Nickel Creek played an intimate warmup show at Largo at the Coronet for a lucky crowd Wednesday that piled into the L.A. theater for a night of skillful, spellbinding folk music.

At first, it seemed impossible: How could such a good band play such a small venue? At 280 seats, the Largo is much smaller than the high school auditorium that was regularly subjected to my bands’ takes on jazz, reggae and the like.

The group is touring with Kacey Musgraves, so this show was jammed between a show in San Diego and two at the Forum in Inglewood. They sandwiched songs from their new album, “Celebrants,” between recognizable hits, exposing the crowd of about 250 people to new material while still delivering plenty of nostalgia from past releases.

With all four members of the band sharing one microphone, they opened with a few crowd favorites, including “Smoothie Song,” one of the most technical instrumental pieces any folk band will ever play.

Nickel Creek’s songs have a theatrical quality to them — many tell a story, and a few are quite funny. I’d never noticed the comedy in the lyrics on tape, likely because the band’ recordings always grip me instantly with the audacity of the instruments they feature. For example, “To the Airport,” a song about flying, was genuinely funny and musically complex. It’s a high-wire act that few, if any, other artists can pull off. If Weird Al had gone to Berklee and met three other Weird Als, this song might have been the result.

“Thinnest Wall” was probably the biggest hit from “Celebrants,” released in 2023.

After playing the album from front to back, the band took audience requests. And I mean really took them. To summon such challenging and intricate music at the drop of a hat is another of the band’s magic tricks. This included a rousing cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which was probably the musical low point of the night. Though the cover was spotless and the crowd loved it, using a few precious moments of Nickel Creek’s time to do something simple felt like a waste. The song simply isn’t complicated enough for the band to flex its abilities.

There are some concerts where the technical proficiency on display melts my face early on. This was one of those nights, assuming a place in the chops pantheon alongside acts like Thundercat and Anderson Paak.

In these cases, my awe is generally reserved for one or two members of the band. However, Nickel Creek consists of four truly exceptional musicians, and three of them are singing complex harmonies while shredding on mandolin, violin and guitar, respectively. Altogether, it was the most dazzling display of musical talent I’ve ever seen.

As for the crowd, no one sang along, and any clapping was done mostly between songs, as everyone focused on hearing the exquisitely intricate strumming. The venue forbids phones, so it was a joy to see a crowd focused on the stage without hundreds of little screens recording poor facsimiles of the live event.

Nickel Creek is really a live band first and foremost. Though I’ve loved its albums for decades now, any recording implies the use of production tricks and multiple tracks to make the sound possible. So I was unprepared for the idea that their studio albums actually could have been recorded live. The execution on stage left me in awe, willing to believe pretty much anything.

Writing this review was difficult because I would prefer to keep the secret to myself: The best live band available in L.A. plays a tiny venue once in a while. Next time they do, we may be competing for limited seats. I can only hope they keep doing it, for music’s sake.

There are no real red rooms in Canadian director Pascal Plante’s unnerving thriller Red Rooms. Mostly a lot of white, gray, blank ones — from the bare and futuristically antiseptic courtroom where a grisly trial is taking place, to the minimalist high-rise Montreal apartment where the film’s protagonist lives, to the squash courts where she takes out her anger. The title refers to the horrific, blood-soaked dungeons where, it is alleged, the serial killer on trial — Ludovic Chevalier, also known as “the Demon of Rosemont” and played wordlessly by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos with saucer-eyed, predatory calm — mutilated his teenage victims while livestreaming the slaughter for money. We do witness distant flashes of such a room at one point, but the idea mostly looms over the film like an unseen dimension, a psychotic alternate reality beneath and beyond the eerie, empty drabness of modern life.

Plante’s interest lies not so much in the criminal or his victims but on the people obsessed with him. The film (which is now available on demand and playing in select theaters) follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a statuesque and mostly expressionless professional model who gets in line early every night to get into the small courtroom in the morning. Deep into the world of the dark web, Kelly-Anne spends much of her time playing online poker with Bitcoin and hacking into other people’s private lives — even accessing the email accounts and security codes for the grieving parents of the Demon’s victims. Kelly-Anne doesn’t show much emotion, but Plante often accompanies her scenes with wailing, operatic music that is as expressive as she is not. She also meets another serial killer groupie who could be her polar opposite in personality, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a manic chatterbox who genuinely believes Chevalier must be innocent because his big eyes are too kind. (His eyes, by the way, are not kind — and Plante makes fine use of them in one of the film’s more striking scenes.)

There is no real bloodshed in Red Rooms, but there is a kind of spiritual savagery. Plante achieves this partly through subtraction: Confronted with a verbal accounting of the Demon’s unspeakable crimes, Kelly-Anne’s poker-faced fascination with the trial is increasingly hard to read. Is she drawn to Chevalier and his alleged acts, or repulsed by them? This is among the many questions that hang in the air for most of Red Rooms’ running time, and the unnerving mystery of Kelly-Anne’s psyche, combined with the ease with which she moves through the shady corners of the internet, present a portrait of a very modern soul — unreadable, unstable, and unsettling.

At the same time, the initially controlled direction of the film — with its long, deliberate tracking shots, and orderly spaces — suggests a character who is herself fully in control of herself and her surroundings. Kelly-Anne might be unwell, but she’s also quite cool. This contrasts sharply with the messy behavior of Clémentine, who during one of the movie’s more bravura sequences calls into a late-night talk show to try and defend Chevalier, only to reveal how unhinged she really sounds. But as Red Rooms proceeds, Kelly-Anne’s reality also begins to slip, and the film’s style becomes looser, more frantic and fragmented. So much so that we might even start to question the veracity of what we’re seeing.

Despite the (thankful) lack of gore and violence, Red Rooms feels curiously giallo-adjacent at times. The bursts of formalism, the melodramatic score, the ways in which the model-protagonist’s own profession becomes a stylistic barometer for her mental state — these are all evocative of that classic, colorful subgenre of horror. What’s missing is the tongue-in-cheek exploitative quality of giallo. Or is it? By denying us cheap thrills, and by pointedly going in the other direction, Red Rooms highlights their absence. This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s, but our own.

Giancarlo Esposito is no stranger to the fandom convention circuit. His role in “Breaking Bad” brought a certain type of fan. His roles in “Abigail” and “The Mandolorian” bring another type. And his upcoming role in “Captain America: Brave New World” will thrust him into a Marvel fan space he has yet to experience.

He acknowledges that it’s all because of fans.

“They are responsible for me being in ‘Captain America,’ because although I liked the idea of X-Men and many other comic book characters, it was that particular fandom blowout that allowed me to walk up to [Marvel executive] Nate Moore at an Emmy Awards and say, ‘Hey, it would be great to do something with you,’” said Esposito.

“The world has changed in film and television, and I think people are listening to the fans. Fans are loyal. If fans love what you do, they can create a space for you to do more of what you do and to do what you don’t do.”

The award-winning actor is one of the standout participants at this year’s Los Angeles Comic Con. The con takes place this Friday through Sunday, and has been around in different forms since 2011. Founded by producer Regina Carpinelli and her brothers as Comikaze Expo, the show gained support from industry stars like Elvira, Todd McFarlane, and Stan Lee. It has gone through enough iterations and name changes and now draws about 125,000 people to downtown L.A.’s convention center. Not exactly low-key, but when mentioned alongside other national fandom events, it may not seem to have the same Hollywood cache.

There’s little reason for that logic, and this year could help prove it.

Chris DeMoulin, CEO and GM of Los Angeles Comic Con parent company CEI, wants L.A. Comic Con to be a home for Angeleno nerds. It’s different than its two closest comparisons (not competitors): Anime Expo, which features Japanese anime, manga and cosplay, and San Diego’s Comic-Con International, which, though fan-centric, has become a calling card for Hollywood studios.

But how is it different?

“Our mantra from day one has always been that we’re a convention that’s for the fans by fans. … In the early going, as a little show, the studios weren’t going to sit down with us and think about doing big publicity things with us. So we just asked the fans, ‘Who do you want to see?’ ,” says DeMoulin. “So we don’t do it just for the sake of doing it. We really do it because somebody like Hayden Christensen has been in the top five recommended guests in the post-show surveys we’ve done for the last five years.”

Besides Esposito and Christensen , additional fan-favorite guests this year include Ewan McGregor, Tara Strong, Hayden Panettiere and Gordon Cormier. Reunion casts of “Back to the Future” and “The Addams Family” will also make appearances on panels and at autograph booths.

DeMoulin was excited over last year’s appearance of the four hobbits from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan), and this year’s crop is just as exciting. Many of the names, like Rosario Dawson and Ming-Na Wen, are familiar on the convention circuit. But there are others, like Michael J. Fox and Anjelica Huston, who represent a little of what’s different about L.A.’s Comic Con.

“I mean, Anjelica Houston. Amazing actor. Doesn’t normally do cons — but when we had Christopher Lloyd and we were talking to Christina Ricci, we thought, ‘Hey, “Addams Family” reunion!’ We reached out to her agent and she was like, ‘Yeah, I normally don’t do this stuff, but I live here, so why not?’”

It’s that proximity to stars — not just where they work in Hollywood, but also where they live — that is also a unique component of the growing convention. Though he’s an avowed New Yorker, Esposito sees something special about the L.A.-ness of the event. He has been to the con twice before, and will be there again this year greeting fans who may only know him as Moff Gideon, his “Mandolorian” bad guy, but most likely are more savvy about his career.

“I think the L.A. Comic Con is an example of people who are also in film. And I think that gives it a bit of an edge,” says Esposito. “The connective tissue between Los Angelinos and Hollywood and film and geek actors and geek technicians is huge. I always look forward to doing L.A. Comic Con because part of the reason I go to Comic Cons is to be in wonder, enchantment and joy.”

A shot of the Artist Alley at last year’s Los Angeles Comic Con in the L.A. Convention Center.

(Courtesy of Los Angeles Comic Con)

Like other fandom gatherings, L.A. Comic Con also endeavors to keep fans front-and-center with the vendors. The main stage is actually in the middle of a showroom floor, which will be host to almost 900 exhibitors and artists. The Artists’ Alley section also highlights what DeMoulin sees as one of the main purposes of the convention.

“Ultimately, we want this to be a place where creators want to come and debut new stuff and just interact with fans. We’ve got really knowledgeable, interesting fans in this town, and they love to come out and meet the creators that are associated with the stuff that they love,” says DeMoulin.

The convention is evolving, this year inserting video game creators and lots of anime- and manga-centered entertainment in their own spaces. The new additions are a side effect of growth, and there’s more coming.

“I think you’ll see us continue to add concentric circles of adjacent entertainment spaces as we grow, but always being true to our inner nerd, which is we’re never going to walk away from the key franchises,” DeMoulin continues. “The Marvels and the ‘Star Wars’ and the ‘Star Treks’ and the whole comic universe. That’s always going to be the core of what we do. But I think we have the opportunity to do more because we’re L.A.”