You’d think it would be easy to parody beloved period British dramas because they have so many guilty pleasure repeated tropes: huge historic houses, romances within and between upper classes and their servants, swooningly fabulous clothes, luscious meals, fabulous furnishings, and dialogue that sounds witty even when it isn’t because it is delivered in heavenly aristocratic accents with exquisite, RADA-trained diction. But the secret to the really great parody is truly loving whatever it is you’re making fun of. Thus, on a scale from the top (by Grabthar’s hammer, that would be “Galaxy Quest”) to the sloppy (I love you, Wayanses, but noticing something is not the same as being funny about it), “Fackham Hall” comes in around the middle.

Its watchability comes from the very elements it is trying to undermine: the fairy-tale setting of a huge country house, antique furniture, and beautiful people wearing gorgeous period clothes, speaking in accents ranging from elegant upper-class to cute commoner. Most of its jokes are based less on observing what makes these works so popular than on what is silliest or most outrageous. But what’s funny in the writers’ room does not always work on screen. An example of the tone is the title, the name of the characters’ residence, which a character says aloud to make sure we know it sounds like a crude insult to everyone involved.

The story is set in 1931, or, to put it in context, after the end of “Downton Abbey” and around the third of the ensuing films. We are informed, in case you have no exposure of any kind to this genre, in which case, why are you even watching this, that “England was a nation divided by class.” The country is suffering through a depression, but the Davenport family, who have occupied their ancestral home for 400 years, have no such concerns. (The 2,500-acre estate of Knowsley Hall, also featured in “Peaky Blinders,” plays the part of the ancestral home.) 

“The sheer grandeur of Fackham Hall was a testament to splendor and an enduring family legacy,” we are told by a narrator whose identity we will not discover until the end. “They led a decadent life and barely had to lift a finger.” Indeed, Lord Davenport (Damian Lewis) is sipping a cocktail from a glass held to his lips by a servant. He and Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) are congratulating themselves on the upcoming wedding of their daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), to the presumptive heir to the property, Archibald (Tom Felton). “I’m just delighted she’s finally found the right cousin,” Lord Davenport smiles. As anyone who knows this genre understands, only males can inherit the land. Since the Davenports’ four sons, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, all died, this marriage is the only way they will be able to stay in their home. Thus, the motto on the family crest is “Incestuous ad Infinitum.”

The Davenports’ other daughter, considered too old and independent-minded at 23 to be likely to find a husband, is Rose (Thomasin McKenzie). She will soon meet a plucky orphan lad and kind-hearted pickpocket named Eric Noone (as in “no one”), played by Ben Radcliffe, handsome and charming enough to play the lead in any period romantic drama, and wisely calibrates his performance as though he is doing just that.

Noone is sent to deliver a message to Fackham Hall just as Poppy and Archibald are about to get married, except they don’t, because Poppy makes a dramatic race from the church to the arms of her low-born beloved. This puts the pressure on Rose to take over as Archibald’s fiancée and save the family home.

This is one of those “throw everything at the screen and by the time you realize that one wasn’t funny, four more will have come at you” movies. These include running jokes, anachronisms, sight gags, potty humor (in one case, chamber pot-y humor), slapstick, an extended dick joke, an extended “who’s on first”-type joke involving a character named Watt, sight gags, and verbal misunderstandings, e.g., “You fought [in WWI] with my father.” “No, we were on the same side.” And a tailor shop called “Tailor Swift.”

One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty. The score by Oli Julian and the costumes by Rosalind Ebbutt are also perfectly suitable for the kinds of movies this one spoofs. It’s just the jokes that, like British cocktails, are to American taste lukewarm.

There was no shortage of engrossing art with which to engage in Southern California museums during the past year, although the considerable majority of it had been made only within the past 50 years or so. Art’s global history before the Second World War continues to play a decided second fiddle to contemporary art in special exhibitions.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

The chief exception: the Getty, where its Brentwood anchor and Pacific Palisades outpost accounted for three of the 10 most engrossing museum exhibitions in 2025, all 10 presented here in order of their opening dates. (Four are still on view.)

Art museums across the country continue to struggle in attendance and fundraising after the double-whammy of the lengthy COVID-19 pandemic shut-down followed by culture war attacks from the Trump administration. That may help explain the unusually lengthy, seven-to-14 month duration of half of these shows.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875, oil on canvas.

(Musée d’Orsay / Patrice Schmidt
)

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. Getty Center

An emphasis on men’s daily lives is very unusual in French Impressionist art. Women are more prominent as subject matter in scores of paintings by marquee names like Monet, Cassatt and Degas. But homosocial life in late-19th century Paris was the fascinating focus of this show, the first Los Angeles museum survey of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings in 30 years.

A view into a dance gallery is framed by Guadalupe Rosales’ “Concourse/C3” installation.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

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Guadalupe Rosales – Tzahualli: Mi Memoria en Tu Reflejo. Palm Springs Art Museum

Vibrant Chicano youth subcultures of 1990s Los Angeles, during the fraught era of Rodney King and the AIDS epidemic, are embedded in the art of one of its enthusiastic participants. Guadalupe Rosales layers her archival work onto pleasure and freedom today, as was seen in this vibrant exhibition, offering a welcome balm during another period of outsized social distress.

Don Bachardy, “Christopher Isherwood,” June 20, 1979; acrylic on paper.

(Don Bachardy Paper / Huntington Library)

Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits. The Huntington

The nearly 70-year retrospective of portrait drawings in pencil and paint by Los Angeles artist Don Bachardy revealed the works to be like performances: Both artist and sitter participated in putting on a pictorial show. The extended visual encounter between two people, its intimacy inescapable, culminates in the two “actors” autographing their performed picture.

“Probably Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha,” China, Tang Dynasty, circa 700-800; marble.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia. LACMA. Through July 12

“Realms of the Dharma” isn’t exactly an exhibition. Instead, it’s a temporary, 14-month installation of Buddhist sculptures, paintings and drawings from the museum’s impressive permanent collection, plus a few additions. It’s worth noting here, though, because almost all of its marvelous pieces were in storage (or traveling) for more than seven years, during the lengthy tear-down of a prior LACMA building and construction of a new one, and much of it will disappear again when the installation closes next summer.

Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas.

(Anna Arca)

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Noah Davis. UCLA Hammer Museum

A tight survey of 50 works, all made by Noah Davis in the brief span between 2007 and the L.A.-based artist’s untimely death in 2015 at just 32, told a poignant story of rapid artistic growth brutally interrupted. Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even while still in invigorating development.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig), “The Gay Deceiver, 1939/1950, gelatin silver print. Getty Museum

(Getty Museum)

Queer Lens: A History of Photography. Getty Center

Assembling some 270 photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, “Queer Lens” looked at work produced after the 1869 invention of the binaries of “heterosexual and homosexual,” just a short generation after the 1839 invention of the camera. Transformations in the expression of gender and sexuality by scores of artists as well-known as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske were tracked along with more than a dozen unknowns.

“Sealstone With a Battle Scene (The Pylos Combat Agate),” Minoan, 1630-1440 BC; banded agate, gold and bronze.

(Jeff Vanderpool)

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The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece. Getty Villa. Through Jan. 12

The star of this look into the ancient, not widely known Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos was a tiny agate, barely 1.3 inches wide, making its public debut outside Europe. The exquisitely carved stone, unearthed by archaeologists in 2017, shows two lean but muscled warriors going at it over the sprawled body of a dead comrade. Perhaps made in Crete, the idealized naturalism of a battle scene rendered in shallow three-dimensional space threw a stylistic monkey-wrench into our established understanding of Greek culture 3,500 years ago.

Ken Gonzales-Day digitally erased Illinois Black lynching victim Charlie Mitchell from an 1897 postcard to focus instead on the perpetrators.

(USC Fisher Museum of Art)

Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade.” USC Fisher Museum of Art. Through March 14

The ways in which identities of race, gender and class are erased in a society dominated by straight white patriarchy animates the first mid-career survey of Los Angeles–based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. The riveting centerpiece is his extensive meditation on the American mass-hysteria embodied by the horrific practice of lynching, in which Gonzales-Day employed digital techniques to erase the brutalized victims (and the ropes) in grisly photographs of the murders. Focus shifts the viewer’s gaze toward the perpetrators — an urgent and timely transference, given the shredding of civil society underway today.

Kara Walker deconstructed a monument to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson for “Unmanned Drone,” as seen at the Brick gallery as part of “Monuments.”

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Monuments. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick. Through May 3

The nearly two-year delay in opening “Monuments,” an exhibition of toppled Confederate and Jim Crow statues that pairs cautionary art history with thoughtful and poetic retorts by a variety of artists, turned out to give the much anticipated undertaking an especially potent punch. As the Trump Administration restores a white supremacist sheen to “Lost Cause” mythology by renaming military installations after Civil War traitors and returning sculptures and paintings of them to prior perches, from which they had been removed, this sober and incisive analysis of what’s at stake is nothing less than crucial.

Peak moment: As a metaphor of white supremacy, Kara Walker’s transformation of the ancient “man on a horse” motif into a monstrous headless horseman — a Euro-American corpse that tortures the living and refuses to die — resonates loudly.

Installation view of sculptures and a painting by Robert Therrien at the Broad.

(Joshua White / Broad museum)

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Robert Therrien: This Is a Story. The Broad. Through April 5

The late Los Angeles-based artist Robert Therrien (1947-2019) had a distinctive, even quirky capacity for teasing out a conceptual space between ordinary domestic objects and their mysterious personal meanings. In 120 paintings, drawings, photographs and especially sculptures, this Therrien exhibition offers objects hovering somewhere between immediately recognizable and perplexingly alien, wryly funny and spiritually profound.

They say write what you know, which is probably why there are so many damn films about Hollywood. The latest navel-gazer, Jay Kelly, is about an aging movie star (played, not coincidentally, by aging movie star George Clooney) reflecting on his life and his choices. The film is directed with care and style and generous (if occasionally gimmicky) wit by Noah Baumbach and the performances by both Clooney and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-suffering manager, are excellent. But a little part of me was like, remind me again why I’m supposed cares about this vain multimillionaire and his extremely niche problems?

Having just wrapped his latest film, the 60-year-old Jay is having an existential crisis, of sorts. It has dawned on him that he spent so much time building his career, his life is empty. He’s neglected the two most important relationships of his life, namely with his daughters. He doesn’t really know who he is beyond the glamorous façade and he has no real friends, other than Ron, who is on the payroll.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit familiar that’s because a very similar film came out of Norway earlier this season, Sentimental Value. I’m not going to make broad generalizations about American vs. European films—especially since Baumbach is the spiritual successor to Woody Allen who was deeply influenced by the European greats—but suffice it to say that the Norwegian one, which focused mainly on the inner lives of the abandoned daughters, was better.

The crux of Jay Kelly is that our titular hero is always surrounded by a coterie that includes his manager, a stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script), a bodyguard-cum-butler, a publicist (Laura Dern), and various other hangers on, but he’s supremely lonely. (An on-going joke has Jay complaining he’s always alone just as his bodyguard hands him a cold drink.)

And Ron is beginning to reassess his devotion to Jay. He’s given the better part of his life to this man—willing to drop any other commitment, including to his own children, on a dime to attend to him—but was it all worth it? Are they even friends?

“Friends don’t take 15 percent,” Jay snaps to Ron during one particularly bruising fight.

But at least Ron still has his family—although his wife (Baumbach’s real-life partner Greta Gerwig in what amounts to an extended cameo) blames him for their daughter’s almost debilitating anxiety. Jay, however, is essentially on his own. His oldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), has all but given up on him. “You know how I know you didn’t want to spend time with me?” she asks him bitterly. “Because you didn’t spend time with me.”

Oof.

And he now he finds himself desperate to connect with his younger daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to embark on a European vacation with her friends before heading off for college.

Daisy has more fondness, or at least more patience, with her dad—she finds him amusing—but she isn’t going to suddenly disrupt her life to spend time with him. She heads off on her own.

Jay Kelly occasionally employs an A Christmas Carol-style structure where Jay revisits pivotal scenes of his life. One comes after he finds out that the director who gave him his first big break, Peter Scheider (Jim Broadbent), has died. Jay is indebted to Schneider, or should be, at least—and they’ve remained friends. But one of those flashbacks has Schneider begging Jay to do his latest film, as he needs the money. With a kind of cold efficiency masking as kindness, Jay refuses him. We see this a lot with Jay. He is good at indicating friendship and generosity of spirit, but there’s no substance behind his cheer.

At Schneider’s funeral, Jay reconnects with his old acting school roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup). Turns out, despite his eagerness to grab a beer, Timothy despises Jay—blames him for stealing his life. It is, in fact, not an exaggeration. In another flashback we see cocky young Jay (now played by Charlie Rowe, not quite convincingly) snatch an audition for Schneider’s film right out from under Timothy (Louis Partridge), even using Timothy’s own improvements to the script that Timothy was too shy to incorporate. (The suggestion here is twofold: Yes, Jay stole from Timothy. But also, Jay had the kind of ballsiness to make those embellishments to the script. When he tells Timothy he didn’t have what it took, was he possibly…right?)

Finding out that his old friend, about whom he has warmly nostalgic feelings, actually hates his guts is another turning point for Jay. He’s more determined than ever to repair his relationship with Daisy—perhaps his last hope for redemption—so decides to track her down in Europe, using a lifetime achievement award he’ll be receiving from the Tuscan Film Festival as his excuse.

In one of the film’s most irritating scenes, he is forced to take a train from Paris to Rome with the actual little people, who are depicted as kindly, salt-of-the-earth types; a train full of Mrs. Clauses and Geppettos. Jay watches them, moist-eyed, thinking this is what he has missed in life. It’s beyond patronizing, although Baumbach adds a small dose of reality when someone points out to Jay that the people are on their best behavior because they’re in front of a movie star. Later in the train ride, Jay pulls a Tom Cruise and catches a purse snatcher—it’s a clear inside joke as Clooney even does Cruise’s intense, arm pumping run to catch up to him. Jay is hailed as a hero, but even that is complicated. The man who stole the purse isn’t a hardened criminal but a family man off his meds. (Again, it felt like Baumbach was fighting against his own impulses in that scene.)

Recently, after watching Jerry Maguire for the first time in years, I complained that they didn’t make middlebrow films like that anymore—that is, smart and satisfying, if somewhat facile, films for grownups. This is definitely that. And there’s excellent here work from Clooney, who gives arguably his best performance ever in this a meta dissection of his own career and of the strange paradox of having a life that belongs to everyone but yourself.

[WARNING: HERE COMES A SPOILER OF SORTS BECAUSE I WANT TO DISCUSS THE FINAL SCENE]

Jay Kelly is ultimately a film about a man living with the consequences of his own narcissism but the final scene, at the Tuscan film festival, does hedge its bets a bit: We see a montage of Jay/Clooney’s films and it brings tears to his eyes. He was great. He did move people. It was a wonderful life, in its own way. He’s so touched by what he sees on screen that he reaches out for the hand of a loved one—but there’s only Ron, so he clutches his hand instead. It’s both sad and kind of beautiful. The film has sneakily been a love story between these two hollow men the whole time.