapsed eight years ago has been convicted of tax fraud, marking the end of a notorious entertainment industry crime story. John Visconti, the former chief executive of Axium International Inc., was convicted Wednesday by a federal jury after...
“King Cobra” unzips a lurid package of betrayal, obsession and murder in the gay porn world that’s just as eye-opening for its pockets of behavioral fascination as for its seedier elements. So why is writer/director Justin Kelly like a kid who loves the shiny wrapping more than what’s inside? The...
Though it is a serious documentary about a devastating subject, "The Uncondemned" has a title that makes it sounds a bit like a 1940s film noir. And that is likely not an accident. For co-directors Michele Mitchell and Nick Louvel have astutely decided to tell the story of the first time rape was...
Taking the 2016 presidential race as a sign, Zack Norman and Neil Cohen elected to finally put the finishing touches on their never-completed 1986 comedy about a New York real estate developer with lofty political ambitions. As it turns out, the resulting “Chief Zabu” may have been buried for the...
Although it aspires to be a kind of latter-day “Love Story,” the rote, overly earnest drama “New Life” exists largely on the surface. With its heart-on-its-sleeve narration, time-skipping relationship highlights and generally bland prettiness, the film can feel as authentic as a pharmaceutical...
Next to jump-scares, the “silence followed by sudden noise” trick is the laziest way for a horror film to jar an audience when it doesn’t have anything else to offer. Writer-director Sheldon Wilson’s “The Unspoken” has so much plot that it really shouldn’t need to rely as much as it does on big,...
Sometimes even apocalyptic events can have silver linings. For Jack Coleman (David Maldonado) in “Jack’s Apocalypse,” the end of the world serves as the rock bottom he needs in order to kick an out-of-control penchant for booze, hard drugs and sex. When Jack’s U.S. Army officer brother enlists...
Movie recommendations from critics Kenneth Turan, Justin Chang and other reviewers. Click title for full review. American Honey This wild, unruly and astonishingly beautiful fourth feature from "Fish Tank" director Andrea Arnold earns its 162-minute running time as it follows a teenager (startling...
Sometimes it takes time for a concert to settle in and become interesting. Such was the case at the joint recital of violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Robert Levin on Wednesday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall. The second half — when the two performers went their separate ways for commissioned...
Writer/director Neal McLaughlin pays loving homage to the teen sexploitation and monster flicks of the ’50s and ’60s with the cheeky spoof “I Was a Teenage Wereskunk.” It reanimates the genre so well you almost wish for a drive-in theater to have the full experience. Our hero is Curtis (Scott...