Driving in a New Direction

At WQED and public TV stations nationwide, programmers are rethinking their approach to pledge drives.

• by Andy Mulkerin

County Council: Bill would strap guidelines on trade with foreign companies

A bill pending before Allegheny County Council would require the county executive -- prior to making any deal that permits or requires international shipments to or through Allegheny County -- to obtain assurances that none of the cargo has "been manufactured or is intended to assist in the violation of human rights of any individual."

• by Adam Fleming

Film: Despite criticisms, 48-Hour Film contest coming back with few changes

Pittsburgh's first-ever 48-Hour Film Project is back for a second year with a few minor changes.

• by Chris Young

Love Street Treats

Delicious, sweet treats are also good for you.

• by Melissa Meinzer

Leonard's Living Room

This South Hills venue features Italian-American old-favorites fare.

• by Angelique Bamberg and Jason Roth

Local Abstract on Black label expands beyond Pittsburgh

A Pittsburgh label striving for recognition in the wide world is admirable, but what about a local connection?

• by Manny Theiner

Modey Lemon offers stop-and-think moments on Season of Sweets

While it's nearing the 10-year mark as a band, Modey Lemon manages to avoid falling into too comfortable a routine musically.

• by Andy Mulkerin

Alt-country's unlikely heroes the Waco Brothers play the Warhol

"We were a bunch of punk rockers who didn't know how to play country, so we approximated things."

• by Manny Theiner

Lizz Wright sings the blues at the Three Rivers Arts Festival

Most of the songs were co-written by Wright with singer-songwriter Toshi Reagon and rendered in stark acoustic atmospheres.

• by Aaron Jentzen

Derek White and The Monophobics were born to boogie

I'd like it a bit better if the band found its own sounds to pet, but it's a massively tuneful way to start the summer.

• by Aaron Jentzen

Godspeed! progeny Thee Silver Mt. Zion rocks to its own clock

There's no disputing the musicianship melding tribal freak-folk intensity, rumbling rock drums and prog's orchestral adventurism into evocative set pieces that maintain momentum despite their knotty nature.

• by Chris Parker

Standard Operating Procedure

The film seeks to provide the context for understanding how this aberrant behavior could have occurred, while simultaneously querying the "truthfulness" of an image. To this end, Morris interviews those who were directly involved, including the soldiers who took and/or posed in the photos. SOP asks us to consider the elusive truth of photography, but it might as well be about the dubious nature of first-person accounts. If this is your first Iraq doc, you'll likely find SOP to be profoundly disturbing and potentially eye-opening. But, for battle-hardened consumers of myriad books, films and television programs about the various failures of the Iraq mess and the related war on terror, SOP feels both late to the table and inadequate. Still, Morris' film is open-ended enough that each viewer may take away something different from the rumination and eyewitness accounts. [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Sex and the City

Michael Patrick King's film catches up with the four fashionable best gal-pals, who are now variously married, settled and sort-of looking. The big news is: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) are getting hitched. At its best, Sex and the City is funny and touching, just like the TV series, and pleasingly familiar to its fans. At its worst, it's five episodes strung together, like a holiday-weekend "marathon." The acting is uniformly strong, and each supporting star has a moment or two. Parker, of course, gets many more. She runs the gamut beautifully, and Noth, so often without charm or depth as Big on TV, finally gives us reason to see why Carrie loves him. [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Harry Kloman

The Fall

In a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, an injured and depressed movie stuntman named Roy (Lee Pace) tells a fellow patient, a little immigrant girl (Catinca Untaru), a fantastical yarn about a group of idiosyncratic avenging bandits. Fiction and reality become easily intertwined -- Roy is doped up, the child brightly imaginative -- with characters and events inside the hospital popping up in the epic, visually spectacular fairy tale. Tarsem Singh's (The Cell) film is wildly self-indulgent, with more cinematic verve than plot. Both narratives have a hazy, dream-like quality that is occasionally spiked by a bit of swordplay or a wry aside; also incorporated is an homage to the magical qualities of early motion pictures that unfortunately grows ham-fisted. The final reel takes a dark turn that makes The Fall less suitable for young kids, but viewers of all stripes will goggle at the gorgeous, color-saturated imagery, stunning costumes and real-life exotic locales. AMC Loews (AH) [capsule review] [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Land of Confusion

In March 2004, National Reservist Jeremy Zerechak was mobilized to Iraq, and naturally the Penn State film student packed his camera. This document of his unit’s year-long deployment was shot on the fly, but there’s some great stuff amid the film’s hang-loose feel. Zerechak has a keen eye for capturing the droll absurdity of the mid-winter training the unit endured in New Jersey, and you can sense his director’s delight when he learns the unit’s plum assignment: As part of the Iraq Survey Group searching for WMD, they’ll travel all over the country and interact regularly with Iraqis, whose opinions and experiences Zerechak works to capture. The story flags somewhat toward the end, though it’s hardly Zerechak’s fault that his unit didn’t find any WMD, and his crew were lucky to have missed the worst of the growing insurgency. Land is a clear-eyed snapshot of a year that began in hopeful confusion and ended in bitterness, and with no more clarity. Some of Zerechak’s fellow reservists carp about being misrepresented by the mainstream media, but films such as this give soldiers their own voice. Zerechak will present the film, to be followed by a Q&A. In English, and some Arabic, with subtitles. 8 p.m. Wed., June 11, only. Harris (AH) [capsule review] [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Viewing China through Cao Fei's "Whose Utopia" at the Carnegie International.

Even without a question mark, Cao's title is inherently confrontational: It indicates that this is neither her idea of utopia, nor that of the workers who live under it.

• by Savannah Guz

The Three Rivers Arts Festival tries something new: single-artist galleries in curbside shipping containers.

"Nobody wanted to be naked!"

• by Bill O'Driscoll

From cage-fighting photos to environmental sculpture, SPACE gets diverse with the seven artists in Pittsburgh Now.

Hosking's contribution feels poetic, a narrative unfolding, about the everyday, everywhere, things we see, repeatedly, but usually fail to notice.

• by Janera Solomon

Exhuming the Truth

A final ruling on Bodies comes too late

• by Chris Potter

Letters to the Editor: June 4 - 11

Feedback from our readers: CP barks up the wrong tree on police dogs ... a libertarian diagnoses our story on health care.

This Just In: June 5 - 12

Highlights from the local TV news: Yet another "House of Filth."

• by Frances Sansig Monahan

Eastburn Avenue

They mix speech and song like ingredients in a cocktail, and the effect is intoxicating.

• by Robert Isenberg

Bust

She has a wonderful way of summing up people with tiny gestures and slight changes of voice and posture.

• by Ted Hoover

Duck Hunter Shoots Angel

Albom's play is really just a boatload of laughs.

• by Ted Hoover

The Arts Festival and barebones productions step to the plate with a stage drama about a baseball star who steps out of the closet.

Were it for real, the fictional Lemming's coming-out as an active professional athlete wouldn't be this production's only first.

• by Bill O'Driscoll