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Photo courtesy of Moving Arts "Hello everyone. Please take your seats and, if you have not done so already, visit the restroom now" the chirpy usher announced from the center of the stage of the cozy Hyperion Station theatre. "If you have to, please go now as there is no intermission and no access to our restroom once the show begins." As I gripped my complimentary ironic cheap beer, panic set in -- "Oh...

Salam Shalom The personal and the political are stuck with each other in actor-playwright Saleem’s 1996 Harvey Fierstein Award-winning Salam Shalom, now running in a new, substantially revised version at the Greenway Court Theater in West Hollywood. Thrown together as roommates in UCLA graduate student housing...

Young Ben is on his way to meet his fiancée Jill’s father Sam, stepmother Penny, and stepsister Jillian for the first time this weekend. As the couple drive down the highway, only a few minutes away from Jill’s childhood home...

Working mother Matty faces each day with a bleary-eyed scowl and grievance list a mile long. Her children? Completely withdrawn, when they can be bothered to come home. Her housework? Piling higher and higher with no end or help in sight. Her post office job? Literally walling her off from the outside world. Her only friend? A repeat customer who chats her up between shipments of funeral invitations. Her husband Werner? Living across town with an art student young enough to be his daughter. To top it off, her car is rear-ended by a long-haul truck in the grocery parking lot. The truck's driver, Johnny, escapes with a serious tongue-lashing, only to show up at her apartment to repair vehicles and relations. Has Matty finally found a bright spot in her life, or is this budding romance just another trial to join her list?

"Wow, you're really going all out!" my friend Kiel said, giving me the old once-over as we strolled down the Bavarian beer mug image that is Saturday night in downtown Santa Monica. "What do ya mean... I dress up sometimes, when the occasion calls for it," I argued, adjusting the safety pin on my pink polka dot dress and tripping over absolutely nothing at all in my brand-new vintage pumps. "Besides," I pleaded as I...

by Jon Peters, special to LAist This Saturday night, the Egyptian Theatre is presenting its annual African American Filmmakers Celebration, a collection of shorts curated by Hollywood Shorts, a local film outreach organization. This year features five selections, many of which have already racked up awards on the festival circuit.

You’ll definitely know right away whether you’re about to love the Zombie Joe’s Underground theater group's Once Upon a Nightmare or whether you’d rather be somewhere - anywhere - else once its first shocking image assaults your senses mere moments after the house lights dim.

Tomorrow night Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre presents a rare gem from the Czechoslovak New Wave, Intimate Lighting, directed by Ivan Passer. (Passer is perhaps best known as Milos Forman’s co-writer on such classics as...

Frank Henenlotter is the J. D. Salinger of exploitation cinema - a few game-changers and he's gone. Sure, Brain Damage (about a hallucinogenic space worm), Frankenhooker (a romantic retelling of Frankenstein with dismembered hookers) and the Basket Case series (horror-comedies starring homicidal siamese twins) may not be required reading at your local high school, but his latest, Bad Biology, is required viewing at your local Cinefamily. It's a black-humored, black-hearted love story, with an oversized...

Better off Dead celebrated its 25th anniversary at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica yesterday. In attendance was director “Savage” Steve Holland along with a coterie of stars including Diane Franklin (French exchange student Monique), Curtis Armstrong (snow snorting best friend Charles De Mar), and E.G. Daily (the intoxicating singer at the dance). Sadly, John Cusack, who some think landed his breakout role in this movie, was not in attendance. The rest of the cast, however, provided sometimes illuminating and always funny commentary during the film.