Arts

Back in 1958, when Mark Rothko was commissioned to do a series of murals for The Four Seasons restaurant in New York — a place he believed was "where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off" — his acceptance of the assignment was subversive at best. He hoped his art would "ruin the appetite of every son of a [beep] who ever eats in that room," according to a Harper's magazine article, "Mark Rothko: Portrait Of The Artist As An Angry Man."

The Peony Pavilion is one of China's most famous operas, but uncut performances of this romantic 16th century work can take more than 22 hours. Chinese composer Tan Dun, who's best known for his Academy Award-winning score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has adapted the work into a compact 75 minutes.

Otelo, a lanky, reticent 16-year-old, is standing on the beach outside Durban, South Africa, watching in disbelief and envy as his friend and periodic rival — the older, aggressive Mandla — does what Otelo has only heard of white people doing. Mandla is surfing.

"That's what people mean when they talk about freedom?" Otelo asks, half-heartedly trying to minimize what he's seen as Mandla, elation on his face, rides in on a wave.

Ungracefully aging rockers have long been stock figures of fun at the movies, with Bill Nighy topping the burnout charts in Love, Actually. Lately, though, a slew of former rock kings have enjoyed fresh renown via documentaries like Anvil, The Other F-Word and the upcoming Beware of Mr. Baker, many of which chart a Christ-like saga of meteoric rise, catastrophic fall and painfully slow resurrection. That's if their shot livers don't kill them first.

For those who had come to dread yet another installment of the Saw series and its ilk — not out of fear, but from boredom at the films' dull repetition of elaborate torture and murder methods — 2009's The Collector was a breath of if not fresh, then at least less stagnant air.

The latest movie from versatile Hong Kong director Peter Ho-Sun Chan has been given not one but two generic titles: In China, it's Wu Xia, which means "martial hero" and is the overall term for kung fu films; in this country, it's called Dragon, which has similar connotations.

George Higgins was a Boston-based crime novelist and former assistant U.S. attorney who wrote meaty, swaggering dialogue that seems tailor-made for the movies, though until now only one of his books had been made into one.

Director, producer and screenwriter Robert Zemeckis is known for the Back to the Future films — which marked his arrival onto the Hollywood scene in the mid-1980s — as well as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump. His latest film, Flight, stars Denzel Washington as William "Whip" Whitaker, a heroic airline pilot with a dark secret.