Search Events | Falkor

Grand Park Summer Events & Free Movies 2026 — Los Angeles

Weekly

75 Gathering

2 days away

75 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Grand Park Summer Events & Free Movies 2026 — Los Angeles

Every Saturday · Next Oct 10 Free 200 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 9…

There is no membership, no reservation, no blanket application - you just show up in the middle of downtown Los Angeles and a movie is playing on twelve acres of park that runs from City Hall to the Music Center. That kind of open, unguarded public space is exactly what cities claim to want and almost never sustain. Grand Park has sustained it for over a decade. On summer evenings the park hosts free outdoor movies, and the audience is downtown LA in cross-section: workers who stayed late and found a reason to stay later, people who walked over from Pershing Square, families from Boyle Heights and Chinatown and Echo Park who treat Grand Park as a weekend destination, tourists who did not know this existed. Beyond the movies, the park runs free concerts, fitness events, and cultural celebrations through summer and fall. 200 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Free. Adjacent to the Metro Red and Purple Lines at Civic Center. Text it to the friend who swears there is nothing free to do downtown - there is more of this around here than either of you knows about.

The 17th Door — Buena Park (Haunted Attraction 2026)

Weekly

94 Gathering

2 days away

94 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

The 17th Door — Buena Park (Haunted Attraction 2026)

Every Saturday · Next Oct 10 8420 On The Mall, Buena Park, CA 9…

You signed a waiver. The door closed behind you. And now the room is rotating and the wind is hurricane-force and someone — something — just touched your shoulder from a direction that shouldn't exist. The 17th Door is one of the most intense haunted attractions in the United States. This isn't a haunted house with jump scares and fog machines. This is theatrical, physical, interactive horror — rotating rooms, earthquake effects, hurricane-force winds, and scenes designed to make you question whether you actually want to keep going. A waiver is required. They mean it. Select nights, September 26 through November 2, 2026. 8420 On The Mall, Buena Park, CA 90620. General admission from $35. Send this to the friend who says nothing scares them. Then ask them about it on November 3rd.

San Diego Summer Movies in the Park 2026

Weekly

44 Gathering

2 days away

44 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

San Diego Summer Movies in the Park 2026

Every Saturday · Next Oct 10 Free Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Grass under a blanket, somebody's dog wandering the row, and a kid down front narrating the plot to nobody in particular. Half the neighborhood is out here and not one of them paid anything to be. Somebody decided that every part of this city deserved at least one summer evening of a movie outdoors under an actual sky, and then went and did it, park by park, year after year. The format is the whole idea: find the screening closest to you, bring something to sit on, arrive before dark. No seats to reserve, no venue with opinions about your shoes. Just a park turning into a theater for a few hours because people wanted somewhere good to be. The lineup runs wide enough that something is always worth the trip — a recent release, an old one, something the kids have not seen. Rotating locations from July into October, free. Find the one nearest you and tell your neighbors. That is genuinely all it takes.

Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Coming Soon

21 Gathering

3 days away

21 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

In 3 days · Oct 11 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

Thirty newspaper bags. Six water guns. A roll of toilet paper you will throw at the exact right moment. And Patricia Quinn — Magenta herself — standing on the Balboa Theatre stage in the flesh. The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening is one of those events that exists in its own category. It's not a movie. It's not a concert. It's a participatory ritual that's been running for half a century and shows no sign of slowing down, because every generation discovers it at exactly the right age and never fully recovers. The Balboa Theatre showing features the original cast member Patricia Quinn live and in person, making this more than a screening — it's a pilgrimage. Costumes are encouraged. Props are required. The callback lines are non-negotiable. If you don't know them yet, the person sitting next to you will teach you before the opening credits end. Sunday, October 11, 2026. 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, San Diego. Shadowcast troupes run this all over the county on nights nobody advertises, and once you know the callbacks you start looking for them.

Casual Commander Night 21+ — Guildhall, Burbank

Weekly

4 days away

{# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Casual Commander Night 21+ — Guildhall, Burbank

Every Monday · Next Oct 12 ✨ New Free Guildhall, 3516 W Victory Blvd, Bu…

Burbank empties at six and refills at the bars, largely with people who spent nine hours in a dark room fixing the colour on somebody else's movie. They do not want to talk about the movie. This is the 21-and-over table, and that changes the texture of the whole evening. Pint glasses go on the far side of the playmat by unspoken agreement, the trash talk is funnier and considerably more profane than it would be with teenagers at the table, and the half hour before anybody shuffles is just post-production gossip delivered in the flat voice of people who are tired. Starting at half five is the kindness in it. You can play two full games and still be home at a sane hour on a work night, which is why the room fills with industry regulars rather than students. 3516 W Victory Blvd, Mondays, bring ID. The deck matters less than you would think.

Silent Movie Mondays: The Headless Horseman (1922) — Balboa Theatre San Diego

Weekly

25 Gathering

4 days away

25 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Silent Movie Mondays: The Headless Horseman (1922) — Balboa Theatre San Diego

Every Monday · Next Oct 12 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

The rumble of 1,800 pipes waking up inside the walls is the first thing you hear. The Wonder Morton Theatre Organ at the Balboa Theatre is not a soundtrack. It is a living instrument the size of a room, hidden in a chamber above the stage, and when Ken Double sits down to play it the whole building becomes the speaker. The Headless Horseman is the 1922 silent film adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” starring Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane — yes, that Will Rogers, before he became the most famous man in America. The film has not been widely screened in decades. You are watching it the way it was meant to be watched: in the dark, in a theater built in 1924, with a live organist scoring every gallop and every shadow in real time. This is the Season Three premiere of Silent Movie Mondays, a series that runs seven films through the fall. The crowd is a beautiful mix — film students, retirees who remember when every theater had an organ, couples on dates who wanted something that wasn’t a streaming algorithm. Monday, September 21, 2026 at 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101.

Role Model: Chuck On Tour — Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre, San Diego

Coming Soon

5 days away

Role Model: Chuck On Tour — Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre, San Diego

In 5 days · Oct 13 Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Th…

Somewhere between the second verse and the bridge of 'Blind,' you realized this wasn't just a song—it was a mirror. Role Model writes the kind of music that makes heartbreak feel like a shared language, the tracks you sent to someone at 2 AM not because you wanted them to hear a song but because you needed them to understand how you felt without having to say it. Now he's bringing the Chuck On Tour to San Diego State's Open Air Theatre with special guest Samia opening. The outdoor amphitheater sits on a hill at SDSU where October's warm San Diego night fills the space between songs, and the skyline behind the stage makes everything feel more cinematic than it has any right to. His live shows turn audiences into singalongs—strangers harmonizing on lyrics they each thought were private. If someone sent you 'Forever Oh' or 'Stealing the Show' at a weird hour, this is the show you send them back. Tuesday, October 13 at 7:30 PM. Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, CA 92182.

The Rental with writer/director Dave Franco

Coming Soon

5 days away

5 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

The Rental with writer/director Dave Franco

In 5 days · Oct 13 Vidiots at the Eagle Theatre, 4884…

Everyone has been on the group trip where the house was beautiful and something was wrong. Not wrong enough to say out loud on the first night - just a door that did not lock right, a host who answered too fast, a friend who got quiet in the car. You spend the weekend deciding whether you are being paranoid or polite. That is the nerve this movie puts a thumb on, and its director is going to be standing in the room afterward explaining exactly how he built it. Dave Franco made his directorial debut with a vacation-rental horror film that understood the real fear was never the stranger - it was the four people you already knew. He is bringing special guests and taking questions on 35mm-house turf where the crowd actually stays for the Q and A instead of filing out. Insider note: the Eagle Theatre seats about 270, and guest nights sell through before the week starts. One night only, Tuesday October 13, 7:30pm.

Lyrical Exchange Open Mic — Queen Bee’s Art & Cultural Center, North Park

Weekly

18 Gathering

5 days away

18 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Lyrical Exchange Open Mic — Queen Bee’s Art & Cultural Center, North Park

Every Tuesday · Next Oct 13 Queen Bee's Art & Cultural Center,…

Every Tuesday night in a North Park arts center, the mic goes live and the room fills with people who came to say something. Poets who have been carrying a verse in their pocket all week. Musicians who want to test a song on a crowd that actually listens. Comedians working out material that might be brilliant or might be a beautiful disaster. Nobody knows until the words leave their mouth. Lyrical Exchange is not a showcase — it is a conversation. The five-dollar cover keeps it intimate. The room at Queen Bee’s is small enough that you can feel the nervous energy of a first-timer three rows back, and the regulars treat newcomers like they belong because the whole point is that everyone does. The format rotates between spoken word, acoustic music, comedy, and whatever else walks through the door. This is the room where the city’s creative community shows up when they need to be heard, not applauded. Every Tuesday, 8:00 PM – 11:00 PM. Five dollars at the door. Queen Bee’s Art & Cultural Center, 3925 Ohio St in North Park.

San Diego International Film Festival 2026

Coming Soon

16 Gathering

6 days away

16 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

San Diego International Film Festival 2026

In 6 days · Oct 14 – Oct 18 Reading Cinemas Gaslamp 15, 701 Fi…

What you remember from a festival this size is not on the screen. It is the moment the lights come up and the person who made the film stands out of the row behind you and turns out to be a nervous human being answering questions. Bigger festivals cannot hand you that. Here you get a week of films that played Venice or Toronto or Sundance a few weeks earlier, screened downtown within walking distance of each other, with directors and cast actually in the building afterward. International competition titles, American documentaries, shorts programs, and features with local roots. The evenings turn social, premieres bleeding into parties until the entire arts scene of the city is in the same few blocks for the week. Downtown San Diego in October, passes or single tickets, trolley to the door. See one film alone and one with somebody. The second is the one you will still be arguing about in December.

Coming Soon

6 days away

6 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

San Diego Gulls vs Ontario Reign

In 6 days · Oct 14 $20+ Pechanga Arena San Diego, 3500 Spo…

Every good hockey team needs a rival it genuinely can't stand, and for the Gulls that is the Ontario Reign — the LA Kings' farm club, a short drive up the freeway, and the kind of opponent that turns a regular Wednesday into a grudge match. AHL hockey at this level is a beautiful contradiction: the players are one call-up away from the NHL, the tickets cost less than a movie, and the hitting is somehow harder than the big league because everyone is fighting for a job. Pechanga gets loud and mean when the Reign are in town, the SoCal hockey diaspora out in force, beer cold and chants sharp. Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 7pm, Pechanga Arena San Diego. Come for the rivalry, stay for the specific joy of a well-timed hip check, and discover that the best sports deal in the county has been hiding in the Sports Arena this whole time.

Coming Soon

19 Gathering

7 days away

19 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Newport Beach Film Festival 2026

In 7 days · Oct 15 THE LOT at Fashion Island, 999 New…

Most festivals make you choose between the movie and the party. This one flatly refuses, and that refusal is the entire personality of the thing. Eight days on the Orange County coast, hundreds of screenings, and a nightly ritual nobody else runs the same way: the country spotlights. Irish night, French night, Latino night, Pacific Rim night — each anchored by a film and then walked straight into a party, so a screening becomes an evening and the evening becomes three conversations you did not plan on having. It is prestige cinema with sand in its shoes. International work that will not surface anywhere else nearby, the people who made it standing in the room, and the particular coastal glamour of toasting a movie under string lights when it ends. Send it to the friend who believes a great film deserves a great party. They have been waiting years for somebody to agree with them out loud.

Outpost with writer/director Joe Lo Truglio

Coming Soon

7 days away

Outpost with writer/director Joe Lo Truglio

In 7 days · Oct 15 Vidiots MUBI Microcinema, 4884 Eag…

Some weeks the fantasy is not a vacation. It is a fire lookout tower, one road in, no service, nobody who needs anything from you. Then you get there and discover the quiet is not empty - it has been waiting to hand you back everything you drove up to avoid. That is the film, and the man who wrote and directed it is the guy you know as the sweetest idiot in a police precinct sitcom. Joe Lo Truglio made a psychological horror picture about isolation and it is genuinely unsettling, which is its own small shock to anyone who only knows him from sketch comedy. He will be there in person. The MUBI Microcinema is the smaller of the two rooms here - under fifty seats, which means a director talkback in there is less a panel than a conversation. That intimacy is the entire reason to pick this over a bigger screening somewhere else. Thursday, October 15 at 7:00pm, in the small room upstairs.

Coming Soon

7 days away

Supernatural / Terror Aboard

In 7 days · Oct 15 New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly B…

Carole Lombard made exactly one horror film and almost nobody has seen it. In Supernatural she plays an heiress taken over by the spirit of an executed murderess, a 1933 Paramount picture that runs barely an hour, moves like a fever, and slipped so far out of circulation that for decades it travelled mostly as a rumour among people who collect this sort of thing. It is paired with Terror Aboard, another pre-Code Paramount rarity, in which a killer works his way through the passengers of a private yacht with a cheerfulness the Production Code would have struck out a year later. Neither turns up on a streaming menu. Both run on 35mm, which is most of the reason you can see them at all this year, and the reason the condition of the print becomes part of the evening. New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd, on the fifteenth: first feature at 7:30, the second at 9:05.

Animation Is Film Festival 2026 - TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, Hollywood

Coming Soon

8 days away

Animation Is Film Festival 2026 - TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, Hollywood

In 8 days · Oct 16 TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, 6801 Holly…

Everybody tells you animation is for children right up until the year you work out that most of the films that genuinely wrecked you were drawn. This is the festival built for whoever that happened to. Its ninth edition puts Oscar contenders on the same four-day program as a twenty-six-year-old cult picture nobody's studio wanted, which is the entire argument it exists to make. On the awards side: Louis Clichy's Iron Boy, Leah Nelson's Tangles, The Violinist, and the first theatrical showing anywhere of the opening two episodes of Dana Terrace's Knights of Guinevere. But the reason to clear a Friday is further down the grid — the North American premiere of Shingo Natsume's Ghost: End of Night, and a retrospective print of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the 2000 film that underperformed and then quietly became the thing a whole generation pointed at to end the argument about whether animation was a medium or a genre. Opening day starts with Best of Annecy at four in the afternoon, which means the festival's first act is a room full of people watching shorts that will never get a US release. October 16 to 19, at TCL 6 on Hollywood Blvd. Passes and single tickets through the festival.

Daily

25 Gathering

8 days away

8th LA Horror Film Festival 2026

Every day · Next Oct 16 Let Live Theater, 916 N Formosa Av…

Independent horror filmmakers get their own three-day showcase at the 8th LA Horror Film Festival, running October 16-18 at Let Live Theater in Los Angeles. This is not a midnight screening of a studio sequel -- this is the festival where first-time directors screen the thing they shot in a warehouse in Van Nuys with a budget that would not cover a single day of catering on a studio lot. The programming runs from short films to features, spanning psychological horror, creature features, body horror, and the uncategorizable experiments that only exist because someone with a camera decided to try. Panel discussions and filmmaker Q-and-As fill the gaps between screenings, and the crowd is the kind of horror community that has opinions about practical effects versus CGI that will outlast any conversation you expected to have. Let Live Theater, Los Angeles. Three days of independent horror cinema.

Coming Soon

10 Gathering

8 days away

10 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Boy Harsher at Hollywood Palladium

In 8 days · Oct 16 $40+ Hollywood Palladium, 6215 W Sunset…

Some bands sound like a movie you have not seen yet; Boy Harsher sounds like the one already playing behind your eyes at three in the morning. The duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller took darkwave out of the basement and made it cinematic -- pulsing, sensual, faintly terrifying -- and their live show has become the rare underground act that can now fill the Palladium without losing an ounce of its menace. Expect strobe, sweat, and a room full of people who found the exact soundtrack to their inner lives. It is a genuine scene event, the kind that turns strangers into a congregation for ninety minutes. Come alone and leave part of something. Or bring the person these songs remind you of. Either way, wear black and prepare to move.

Coming Soon

33 Gathering

9 days away

33 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

D6 Fall Festival

In 9 days · Oct 17 Verne Goodwin Mira Mesa Senior Cen…

Some neighborhoods have to build their own gathering place because the map never bothered to hand them one. Mira Mesa and the Convoy corridor did exactly that, and this is the autumn version of it. Same team as the night market, so the food-truck rows and vendor booths are what most people come for, and then it wraps all of that in everything a fall evening should have: a movie in the park, a trunk-or-treat, pumpkin decorating, live performances, and the particular warmth of an immigrant community that turns out in force for its own. It runs into the evening and it is free. You will watch three generations of one family split a single plate and stay until the movie ends, because nobody wants to be the one who suggests leaving. The senior center on Mira Mesa Boulevard, an October evening, no admission. If you grew up out here, you already know exactly who to send this to.

Coming Soon

9 days away

Riptide Film Festival 2026 — Torrance

In 9 days · Oct 17 James R. Armstrong Theatre, 3330 C…

Last year you shot something you're still not sure is good. You showed three people. Two said it was great and one said nothing, which is the one you keep thinking about. Riptide Film Festival is the South Bay's answer to that silence. It screens indie and high school filmmakers at the Armstrong Theatre in Torrance — a venue just small enough that the filmmaker is sitting three rows from the audience reaction. No publicists, no red carpet, no entourage blocking the bar. Just the work, projected large, in front of people who came because they wanted to see something they hadn't seen before. The festival celebrates filmmakers at every stage — first shorts alongside polished independents — and the Q&As afterward are the kind where someone in the audience asks the question the filmmaker was afraid no one would notice. It's the South Bay film community in a room together, discovering each other. Saturday, October 17, 2026. James R. Armstrong Theatre, 3330 Civic Center Dr, Torrance 90503. Torrance has a quiet circuit of screenings and shorts nights the rest of the year, and most of these filmmakers are on it.

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

Coming Soon

52 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 9 days away

52 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

In 9 days · Oct 17 – Oct 21 Varies by theater Fathom Events Theaters Nationwide …

You have been homesick for twenty-five years for a place that was never real. A bathhouse lit gold over black water. A train that only runs one way, across a flooded world, into the dark. Spirited Away gave you that homesickness the first time you saw it — and this October, for one week only, its 25th anniversary and the finale of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026, Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece comes back to the big screen where the ache belongs. There is a particular silence that falls over a theater full of people who love the same film. The lights drop, Joe Hisaishi's first piano notes land, and a room of strangers stops breathing at the same moment. Ghibli Fest runs both the subtitled original and the English dub, with a piece of surprise content before each show. But the real event is the crowd — parents who were kids when this came out, now holding the hands of kids seeing it for the first time; longtime fans catching a detail they'd missed on every laptop rewatch; someone two rows back crying quietly and not caring who sees. Even if you've seen it a dozen times, you have not seen it like this. If Spirited Away is a film you carry around inside you, this isn't a question — you go. Projected, at scale, with sound that fills the room, is the version it was made for. It's rated PG and open to almost everyone, though No-Face and the spirit world can frighten very small children — parents of under-sevens should know that going in. This is not a movie to leave on in the background. It's two hours built to move you, in a room full of people who came to be moved alongside you. Tickets run through the official Ghibli Fest and participating theater box offices, and the anniversary finale sells out earliest of the whole festival — buy ahead. Choose your format on purpose: the dub is the gentle way in for young kids, the subtitled original is what the purists want. Come early for the pre-show content most latecomers miss. Go on a weekend evening if you can, when the theater fills all the way up and the silence gets deeper. Some films you own and still leave the house for. At twenty-five, Spirited Away is less a movie than a place people keep returning to — and going back together, in the dark, is how you remember why it marked you. One week in October. Then the train pulls away again.

Coming Soon

9 days away

Boy Harsher at The Sound

In 9 days · Oct 17 $40+ The Sound, 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd…

Down in Del Mar, on a Saturday in October, the fairgrounds' newest room goes pitch dark for the duo the whole darkwave scene bows to. Boy Harsher does not do polite; the duo makes music that feels like a beautiful anxiety attack, all analog throb and whispered dread, built to be experienced loud and in the dark with a crowd that gets it. The Sound is an intimate, sharp-sounding venue, which means none of the cinematic detail gets lost. For San Diego's synth and goth faithful, a Boy Harsher night this close to home is not a maybe. Get there early, stand close, and let the bass rearrange your ribcage. This is a band that literally made its own horror film, and live it shows. Some shows you attend. This one attends to you.

Coming Soon

10 days away

8 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Blitzkid, Zombeast, The Writhers

In 10 days · Oct 18 Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd, San Die…

Two weeks before Halloween, the people who dress like this all year round get their actual holiday, and it looks nothing at all like the bar crawl everyone else is planning. Horrorpunk is a small and startlingly sincere world: B-movie imagery, greaser haircuts, songs about graveyards delivered with total commitment and absolutely no irony anywhere in the building. The West Virginia headliner has been at it since the nineties and carries a following that treats the band less like entertainment and more like a denomination — people who learned the words at fifteen and have not revised their opinion since. Two more acts sit underneath, both leaning the same direction, so the aesthetic holds all night instead of breaking between sets. If you have never been in a room like this, the thing that surprises people is how friendly it is. The look is hostile. The crowd is not. Doors at seven, first band at eight, a Sunday. October 18, Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd. Wear the jacket. San Diego runs a full calendar of this every October and it operates almost entirely by word of mouth.

Alicia Malone w/ Ben Mankiewicz, "Murder at the Movies"

Coming Soon

12 days away

Alicia Malone w/ Ben Mankiewicz, "Murder at the Movies"

In 12 days · Oct 20 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

If you have ever stayed up past one in the morning because the host said something about a film you had never heard of and now you had to see it, you already belong to this. The two people who do that to you on Turner Classic Movies will be in a bookstore in Los Feliz, in a room with about forty chairs, talking about the place where old Hollywood meets actual murder - the real crimes the studios buried, and the pictures that kept circling them anyway. Malone wrote the book; Mankiewicz sits across from her, and anyone who has heard the two of them together knows it turns into argument quickly and affectionately. This is the crossover night: the classic-film people who can date a print by its title cards, sitting next to the true-crime people who know the Bugsy Siegel address by heart, discovering they have been the same audience all along. The store keeps a surprisingly deep film-criticism section a few feet from where they will be sitting. Go look at it before it starts. Free, RSVP, Tuesday evening.

Coming Soon

23 Gathering

13 days away

23 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

AFI FEST 2026

In 13 days · Oct 21 TCL Chinese Theatres, 6925 Hollywo…

There is one week a year when the boulevard that sells cheap souvenirs the other fifty-one becomes the center of the movie universe. Not figuratively. The films everyone will be arguing about in winter are screening a few feet from the handprints. The actual pleasure is narrower than that: sitting in that enormous auditorium as the lights go down on a film nobody has decided about yet — before the critics fix its meaning, before the trophies tell you what it was. The year's most talked-about titles arrive here months ahead of wide release, in the same complex where the studios stage their own premieres. Around you: the obsessives, the awards-season trackers, and the students who moved to this city for exactly this. A week in the fall at the TCL Chinese Theatres on Hollywood Boulevard. Send it to the friend whose Letterboxd reviews you actually read all the way through.

Bones on 35mm with director Ernest R. Dickerson

Coming Soon

13 days away

Bones on 35mm with director Ernest R. Dickerson

In 13 days · Oct 21 Vidiots at the Eagle Theatre, 4884…

There was a shelf in the video store nobody's parents walked down, and whatever was on it got passed to you by an older cousin who swore you could handle it. For a lot of people that was this one: a haunted-house picture built on a Black neighborhood's memory of what got taken from it, starring Snoop Dogg as a ghost in a full-length fur, with Pam Grier in the house. It was dismissed on arrival in 2001 and has spent the years since becoming a genuine cult object. Now the man who shot Do the Right Thing and directed Juice is bringing it back on an actual 35mm print and standing up to talk about it. Ernest R. Dickerson is one of the most important cinematographers in American film and he does not do many of these. The print is the point - the reds in this movie were designed for film and have never looked right on a stream. The print screens Wednesday, October 21 at 7:30pm.

My Chemical Romance at the Hollywood Bowl -- October 2026

Coming Soon

13 days away

My Chemical Romance at the Hollywood Bowl -- October 2026

In 13 days · Oct 21 Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Av…

For a generation that grew up screaming along to Welcome to the Black Parade in bedrooms plastered with band posters, My Chemical Romance at the Hollywood Bowl on October 21 is not just a concert -- it is a summoning. The Bowl's open-air acoustics and the October night sky turn every anthem into something larger than it was on the record, and the crowd will sing louder than the PA system at least twice. MCR's catalog runs from the raw punk fury of I Brought You My Bullets to the theatrical grandeur of The Black Parade to the synth-soaked Danger Days, and a setlist at the Bowl will pull from all of it. The band has been selective about touring since their reunion, making every announced date feel like it might be the last one for a while. Two nights at the Bowl -- different setlists each -- and both will leave you hoarse. The Bowl sits at 2301 N Highland Avenue, just off the 101 in the Hollywood Hills.

Daily

20 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 14 days away

20 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Denver Film Festival 2026 — Denver, CO

Every day · Next Oct 22 1000 14th St, Denver, CO 80202

Something happens at 10 PM on a Wednesday in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House when a director from a country most Americans can't locate on a map introduces a film about a life you've never considered, and the audience sits in the dark and lets a stranger rearrange how they see the world. That chemical hit is what the Denver Film Festival has been manufacturing since 1978, making it one of the oldest film festivals in America — and every October it proves that nearly five decades of practice has only sharpened the dose. The 49th edition runs October 22 through November 1, 2026, across ten days and multiple venues in downtown Denver including the Ellie Caulkins Opera House and the Sie FilmCenter. More than 140 new films from countries across the globe screen for 27,000 attendees, joined by over 50 international filmmakers, directors, and actors who stick around for Q&As, panel discussions, and the kind of bar conversations that only happen when someone has just watched something that rewired them. If you're the kind of person who watches the Sundance lineup announcement with genuine excitement — who texts friends about a documentary trailer, who has opinions about aspect ratios — this festival is worth the flight. The programming spans narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and experimental work, all selected with the curatorial rigor that comes from doing this longer than most festivals have existed. Red carpet presentations run alongside industry workshops, filmmaker receptions, and networking events that feel less like industry and more like congregation. What to know before you go: Denver in late October is crisp and gorgeous — layers are mandatory, the light is golden, and the brewery scene means the post-screening nightcap is never the hard part. Single tickets, multi-packs, and festival passes are available at denverfilm.org. Book early — the marquee screenings sell out, and the best discoveries are in the slots you didn't plan for. The Sie FilmCenter runs year-round if you need a preview. The Denver Film Festival matters because it's proof that nearly fifty years of showing up, every October, in the same city, for the same reason — to sit in a dark room with strangers and feel something together — is enough to build a tradition that outlasts every trend, every platform, every algorithm. The films change. The experience doesn't.

13th Los Angeles Black Film Festival 2026

Daily

11 Gathering

14 days away

11 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

13th Los Angeles Black Film Festival 2026

Every day · Next Oct 22 The Actors Company LA, 916 N Formo…

The story you carry does not look like the stories that get greenlit. The protagonist is too specific, the neighborhood too real, the ending too honest for a studio to touch. A hundred films have almost told it, and the distance between almost and exactly is the loneliest distance in cinema. The Los Angeles Black Film Festival exists in that gap. Thirteen years running, LABFF takes over The Actors Company in West Hollywood from October 22 through 25 — four days of independent work by Black filmmakers that the mainstream circuit will not surface for another two years, if it surfaces them at all. Shorts. Features. Documentaries. The kind of films where the director is standing in the lobby afterward because they made it with their savings and a borrowed camera and they need you to understand why it matters. The Let Live Theater and Other Space Theater at 916 North Formosa hold maybe a hundred people each. That is the point. At this size you do not just watch the film — you meet the person who made it. Parking is free on site and in the surrounding neighborhood. October 22 through 25, 2026. Screenings at The Actors Company, 916 North Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood.

The Oldest Person in the World with Sam Green in conversation

Coming Soon

14 days away

The Oldest Person in the World with Sam Green in conversation

In 14 days · Oct 22 Vidiots MUBI Microcinema, 4884 Eag…

Somewhere on earth right now one person is the furthest anyone has gotten. When they go, the title moves to a stranger, and the whole record of human time shifts one seat down without ceremony. Thinking about that too long does something to you - it makes a Thursday feel both unbearably short and strangely survivable. Sam Green builds films about exactly this kind of vertigo, and he builds them to be experienced in a room rather than alone on a laptop; his work has always treated an audience's simultaneous presence as part of the material. He will be there afterward, in conversation, somewhere under fifty seats. This is not a movie you put on. It is an hour you agree to spend with other people thinking about the arithmetic of a life, and then walking out onto Eagle Rock Boulevard slightly rearranged. Thursday, October 22 at 7:00pm, in the microcinema.

Coming Soon

14 days away

7 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Wanna Play? Chucky Rave w/Crux My Heart

In 14 days · Oct 22 1720, 1720 E 16th St, Los Angeles,…

You know exactly which friend to send this to. The one whose entire personality from September onward is horror movies, who has opinions about which sequel was underrated, who has been building a costume since August. This is a Chucky-themed rave, and the joke is that it is not a joke — the bass music scene and the horror scene in Los Angeles have overlapped for years, same people, same aesthetic, same relationship to things being a bit too much on purpose. Dubstep and drum and bass all night, Crux My Heart on the bill, a room full of people who committed to the bit completely. 1720 is a warehouse in the Arts District with the kind of sound system that makes a novelty night stop being a novelty about twenty minutes in. The Thursday before Halloween weekend is the sleeper slot. Everyone saves themselves for Saturday and misses the one where the people who really care show up. Thursday, October 22. Doors 8 p.m. 1720 East 16th Street.

Coming Soon

15 days away

Bluey's Big Play — Hollywood Pantages

Oct 23, 2026 From $35 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

The parents already know: the cartoon dog show that plays on loop in your living room is somehow making you cry over a game of keep-away, and now there is a version your kid can watch happen in front of them, in a room, with the lights down. Bluey's Big Play brings the animated series to the stage for the first time ever, using puppetry and live performance to extend the world of Bluey, Bingo, Bandit, and Chilli beyond the screen. It is built specifically for children ages 2 through 7, but anyone who watches the series regularly knows it rewards the grown-ups just as richly - and this production includes new material written just for the stage. Running time is about 55 minutes with no intermission, which is exactly right for the age group. Arrive early; the lobby experience is part of the fun. The Hollywood Pantages is a 1920s movie palace seating 2,700 on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue, accessible by Metro B Line (Red) at Hollywood and Highland Station. Parking is available in the adjacent Hollywood and Highland structure. The Pantages books family matinees all season, and the other parents in the lobby will tell you which ones hold up.

Coming Soon

15 days away

THE UNION / Male Tears

Oct 23 – Oct 24, 2026 The Monty Bar, 1222 W 7th St, Los …

Downtown bars that host a goth night usually do it once, discover the crowd drinks less than expected, and quietly stop. The ones that keep going do so because somebody behind the bar actually likes the music. The Union is one of the long-running LA darkwave nights, and Male Tears are the local act most likely to be playing when somebody from out of town asks what the scene sounds like now — synthpop bones, EBM muscle, vocals pitched somewhere between sincere and theatrical. The Monty is small and a little grimy and sits on West 7th where downtown starts turning residential, which is the correct setting; a goth night in a nice room feels wrong to everybody present. Nine at night on Friday the twenty-third of October. Black is not required, merely inevitable.

Coming Soon

17 days away

Bear Ghost – Tiny Hitman Tour 2026

Oct 25, 2026 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Theatrical rock made by people who are obviously having a wonderful time is deeply unfashionable and completely undefeatable in a live room. This Arizona band writes songs with narrative arcs, key changes that should not work, and a horn part when a horn part is funny — the sort of thing that finds its audience through video games, animation communities, and the general internet rather than through radio. Their crowd is young, extremely online, and knows the words to material that never charted anywhere. Expect the room to handle whole sections unprompted. Sunday evening in an upstairs Masonic hall in Highland Park, wood floors, no seats. Music at 7:00 PM at 104 N Avenue 56. Fandoms built in Discord servers and comment sections are the ones most likely to turn a normal concert into something closer to a convention, and that is the atmosphere here.

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

Daily

19 days away

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

Every day · Next Oct 27 2910 La Jolla Village Dr, La Jolla…

After 300,000 years on the clock, the Grim Reaper is finally done. The question is what happens when his daughter Diana discovers she would rather fall in love with life than carry on the family business. GRIM is a world premiere musical running at La Jolla Playhouse from October 27 through November 29 on the Mandell Weiss Theatre stage. It is irreverent, heartbreaking, and funny in the way only a show about death can be — because the people who made it clearly love being alive. The creative team has built something that feels like it was written for the person who ugly-cries at Pixar movies and then pretends they didn't. First look previews run October 27 through November 1, with the official opening on November 8. Performances run Tuesday through Sunday — the theatre is dark on Mondays. La Jolla Playhouse is the only authorized ticket seller. Subscriber packs of three or more shows start at $167 and include free parking and free exchanges. The Playhouse has premiered more than 30 productions that went on to Broadway, including Jersey Boys and Come From Away. GRIM is the kind of show you see before it leaves San Diego — and then tell people you were there first.

Italo-Disco Horror Night - Argento's Deep Red

Coming Soon

19 days away

Italo-Disco Horror Night - Argento's Deep Red

Oct 27, 2026 Vidiots at the Eagle Theatre, 4884…

Giallo and italo-disco came out of the same country in the same decade, and almost nobody thinks to put them in one room. Argento's 1975 picture is the one with the Goblin score, the murder glimpsed through a window by a man who cannot trust what he saw, and a colour palette that makes no logical sense and perfect emotional sense. A DJ spins italo before the film and again after it, so you dance, then you watch somebody get killed to what is essentially a prog-rock lullaby, then you dance again — and the second dance feels different, which is the joke and also the point. It screens in a restored Eagle Rock movie house that still runs 35mm and keeps a thirty-six seat microcinema down the hall. Doors open ninety minutes before the picture, because the first set is not a warm-up act. Horror obsessives and record collectors end up finding each other in the lobby, which is not something either scene planned on. Doors six, picture seven-thirty, Tuesday the 27th of October, at the old Eagle Theatre on Eagle Rock Blvd.

Improvement Movement – Your Perfect Real LIVE '26

Coming Soon

22 days away

Improvement Movement – Your Perfect Real LIVE '26

Oct 30, 2026 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Billing a show as a specific one-off rather than a tour stop usually means somebody has built something for the night that will not exist again, and those are reliably the better tickets. Whatever the staging turns out to be, the underlying material sits in the melodic, slightly theatrical end of guitar music, and the audience for it is local and invested enough to turn out on the Friday before Halloween when the whole city has other options. That competition is the interesting part; a room that fills anyway on a night like that is a room full of people who chose it deliberately. Highland Park's upstairs Masonic hall, wood floors, balcony. Music at 8:00 PM at 104 N Avenue 56. One-night productions are how bands at this scale make a case for themselves, and the people who show up are the ones who already believed it.

Coming Soon

22 days away

9 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Pop Crypt : Crypt Cube

Oct 30 – Oct 31, 2026 1720, 1720 E 16th St, Los Angeles,…

Some music sounds like a pop song being fed through a shredder, and the people who love it spent their formative years online rather than outside. Hyperpop is less a genre than a shared childhood. Pop Crypt is one of the LA parties built for it — PC Music lineage, pitched vocals, songs that fall apart on purpose halfway through, and a crowd where the average age is low and the outfit commitment is extremely high. The scene grew up on Discord and SoundCloud, which means the room is full of people who have talked to each other for years and are meeting in person for the third or fourth time. Halloween weekend is the natural home for a scene this theatrical. The warehouse on East 16th does not do subtlety. Nine at night on Friday the thirtieth. Dress like you mean it.

Coming Soon

22 days away

DESIRE w: Mothermary // Johnny Jewel

Oct 30 – Oct 31, 2026 Pappy & Harriet's, 53688 Pioneerto…

The producer whose fingerprints are on most of the last fifteen years of cinematic synth music rarely appears on a bill under his own name, which is what makes this particular lineup worth the drive. Everything he touches sounds submerged — drum machines, French vocals, melodies that suggest a film that was never made. Adding a sibling duo whose work sits in the same humid territory turns it into a showcase for one specific aesthetic rather than a single set. The high desert at the end of October, cold outside, a wooden room with a patio, is an almost absurdly good setting for music this atmospheric. Music at 9:30 PM in Pioneertown, the night before Halloween. The synth and goth crowd treats this weekend out here as an annual pilgrimage, and the parking lot looks like it.

Coming Soon

23 days away

Parra For Cuva at The Bellwether

Oct 31, 2026 $35+ The Bellwether, 333 S Boylston St,…

Halloween does not have to mean a warehouse and a headache. Parra For Cuva, the German producer who turned downtempo and organic house into something genuinely cinematic, closes out October at the Bellwether with a set built for people who want to feel the night rather than survive it. His music is all texture and patience -- strings, breath, a beat that arrives like weather -- the rare electronic act you could just as easily sit and cry to as dance to. The Bellwether is a gorgeous new room just west of downtown, purpose-built for exactly this kind of enveloping sound. Come dressed as whatever you want; nobody will out-costume the music. It is a quieter, deeper way to spend the strangest night of the year. Let it carry you somewhere.

Coming Soon

23 days away

Desire

Oct 31, 2026 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Halloween in this city is not really about costumes for a certain crowd; it is about the one night when dressing the way you already want to dress requires no explanation. Music built out of drum machines, French-accented vocals and synth lines that sound like a film score to a movie nobody made is the natural soundtrack to that, and this project has been supplying it since the height of the last synth revival. The producer behind it has an unmistakable signature — everything drenched, nothing rushed. Live it is more physical than the records suggest and the room tends to arrive dressed. Highland Park's upstairs Masonic hall, wood floors, balcony above, a late door. Music at 8:30 PM at 104 N Avenue 56 on Halloween night. The eastside goth and synth crowd treats this particular night as an annual meeting, and it looks like one.

The Creepy Creeps, Mistress 77, Widows, Rey Wolf

Coming Soon

23 days away

The Creepy Creeps, Mistress 77, Widows, Rey Wolf

Oct 31, 2026 Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd, San Die…

Halloween as an adult is usually a bar charging eleven dollars to watch strangers in store-bought costumes look at their phones. You have done that version. It is not the one you remember wanting. The alternative is a room where the band is also in costume and has been for twenty years. The Creepy Creeps play monster-movie garage surf in masks, which is the sort of commitment that stops reading as a gimmick somewhere around the second song and starts reading as a genuine belief system. Three more acts behind them, so the night has actual shape instead of one set and a DJ. Doors at eight, first band at nine. Four bands on Halloween night means you will be there until it is November. Saturday October 31, Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd. Wear something. The horror-punk corner of this city is small, permanent, and considerably older than you would guess from the crowd.

Medium Build — The King of Having Fun Tour at Observatory North Park

Coming Soon

25 days away

Medium Build — The King of Having Fun Tour at Observatory North Park

Nov 2, 2026 The Observatory North Park, 2891 U…

You know that feeling when the whole room is moving and nobody rehearsed it — when the bass line picks up and two hundred strangers decide at exactly the same moment that tonight is the night they stop being careful. Medium Build makes music for that moment. Nick Carpenter built this project in a garage in Boise and turned it into something that fills rooms coast to coast with people who never heard the word 'indie-folk' and don't care. The live show is a sweaty, theatrical, grinning mess — brass instruments nobody expected, singalongs nobody planned, and a drummer who looks like he's having more fun than anyone in the building. The Scratch opens. Monday nights at the Observatory have a different energy than the weekend — smaller crowd, louder per capita, everyone there on purpose. If you've never heard either act, that's the point. This is the kind of Monday night that makes Tuesday morning feel like a badge of honor. Monday, November 2, 2026 · Doors 7 PM / Show 8 PM · The Observatory North Park, 2891 University Ave, San Diego, CA 92104 · All ages · Tickets via Ticketmaster

Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes 2026 — New York, NY

Coming Soon

🌎 Nation's Best 27 days away

Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes 2026 — New York, NY

Nov 4, 2026 $50+ Radio City Music Hall, 1260 6th Av…

Thirty-six women breathe as one body and something in you stands at attention too. The kick line begins and the arithmetic of it — 36 legs, one sound, one beat, zero margin — bypasses your brain entirely and goes straight to the part of you that believes in things. The Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes returns to Radio City Music Hall for the largest production in the show’s 93-year history: 230 scheduled performances from November 4 through January 4, ten show-stopping Rockettes numbers, and the iconic Parade of the Wooden Soldiers — performed every year since 1933, red-and-white soldiers executing military-precision choreography before their famous falling-dominoes finale. The 2026 season marks a new performance record for the Music Hall, with more shows than any year since the Christmas Spectacular debuted. If you are the kind of person who tears up at the first note of “O Holy Night” in a room full of strangers, this show was built for you. If you think holiday spectacles are corny and overpriced, this is the one that changes minds — not because it avoids sentimentality, but because it earns every second of it. The Rockettes are not a nostalgia act. They are 36 of the most technically precise dancers working today, performing at a synchronization level that professional sports teams study. First-timers are routinely stunned by the scale: the 90-minute runtime with no intermission feels like 30 minutes, and the stage effects — a full-size double-decker bus, indoor snowfall, a living Nativity with live camels — are architecture, not gimmicks. Arrive at least an hour early. Late entry is not permitted, and the walk through Rockefeller Center in November is half the experience. First Mezzanine center gives the best full-stage view — the kick line hits differently when you see all 36 at once. Orchestra center rows F through N put you at eye level with the precision footwork. Tickets start at $50 at the box office, $55 online through Ticketmaster or rockettes.com. Weekday matinees are the value play. Dress festive, wear comfortable shoes, eat before you go. Radio City Music Hall is the largest indoor theater in the world, and the Christmas Spectacular is its reason for existing. Every year, more than a million people walk through those Art Deco doors and sit in the dark with strangers and come out feeling like they belong to the same season. That is not a show. That is a civic ritual, and it runs from November through the first days of the new year because some things do not need to be new to be necessary.

Coming Soon

17 Gathering

27 days away

17 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Coronado Island Film Festival 2026

Nov 4, 2026 Coronado Island (Hotel del Coronad…

You keep running into the same director at the coffee cart. By the third day it stops being a festival and starts being a small town that happens to be showing movies, and the conversations outlast the credits by a wide margin. That is what an island does to one of these. Everything sits inside a walkable village staged around the old hotel, so there is no crush, no shuttle between venues, no rope keeping the person who made the thing away from the person who just watched it. The documentary slate is genuinely strong — the kind of programming a small festival can gamble on because it is not trying to fill two thousand seats. Five days in early November, a short stroll from the beach, in the shoulder season when the island quietly belongs to itself again. Send this to the friend who would rather talk to one filmmaker for twenty minutes than fight a crowd for a premiere.

San Diego Asian Film Festival 2026 (SDAFF)

Coming Soon

28 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 28 days away

28 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

San Diego Asian Film Festival 2026 (SDAFF)

Nov 5 – Nov 14, 2026 Reading Cinemas Gaslamp 15, 701 5t…

You sit down in a 200-person theater for a film you could not have seen anywhere else in the country, and the director is in the seat next to you, waiting to talk about it when the credits roll. That is not a rare accident at this festival — it is the rule. For anyone who cares about Asian cinema, this is the most direct path into the full range of what is being made across a dozen countries and cultures, not just the handful of films that reach wide US release. The San Diego Asian Film Festival is one of North America's most significant Asian and Asian American film festivals, presenting over 100 films across ten days from November 5–14. Since 1999 it has been the destination for Asian cinema that has not yet found a theatrical home — often the first place American audiences discover films that later surface in awards-season conversation. Ten days of screenings run across multiple San Diego venues, from world premieres to retrospectives of Asian cinema classics, with real depth in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and South Asian film, plus narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and animation. Filmmaker Q&As are frequent, and the atmosphere is simultaneously cinephile-serious and community-celebratory. For Asian Americans it is one of the few film events where seeing yourself, your family, and your cultural reality onscreen is the rule rather than the exception. Many films here will not be available anywhere else in the US until months later, if ever. Festival passes offer the best value if you plan to see more than three films — single tickets sell out quickly for high-demand titles, and popular films at the main venue fill within hours of the programming announcement. The Opening Night Gala is a social event as much as a screening, and the Programmers Picks section is where to start if you are overwhelmed by choice. SDAFF runs at a moment when Asian and Asian American storytelling has moved from niche to center. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Past Lives, Minari, and the global dominance of Korean film and television have created an audience hungry for more. The festival has been feeding that hunger for 27 years. The mainstream finally caught up.

DOC NYC 2026 — America's Largest Documentary Film Festival — New York, NY

Coming Soon

🌎 Nation's Best 34 days away

DOC NYC 2026 — America's Largest Documentary Film Festival — New York, NY

Nov 11, 2026 IFC Center, 323 6th Ave, New York,…

Every November, Manhattan becomes the center of nonfiction storytelling. DOC NYC — America's largest documentary film festival — returns to the IFC Center and partner venues for its seventeenth year, screening more than two hundred films that range from intimate personal portraits to sweeping investigations of the systems that shape how we live. World premieres sit alongside retrospectives. First-time filmmakers screen in the same program as Oscar veterans. The Q&As after the screenings are not polite formalities — they are the room processing what it just saw, together, with the person who made it standing right there. True crime, climate, sports, music, politics, family — the range is the point. If you care about the world and you want to see it through eyes that are not your own, this is the room. The festival has steadily grown into the definitive showcase for nonfiction storytelling in the United States. It is where the films that will be nominated for Academy Awards in February get their first public screenings in November. The in-person component runs for ten days across Manhattan, with an additional ten days of online access for anyone in the country who wants to participate from home. A single all-access pass opens every screening — no hierarchy, no red carpet separating audiences from filmmakers. What makes DOC NYC different from other film festivals is scale married to intimacy. Two hundred films across ten days means you could see three or four a day and still miss most of the program. But the venues are small enough that you will share an elevator with the director whose film just wrecked you, and the conversations that happen in the lobby between screenings are half the experience. The online extension means geography is not a barrier — someone in San Diego can watch the same film as someone who just walked out of the IFC Center, and both reactions count. November 11-19, 2026 (in-person) and November 11-29 (online). IFC Center and partner venues, Manhattan, New York City. The IFC Center and its partner rooms keep programming documentaries the rest of the year, and the same crowd argues in the same lobbies.

Daily

35 days away

28th LA Indie Film Festival 2026

Every day · Next Nov 12 Let Live Theater, 916 N Formosa Av…

The 28th LA Indie Film Festival runs November 12-15 at Let Live Theater, and it exists because independent cinema needs rooms where the audience comes to find something they did not know they were looking for. Four days of features, shorts, documentaries, and first films by directors whose names you have never heard -- and at least one of those names will matter in five years. The festival sits at the intersection of scrappy ambition and genuine craft. Filmmaker Q-and-As follow most screenings, and the crowd splits between industry people scouting and civilians who just wanted to see something that was not made by a committee. There is no red carpet. The popcorn is real. The films are the kind you tell one specific friend about afterward. Let Live Theater, 916 N Formosa Avenue in the Fairfax district.

Daily

35 days away

Kafka's Letter to His Father

Every day · Next Nov 12 UCLA Nimoy Theater, 1262 Westwood …

He wrote dozens of pages explaining to his father exactly how the man had shaped and frightened him, and then never sent it. Anyone who has drafted a message like that at two in the morning and deleted it before dawn knows the whole architecture: the scrupulous fairness, the rehearsed accusations, the way you argue both sides because you already know how it ends. Hermann Kafka never read a word. It survives only because Franz kept it, which is its own kind of admission. Staged across three nights at UCLA's Nimoy Theater, a converted Westwood movie house rebuilt as a room that seats a few hundred, the piece puts a roomful of strangers in the position of the reader that letter never found. That is the uncomfortable part, and the reason to go with somebody you can talk to afterwards. 8 PM from November 12 through the 14th, 1262 Westwood Blvd.

Coming Soon

37 days away

Stop Light Observations

Nov 14 – Nov 15, 2026 Pappy & Harriet's, 53688 Pioneerto…

Charleston is not a city anyone expects a rock band to come out of, which is roughly why the one that did has such a peculiar sound — southern rock bones with gospel harmony and a willingness to be theatrical that most bands their size avoid. They have built the following almost entirely regionally and through live performance, which is why they can fill rooms in places where the records never got played. The live show is bigger than the recordings, with the harmonies doing most of the work. Out in a high desert saloon on a Saturday night, with the doors open and a patio crowd, it takes on a looseness a theater would not permit. Music at 9:30 PM in Pioneertown. Regional bands who never crossed over nationally have the most devoted audiences in music, and the rooms show it.

Coming Soon

40 days away

The Damned

Nov 17, 2026 $45+ The Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd, L…

The first UK punk band to ever release a single went on to invent goth, psychedelia, and horror-rock all at once, then outlived every peer who burned out: half a century on, The Damned are still snarling. Dave Vanian in his vampire finery and Captain Sensible in his beret still lead one of the most gloriously theatrical live bands alive, tearing through Neat Neat Neat, Smash It Up, and Grimly Fiendish for a crowd spanning every generation of British-music obsessive. Tuesday, November 17, 2026, the Wiltern in Los Angeles. Come for the punk fury, stay for the eerie, gorgeous goth anthems that made them legends twice over. Wear black, bring the friend who owns every Damned pressing, and witness a band that has outlived and out-cooled everyone. Five decades in and still untouchable. This is punk and goth history, alive and snarling.

Coming Soon

41 days away

San Diego Gulls vs Bakersfield Condors

Nov 18, 2026 $18+ Pechanga Arena, 3500 Sports Arena …

Somewhere on that ice is a kid who will be in the NHL sooner than anyone expects and does not know it yet. That is the whole appeal of minor league hockey — everyone plays like their life is one shift from changing, because it is. Bakersfield brings Edmonton's prospects down, so both benches are full of players auditioning in real time. It is fast, it is loose, and the mistakes are as interesting as the goals. A weeknight at Pechanga is the connoisseur's ticket: easy to get into, cheap enough to decide over dinner, and close enough to the glass that you can hear what they say to each other out there. Pechanga Arena on Sports Arena Blvd, on a November weeknight. Duck out of the middle of your week and go watch somebody's career turn over in front of you. It costs about what a movie does and you will be describing it far longer.

Anime Weekend Atlanta 2026 — Atlanta, GA

Coming Soon

20 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 42 days away

Anime Weekend Atlanta 2026 — Atlanta, GA

Nov 19 – Nov 22, 2026 Georgia World Congress Center, Bui…

The American South's longest-running anime convention has been meeting in Atlanta every September since 1997. Anime Weekend Atlanta is where the Southeast's anime fandom comes to recognize itself. Walk the AWA floor on a Thursday night and the energy hits immediately: cosplayers in elaborate handmade builds line the escalators, artist alley tables overflow with original prints and fan art, and the programming halls pulse with AMVs, panel debates, and late-night gaming tournaments that run until 3 AM. The dealers room is legitimately staggering — vintage merchandise, imports, rare figures, and indie creators all packed into a space where you could spend a full day and still miss things. The masquerade on Saturday night is one of the most theatrical cosplay competitions in the country, drawing contestants who have spent months on a single build. AWA moves differently than the mega-cons: it feels less like a trade show and more like a reunion — because for thousands of attendees, it genuinely is. If you grew up watching anime in the South and never found your people, AWA is the answer. This is not for casual fans who think anime is just Naruto and Dragon Ball. It is for people who obsess over seasonal charts, debate subculture lore, and have a hard drive full of unfinished cosplay plans. First-timers frequently describe AWA as the con that finally felt like home. If you are that person — the one who learned Japanese from subtitles and named a pet after a character — this is worth every flight mile. Book your hotel at the World Congress Center Marriott before August or it will sell out — AWA attendees treat the hotel block as sacred and it fills months in advance. Badge pickup lines on Thursday afternoon are brutal; opt for pre-registration and arrive before noon. The dealers room has no ATMs inside — bring cash, bring more than you think you need, and budget for at least one impulse figure you did not plan for. The programming schedule releases about six weeks before the event and fills fast; panel rooms cap out, so plan your must-see events 30 minutes early. The loading dock area outside Building C is where the best spontaneous cosplay photo shoots happen after dark. It is the convention that proved the South has always had its own thriving fan culture — it just needed a room big enough to hold it. AWA 2026 runs November 19-22 at the Georgia World Congress Center, Building C, Atlanta. The Southern con circuit keeps going the rest of the year in far smaller hotels, and the same people build costumes for all of it.

San Diego Environmental Film Festival 2026 — UC San Diego

Daily

43 days away

San Diego Environmental Film Festival 2026 — UC San Diego

Every day · Next Nov 20 Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic …

The ocean doesn't lobby. The kelp forests off La Jolla don't run ad campaigns when they collapse. And the people who spend their lives documenting what is happening to the natural world — the filmmakers who wade into wildfire zones and dive into dying reefs — rarely get a red carpet. This weekend, they do. The San Diego Environmental Film Festival returns to UCSD's Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts with three days of films you will not find on any streaming platform: stories about water, land, creatures, and the people who still believe the fight is worth having. The campus kickoff on Friday features surf punk band KOCEAN at CHE Cafe. Saturday is the community gathering. Sunday night brings the red carpet showcase. The screenings are flanked by filmmaker panels, local food, and the kind of conversations that happen when a room full of people actually care about the same thing. This is not a lecture. It is the room where the people who have not given up find each other. Co-sponsored by the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, John Muir College, and Environmental Studies at UC San Diego. The arguing carries into the courtyard afterward, where the rest of it happens.

Three Days Grace: Alienation Tour with I Prevail — Viejas Arena, San Diego

Coming Soon

43 days away

Three Days Grace: Alienation Tour with I Prevail — Viejas Arena, San Diego

Nov 20, 2026 Viejas Arena at Aztec Bowl, San Di…

The lights drop. The bass hits first. And for two hours, every person in Viejas Arena gets to be exactly as angry as they actually are. Three Days Grace and I Prevail together is a co-headliner built for the crowd that discovered rock music when it felt like a lifeline — and never stopped needing it. The Alienation Tour is named for the feeling, and the setlist is designed to burn through it. TDG brings twenty years of anthems that never left rotation. I Prevail brings the metalcore energy that makes the floor move in waves. The Funeral Portrait opens and sets the tone early — dark, theatrical, and loud. Viejas Arena at SDSU is an underrated rock venue — small enough that the sound stays thick and fills the room, loud enough that the student section makes it feel like a festival. November in San Diego means the night air carries the bass through the parking lot long after the house lights come up. Friday, November 20, 2026. Doors 6:00 PM. Show 7:00 PM. Viejas Arena at Aztec Bowl, San Diego State University.

Coming Soon

53 days away

The Meteors

Nov 30, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Psychobilly is a genre almost nobody stumbles into by accident — you get handed it, usually by one person, usually around sixteen, and then it stays. This is the band that invented it, in England, in 1980, out of rockabilly played too fast and horror movies watched too often. The rule their following adopted decades ago is that only the band matters and politics stay outside, which produced one of the most stubbornly self-contained scenes in music. Forty-odd years on the founder is still leading it and the upright bass is still doing the heavy lifting. Rooms for this are full of quiffs and people who have flown in. The San Diego bar on El Cajon Boulevard is small, dark, and exactly the correct scale. Music at 8:00 PM, doors an hour earlier, twenty-one and over. Monday nights in this city are usually dead, and the people who fill one for a band like this all know exactly who else is going to be there.

Dickens on the Strand 2026 — Galveston, TX

Coming Soon

🌎 Nation's Best 57 days away

Dickens on the Strand 2026 — Galveston, TX

Dec 4, 2026 The Strand Historic District, 2100…

You have read the book. You have seen every adaptation. You have never walked through it. Galveston's Strand Historic District becomes Victorian London for one weekend every December — gas lamps flickering on cobblestones, carolers in top hats singing to nobody in particular, roasted chestnuts from a cart that has been in the same spot since before you were born, and costumes so committed that the century genuinely slips away underfoot. This is not a themed pop-up or a mall activation. This is a city that decided more than forty years ago to become a novel and has done it every December since, the way a church holds Christmas Eve — because it would not feel right to stop. Friday evening is free, Fezziwig's Friday, named for the only employer in fiction anyone would actually want to work for. Saturday and Sunday open the full festival with handmade goods from artisans who build things by hand the way they were built in 1843, festive holiday markets lining the historic iron-front buildings, street performers who could make Scrooge smile, and the kind of magic that exists precisely because nobody is trying to sell you anything except the feeling of being somewhere else, somewhere slower, somewhere that smells like clove and woodsmoke. The Strand district itself is the stage — a National Historic Landmark lined with Victorian iron-front commercial buildings that survived the Great Storm of 1900 and now host galleries, shops, and restaurants year-round. During Dickens weekend, every storefront becomes a character in the novel. Ticket holders get access to Saturday and Sunday events including live theatrical performances, roaming Dickensian characters, handbell choirs, brass bands on street corners, and a Victorian-era marketplace where the vendors are as much in costume as the crowd. Kids get their own Tiny Tim adventure zone. The food is period-correct where it can be and unapologetically Gulf Coast where it cannot — because this is still Texas, and nobody is giving up their shrimp po'boy for authenticity. The entire weekend is walkable, the architecture is real, the crowd is in character, and by Sunday afternoon you will catch yourself wondering why you ever stopped believing. The Strand Historic District, 2100 Strand St, Galveston, TX. December 4–6, 2026. Friday free, Saturday–Sunday ticketed.

Coming Soon

57 days away

Shrek Rave

Dec 4, 2026 Boardner's by La Belle, 1652 N Che…

At some point in the last few years the internet decided, collectively and without a vote, that an ogre from 2001 was load-bearing. You know this. You have participated in it. What you may not have processed is that it escaped the internet entirely and became a thing you can physically attend in Hollywood, in costume, at ten at night, with several hundred people who made the same decision you did. The thing nobody warns you about is how committed the costumes get. This is not a novelty-headband crowd. People arrive painted green. There are full Lord Farquaads. And because the premise is unserious, everyone is unusually kind — the social anxiety that governs a normal club floor cannot survive a room where the funniest outfit wins. Musically it is throwback anthems and singalongs rather than anything challenging, which is the correct call. Photo ops run all night, costumes are expected, and it goes ten PM to two AM. Friday December 4 at Boardner's by La Belle on North Cherokee, presented by Club Decades. Tickets through club-decades.com. You already thought of the one friend who would lose their mind at this.

Sleepless in Seattle in Concert — San Diego Symphony at The Rady Shell

Coming Soon

64 days away

Sleepless in Seattle in Concert — San Diego Symphony at The Rady Shell

Dec 11, 2026 The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 124…

Near the end of the movie, Sam stands on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and the camera holds on his face for three full seconds before Meg Ryan appears. In those three seconds, the orchestra carries everything the character cannot say. You've heard it through speakers a dozen times. You've never heard it performed by a live symphony while the film plays on a screen overlooking the San Diego bay. The San Diego Symphony performs the complete score of Sleepless in Seattle at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — Marc Shaiman's arrangements, the Nat King Cole needle-drops, the Jimmy Durante moment that lands harder than it has any right to. The orchestra sits between you and the screen, and the score exists in the room as a physical thing, vibrating in the air, rather than a signal compressed into a speaker. Every romantic movie you've ever watched alone on a couch prepared you for exactly this feeling, and none of them prepared you for how different it is when you can see the violinist's face. One performance only: Friday, December 11, 2026 at 7:30 PM. The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 1245 Seventh Ave, San Diego. Tickets via the San Diego Symphony box office.

Coming Soon

14 Gathering

65 days away

14 {# Rendered ALWAYS and hidden below the threshold, never omitted. An element that is absent at 0 cannot be repainted when the reader makes it 1 — that is why the card's count used to sit stale until a reload. falkorPresence (base.html) owns the text from here. #}

Elf - The Musical

Dec 12, 2026 $40+ Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

Buddy the Elf, in all his maple-syrup-on-spaghetti, smiling-is-my-favorite glory, gets the full Broadway treatment, and for a certain kind of family the Will Ferrell movie has become as load-bearing a Christmas tradition as the tree itself. Elf - The Musical brings that manic, sweet, deeply quotable holiday joy to the stage of the Hollywood Pantages, with big song-and-dance numbers and a heart as gooey as a candy-cane forest. It is pure, uncynical December fun, scaled for kids but written so the parents laugh too. Elf - The Musical plays the Pantages on Saturday, December 12, 2026, in Hollywood off the Metro B Line. Wear the ugly sweater, make it the kickoff to your holiday season, and come remember that the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — Live in Concert with the San Diego Symphony

Coming Soon

65 days away

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — Live in Concert with the San Diego Symphony

Dec 12, 2026 The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 124…

You already know the ending. You've seen Kevin outrun the Sticky Bandits a hundred times. You've memorized the face he makes at the concierge, the Plaza Hotel lobby, the way the pigeon lady turns out to be the bravest person in the whole movie. None of that matters, because you've never heard John Williams' score performed live twenty feet from your chair while the film plays on a screen the size of a building. The San Diego Symphony performs the complete Home Alone 2 score at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — outdoors, under the December sky, with the bay behind you and Williams' orchestral arrangements filling the kind of open air they were always meant to fill. The brass hits different when there's no ceiling. The strings hit different when you can see the cellist's bow. The moment Kevin walks through a snowy Central Park and the full orchestra swells beneath it — that's the moment you understand why people keep coming back to this format. You already knew the movie. You didn't know the music. This is a holiday tradition built for the person who watches Christmas movies year-round and the person dragged along by them. Both leave converted. One night only: Saturday, December 12, 2026 at 6:00 PM. The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 1245 Seventh Ave, San Diego.

Leaving Falkor