Growing a Solution

Homewood residents are using community gardens to stop illegal dumping

• by Adam Fleming

Building a Movement

Parkour is growing by leaps and bounds, but the sport's toughest obstacle might be defining itself.

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Activism: Group at odds with PDP over Market Square meals for the homeless

An anarchist group that provides weekly meals to the homeless says one of its recent dinner services was halted by police officers called to Market Square by the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership.

• by Diana Fisher

LGBT Issues: Expanded Pride Week kicks off

While a romp and parade in the streets might be the most obvious parts of Pride Week's celebrations, it's certainly not the only aspect of next week's ramped-up festivities. The festival of pride and visibility for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folks, in past years a one-day march with a gathering at the end, has been extended to 10 days (officially a week, with pre- and post-week events) of programming.

• by Melissa Meinzer

Hoi Polloi

Fresh veggie fare to please all palates.

• by Colleen Van Tassell

Tandoor

A new Indian restaurant spices up a familiar menu.

• by Angelique Bamberg and Jason Roth

Local newcomers Thee Adora deliver with second show

"It's called that because I wrote it in the bath."

• by Aaron Jentzen

Red House Painter Mark Kozelek performs at Diesel

Kozelek's appeal, on the other hand, is that he seems to always sing to himself.

• by Aaron Jentzen

Singer-songwriter Jaymay offers prime mixtape material

"People think, 'Oh, it's just a girl singing about love,' and it's like, well yeah."

• by Margaret Welsh

Mates of State hit the road with new album and progeny in tow

It might look strange on paper, but it's the stuff of pop bliss.

• by Mike Shanley

Experimental improv duo Black Forest/Black Sea performs at ModernFormations

The music appeals on a visceral level, creating emotional moments and ideas without relying on an assumed musical metaknowledge.

• by Andy Mulkerin

L7's Donita Sparks plays 31^st Street

The blue hair's gone.

• by Chris Parker

Before the Rains

Set in rural 1937 India, Santosh Sivan's prettily filmed drama treads the familiar ground of melodramas set in colonial lands, whereby the interests of the privileged white and the seemingly accommodating natives brew betrayal, and worse. Briton Henry Moores (Linus Roache) owns a tea plantation, and is dallying with his Indian housekeeper, Sajani (Nandita Das). Both are married to others, and Moores' right-hand man, T.K. (Rahul Bose) is entrusted with the secret – and the gift of new gun. Before the Rains lays out a predictable journey for its few protagonists, sprinkled with ample, and easily decode, metaphors. With little character development, there is scarcely any emotional impact of what amounts to devastating events. Produced by Merchant-Ivory, Before does offer the high gloss one expects from that production house. All light is late-afternoon golden, colors pop from the screen, linen jackets are wrinkled just so, and the camera moves languidly through lovely, lush scenery. In English, and Malayalam, with subtitles. Starts Fri., June 13. Manor (AH) [2 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

The Flight of the Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's film takes place in a rarified world of cultural elites, and yet, these characters face everyday issues. Actress Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) is a single mother, who hires Song (Fang Song), a young filmmaker, as a nanny for Simon (Simon Iteanu), her mop-haired son. Red Balloon, which is set in Paris, is Hou's first non-Chinese film. It's French in every way -- especially in that early New Wave way, where deeper issues percolate among quotidian routines. But it's also very Chinese: symbolic, ponderous, slightly classical. I admire filmmaking like this -- intelligent, meticulous and decidedly non-commercial -- even if watching it can be a chore. This is art about art (about art?), like a mirror held up to itself. Binoche is especially fluid and open in her performance, and the film has an eerie, almost dreamlike quality, despite its slice-of-life story. In French, with subtitles. Starts Fri., June 13. Manor (HK) [3 out of 4 stars]

• by Harry Kloman

You Don't Mess With the Zohan

If you've never seen an Adam Sandler movie before, you might chuckle once or twice, particularly if your tastes run to the low-brow. For those of us who have endured the entire Sandler oeuvre, Zohan will likely inspired this puzzler: How can somebody with so little talent bank so much money making the same film over and over? Cue Sandler's go-to character, a funny-voiced man-child, here Zohan, an Israeli anti-terrorist agent who just wants to cut hair and make life "silky smooth." Per the formula, add an impossibly gorgeous love interest (Emmanuelle Chriqui); a cartoon villain (John Turturro as The Phantom, an Arab terrorist); endlessly repeated jokes about hairy crotches, disco and sex-starved old ladies; a dozen, cheaply played ethnic stereotypes; a supporting role for Sandler's deeply unfunny best bud Rob Schneider; ring announcer Mike "Let's get ready to ruuuuummmmbbbblllle" Buffer, in his first dramatic role; and, as Razzie-ready bonus, the gloriously wooden Mariah Carey, who can't even play herself. Zohan is a mostly lazy Sandler vanity project meant to impress us with its wacky jabs at Arab-Israeli relations, and directed, like many of its antecedents, by Dennis Dugan: Attend at your own risk. (AH) [capsule review] 1.5 stars

• by Al Hoff

The Witnesses

In the early 1980s, a young gay man named Manu (Johan Libéreau) joins the tight-knit trio of Parisians -- an older doctor (Michel Blanc) and a married couple (Sami Bouajila and Emmanuelle Beart) -- and good times and benign bed-hopping ensue. But the uninvited guest in Andre Techine's drama is a mysterious, new deadly virus; after Manu acquires the "gay plague," the gang's already tenuous relationships take a rough hit. The film's AIDS-specificity feels personal, if somewhat dated, but in many ways, this is another playing out of navel-gazing individuals undone by unexpected death, with an added splash of disease-of-the-week. (Blanc's doctor jumps instantly into AIDS research, which generates talky medical-info scenes.) The ensemble cast is meant to offer varied individual responses, as well as to illuminate how AIDS, in essence a social disease, could ripple across friends and families, even those left uninfected. But the film's studied effect of pinpointing history and enshrouding it a retroactive nobility mutes what should have been raw emotions: fear, anger, guilt, anguish. Techine gets points for ultimately being life- (and sex-) positive, and Blanc and Bouajila give fine performances as Mamu's alternating lovers. In French, with subtitles. Mon., June 16, through Thu., June 19. Harris (AH) [capsule review] 2.5 stars

• by Al Hoff

Modern Revival

Finding a Modernist gem in an unlikely place

• by Charles Rosenblum

Was there a baseball field that the Pittsburgh Pirates played in before Forbes Field in Oakland?

Question submitted by: Bob Crytzer, Coraopolis

• by Chris Potter

This Just In: June 12 - 19

Highlights from the local TV news: Heat wave!

• by Frances Sansig Monahan

Historic Photos of Pittsburgh

• by Chris Potter

Making -- and writing -- "the carbon-free home," with author Stephen Hren.

"We do a lot of daily management of sunlight," says Rebekah Hren.

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Take Me Out

Take Me Out is a rendezvous of pro sports and live theater -- a tryst rarely seen -- and the results are majestic.

• by Robert Isenberg

The Color Purple

Celie's journey from darkness into so much light can only, I think, be done justice with music.

• by Ted Hoover

How to Write a Play

It's rather like playing a warped 45 at 33 rpm: It hits many notes, but misses a few and throws off the rhythm.

• by Michelle Pilecki

Unseam'd Shakespeare revives a stage work based on touchstone steel-town novel Out of This Furnace.

"I wanted the people who the story was about to see the play."

• by Melissa Meinzer