Joyce Manor, Toys That Kill, and Guests @ Vera Project

Whoa! Toys That Kill are still a band! Formed from scraps of F.Y.P. and lead by Recess Records founder Todd Congelliere, San Pedro’s Toys That Kill have been making fun, sometimes-spazzy, sometimes-snotty punk/rock/pop since 1999. Do you like short songs with catchy hooks? Bands that kind of sound like Dillinger Four? Bopping around to sweaty three-chord merriment? Having a good time without thinking too hard about it? If any of those things sound like you, then this is your big mid-December excuse to leave your house and thaw the fuck out! EMILY NOKES

Andrew Hodges @ Town Hall

Boy, that Benedict Cumberbatch movie about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, is bad. It's so boring and generic. But you shouldn't hold that against the author of Alan Turing: The Enigma, who wrote the extensive biography on which the film is based. The book has a lot more information than the movie, and you computer nerds should turn out for this reading to see what the movie left out. (Spoiler alert: everything. The movie left everything out.) PAUL CONSTANT

Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Youth Code, and Guests @ Showbox Sodo

It’s fitting that this most industrial of lineups should be playing a gig in Sodo, that rusty husk of train graveyards and blight south of the stadiums. Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly need no introduction: As two of the biggest acts to emerge from the ’80s “electronic body music” scene, their legacy is assured. Listen to Puppy’s VIVIsectVI or FLA’s Gashed Senses & Crossfire if you really need proof (or just a refresher course). Of particular note this evening are the up-and-coming, angst-ridden Los Angelenos Youth Code, who’ve updated their forefathers’ caustic blend of dance, goth, and rock for our present era of apathy and nihilism, with sticky synth-pop hooks buried just underneath the skronking white noise and factory-floor drum-machine workouts. KYLE FLECK

Zero Motivation @ Varsity

One thing you don’t automatically associate with the Israeli Defense Forces is dry observational comedy. Nevertheless, that’s the key ingredient in this mordant, diverting cross between Three Kings and Reality Bites (with an unavoidable, aspirational sprinkling of Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. and maybe a maraschino cherry of Lena Dunham’s Girls on top). Writer/director Talya Lavie’s combination of the bureaucratic drudgery and genuine life-and-death threat pulls off the good trick of making the story of non-combat soldiers doing clerical work in a remote IDF camp feel simultaneously universal and specific, timeless and contemporary. There’s a humanistic charge in seeing what basically amounts to a slacker comedy (with some violence) play out against the backdrop of ideologically fraught and war-ravaged lands. But then, the privilege of thinking that anything even vaguely associated with Israel or Palestine can be free from ideological freight probably constitutes its own ideology, and since ideology is the enemy of art and of human discourse, this well-crafted and entertaining movie can’t help but offer a complicated experience. SEAN NELSON

The Homesman @ Sundance Cinemas

Tommy Lee Jones is one sneaky motherfucker. With hardly anybody noticing, and with only two theatrically released films, he's become one of the best directors working today—and arguably the best when it comes to westerns. First there was 2005's fantastic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, now there's the similarly outstanding The Homesman. Like Three Burials, The Homesman smooths over its pitch-black cynicism with a surprising amount of pitch-black humor—but there's no mistaking the film's central truth that life is hard and unfair and some of us aren't able to handle it. One person who's doing fine, though, is Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a spinster in the Nebraska Territory; independent and clever, Cuddy's also tough—so tough that when three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter) go crazy from the hardships of pioneer life, Cuddy volunteers to take them on the long journey to the more civilized haven of Iowa. Along the way—as he's hanging from a tree, a rope around his neck, about two seconds from dying—she finds the cantankerous Briggs (Jones), who grudgingly agrees to help. Even if all The Homesman had going for it was Rodrigo Prieto's striking cinematography and a slew of fine performances (Swank and Jones are phenomenal, while actors like John Lithgow, William Fichtner, Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, and the kid who played Landry on Friday Night Lights drift around the background), it'd be worth seeing. But there's more: A sense of weary, familiar melancholy soaks each gorgeous frame, while a hard-skinned, stoic determination fuels Cuddy, Briggs, and the film itself. See it, and hope that Jones is already working on another western. He's only directed two so far, and the world's a better place for them. ERIK HENRIKSON