Arts & Events

Opens October 30 at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas

Taking in Jafar Panahi's relaxed manner and sweetly smiling face, you wouldn't judge him to be an enemy of the state. You might not take him to be a world famous film director, writer and producer either. The truth is, Panahi is Iran's most renown film artist. The rest of the truth is deeply ironic: most Iranians have never seen his work. It's been banned.

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This week, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, Le Bateau Ivre welcomes The Dazzling Divas. -more-

Free Concert on Sunday

On their first Main Stage program of the season, concertmaster Robin Sharp takes center stage to perform Leonard Bernstein's 1954 Serenade, inspired by Plato's famous symposium on the nature of love. An earlier experiment in sound and color was Claude Debussy's 1904 Danses Sacrée et Profane, written for harp and strings. Three short, captivating works for multiple percussionists round out this wide-ranging program.

Benjamin Simon, conductor, Robin Sharp, violin, Meredith Clark, harp

Sunsay, Oct 25, 3pm @ First Congregational Church, Berkeley -more-

Opens October 23 at the Century 9 and Sundance Kabuki in SF

Opens October 30 at the Shattuck Landmark in Berkeley

As if Jeb Bush didn't have enough to worry about, Sony Pictures has started airing TV commercials reminding America that his brother, W, "may have gone AWOL from the military," "He never even showed up." The ads are promoting a new movie called Truth that examines how George W. evaded serving in Vietnam and how a CBS exposé wound up taking down the most respected journalist in America.

Screenwriter and first-time director James Vanderbilt signals his intensions from the first scene: Get ready for some intense verbal clashes in a high-stakes clash between political power and the First Amendment. The film starts with a combative meeting between embattled 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and her attorney. Blanchett quickly gets ticked off and angrily pops a Xanax. It's a Blue Jasmine moment. Like her Oscar-winning performance in Woody Allen's 2014 film, this is Blanchett in another rip-roaring, pedal-to-the-metal, emotional road-race. Robert Redford (as iconic CBS anchor Dan Rather) is just along for the ride.

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Celebrating their 20^th Anniversary as a group, the Cypress String Quartet opened their 2015-16 season with two concerts at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall in their salon series. The first concert, on Friday, October 16, featured String Quartet No. 6 by George Tsontakis and Beethoven’s majestic Op. 130 Quartet, which latter was performed with its original finale, Die Große Fugue. For the second concert, which I attended on Friday, October 23, Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 1 Quartet replaced the Tsontakis and was followed after intermission by the Op. 130 Quartet. -more-