The COR of Belief

For 40-plus years, the Community of Reconciliation has shown how faith can bring us together -- and how hard that really is

• by Chris Potter

A Burning Disparity

Pittsburgh has just 11 female firefighters and hasn't hired a new one this century

• by Melissa Meinzer

Sobering Defense

What's the best defense when you kill someone while driving drunk? Try being a terrible driver when you're sober.

• by Adam Fleming

Blog Role

New site seeks to turn bloggers into citizen journalists

• by Chris Young

High Note

Used instruments have new songs to play

• by Robert Isenberg

Popped Art

Does the city have more art than the economy can support?

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Sausalido

Casual but refined dining is part of the youthful transformation of Bloomfield.

• by Angelique Bamberg and Jason Roth

New Amsterdam

Fancy cocktails and frog's legs herald a new sort of bar on Butler Street.

• by Melissa Meinzer

Butch Walker rises from the ashes with the introspective Sycamore Meadows

"It doesn't do any good to try to turn a pop diva into Bob Dylan."

• by Aaron Jentzen

Locals Seven Color Sky release full-length Goodbye to Gravity

If anything, such '80s inflections are more in fashion now, which could bode well for Seven Color Sky.

• by Aaron Jentzen

Mystery man Blank Dogs performs at Howler's this Sunday

Blank Dogs always covers his face with a mask or sheet, thereby retaining complete anonymity, a la The Residents.

• by Manny Theiner

Forward-thinking local band Drugdealer releases Tits EP

"Our first couple shows, we were really noisy and a bit too loud, but we're starting to get better in controlling that."

• by Manny Theiner

The Pittsburgh Jewish-Israeli Film Festival

The annual festival offers 22 films from Israel and around the world representing Jewish experiences from the comic to the dramatic to the inspirational.

• by CP Staff

The Watchmen

Zack Snyder tackles Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' influential graphic novel, set in an alternate 1985 during the Cold War. In it, a group of outlawed costumed crime-fighters try to track down a killer, and confront world annihilation. The award-winning novel was lauded for its dense multi-generational histories, overlapping narratives and meta-commentary that operated as a deconstruction of the superhero and his medium, comics. Snyder works very hard to be faithful to the original text while still delivering a coherent film experience for both newcomers and fans. But ultimately, Snyder's slavish desire to get it all in becomes more distracting than satisfying, and the hurly-burly nature of the film gives short shrift to the irony, reflection and sense of impending doom that should hang over the story. Admittedly, this film does offer more intricate plotting and off-beat, cynical material than your standard caped-hero actioner. But it has little of the novel's heady, gut-punch impact. [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

The Class

Laurent Cantet's two-hour film covers one school year at a junior high in a tough Paris neighborhood, focusing on one teacher and his class of 13-year-olds. The youngish teacher -- François Marin (François Bégaudeau) -- is dedicated, spirited and open to less-conventional instruction techniques; his students are a mixed batch in background, ethnicity, enthusiasm and equanimity.

The Class plays like a documentary, though in fact it's a meticulously constructed hybrid of fiction and fact. The characters, all non-actors, essentially play themselves, including Bégaudeau, whose book about teaching inspired the film. Through ongoing workshops, Cantet, Bégaudeau and the students hashed out the film's framework, scenarios and key dialogue exchanges. Still, much of the film retains a loose, you-are-there feel.

Marin teaches French, and much of The Class is about language. Many of the story's conflicts spring from the inability to communicate effectively, and the frustrations that arise when a shared language doesn't necessarily guarantee a shared understanding. When using words to express themselves, the kids struggle -- and excel -- depending. For these streetwise children of immigrants, language is a potent component of cultural identity. They object to a complicated subjunctive construction, declaring it snooty and old-fashioned (and thus, pointless to them), yet draw easily from hybridized hip-hop slang.

It's hard to pinpoint what makes The Class so engaging: not much happens, and there are no easy-grab characters to root for. In some respects, the study is of a larger organism -- the class, or students and teacher within a larger authoritative construct. It's a dynamic environment where all participants are endlessly regrouping, learning and adapting, though not always for the best. It's an imperfect task for all, conveying and extracting knowledge out of chaos. (One girl quietly confesses that what she learned was that she had learned nothing; it's a heartbreaking admission, but still a legitimate experience.)

The Class is certainly an antidote to all those inspirational teacher-in-the-hood films. It's not that you won't quietly root for Marin or his frustrating kids, but there's no glossy overlay, no transcendental breakthrough moment and no uplifting ending. When summer comes, there's just the knowledge that everybody has made it through another year, hopefully improved. Because, outside of Hollywood, that's how it goes -- and this study of that process is illuminating. In French, with subtitles. Starts Fri., March 13. Regent Square (AH) [3 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Timecrimes

In this latest mind-bending cautionary tale, a middle-aged Spanish man named Hector (Karra Elejalde) finds his lazy afternoon at his country home interrupted by some strange sightings beyond his fence. Through his binoculars he spots a topless woman and a creepy-looking man whose face is obscured with pink bandages. But going to investigate leads to a time machine and -- you guessed it -- trouble of the increasingly confusing kind: Is Hector going into the future to fix the past, or going into the past to fix the future? Are either of these possible? Nacho Vigalondo's compact, small-scale thriller is reminiscent of 2004's sleeper Primer, another time-travel brain-buster that eschewed high-tech bells and whistles. The sci-fi here is cerebral, and the tension derives from man's seemingly innate inability to manage time travel without becoming Godlike and/or screwing things up. Timecrimes is a simply produced puzzler-cum-morality-query with a resolution that mostly makes sense, and is a chewy bit of entertainment for those who don't mind a story looping in four dimensions. In Spanish, with subtitles. Starts Fri., March 13. Harris (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

At Wood Street, Chico MacMurtrie and Amorphic Robot Works find the architecture in nature.

Over a period of minutes, the birds flap their wings slowly and then randomly deflate, becoming moribund-looking husks that simulate life's foreshortened trajectory.

Painter and illustrator Arthur Szyk's obsession with Nazism fascinates.

Szyk's work was often macabre, even surreal, featuring pasty Hitlers marching beside monstrous S.S. soldiers, piles of grimacing corpses and winged Axis dictators buzzing through the air.

• by Robert Isenberg

This Just In: March 12 - 19

Highlights from the local TV news: Horsing around at the Carnegie.

• by Frances Sansig Monahan

Following republication of a collection confronting motherhood in wartime, poet Alicia Ostriker visits Pittsburgh.

In "Song of the Abandoned One," Ostriker writes, unflinchingly, in the voice of a mother who wants to "kill the baby," with its "rubber arms and legs and ugly doll face."

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Britain's acclaimed Ballet Boyz return for the first time since 2003.

"Sometimes they will be working together and sometimes against one another and trying to out-dance each other," says Trevitt.

• by Steve Sucato

Iolanthe

You can get musical satisfaction in a good early duet between Rachel Myers and the capable Justin Thomas Zeno, as Strephon, or in a charming second-act quartet.

• by Gordon Spencer

Playwright Mark Clayton Southers discusses I Nipoti, the latest in his "culture-clash" series.

While I Nipoti does offer some racial philosphizing, Southers intends it to be "just enough that someone will walk away with two things they didn't know before."

• by Bill O'Driscoll