High Anxiety

Approaching the G-20 summit is an uphill climb for police and protesters

• by Marty Levine

Fall Arts Preview

Even after the street theater of the G-20 has ended, Pittsburgh will still offer plenty of drama ... not to mention dance, music and art. On the pages that follow, you'll find plenty of reason to take to the streets all season long.

Global Therapy

People's Summit brings dialogue about world's problems

• by Chris Young

Fall Arts Preview: Music

• by Aaron Jentzen

G-20 Activism

A list of events occurring during the summit

Fall Film Guide

• by Al Hoff

G-20 and beyond, there's plenty of art to go around this fall.

Artists with local ties provide many of fall's highlights.

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Stage companies lean toward the classics this fall.

Even troupes known for taking risks are connecting with tradition.

• by Bill O'Driscoll

This season in Pittsburgh, there's little reason to settle for just watching dance on TV.

Why not trade your remote viewing experience for a firsthand one?

• by Steve Sucato

Writers are talking nonstop this fall.

It won Canada's Griffin Prize for poetry, proving that honest assessments of U.S. policy are always appreciated -- in other countries.

• by Chris Potter

More Fall Arts Highlights

Café J

A comfortable setting for good Italian food -- and a couple of really great appetizers.

• by Angelique Bamberg and Jason Roth

New audio blog offers documentation of live music at Howlers Coyote Café

"Remember when you were at a show, and there weren't that many people in the room, but the band was really good?"

• by Manny Theiner

Jessica Lea Mayfield speaks her mind With Blasphemy So Heartfelt

"If people like it, they like it. And if they don't, they can suck it."

• by Chris Parker

Early Day Miners play Thunderbird Café, supporting new album The Treatment

Even on a pop record, Daniel Burton can't resist the call of nuance, in songwriting and production.

• by Andy Mulkerin

Lorna's Silence

Lorna, an Albania in Belgium, has married a junkie, hoping to get citizenship papers. She is also plotting to intentionally overdose him, so a further chain of payoffs and citizenship can occur. Most things happen to the characters in the second half of the film, and that's the problem: For about an hour, we watch Lorna grudgingly tend to her obligation, caring for her clingy ersatz husband through his withdrawal, and we wonder where the filmmakers are going. This sort of lean storytelling is a trademark of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Their gritty, gloomy, realistic work recalls many better and more emotionally balanced French films of the early 1970s, and over the years, it's sort of set the tone for the slice-of-life dreariness (generally, I mean that as a compliment) of Belgium's small national cinema. But Dardennes parcel out their plot points so sparingly that you begin to wonder if the actors even know what they're doing. If you can tolerate such haziness, Lorna's Silence has its rewards. The actors inhabit their roles in a way that compels you to watch, even if you don't know exactly what's happening. Of course, having context would deepen our attachment, not just to their emotions, but to the film's ideas about love and redemption that the Dardennes want to explore.  In French, Russian and Albanian, with subtitles. Starts Sat., Sept. 26. Harris (HK) [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Harry Kloman

Cold Souls

Our guide in Sophie Barthes' feature is a broody New York actor named Paul Giamatti (played by Paul Giamatti), who has is soul removed and stored, in order to feel better. Unbeknownst to him, there is a more troubling side of the soul-removal biz: a lively trade in the selling and illegal transporting of souls, run  by thuggish Russians. Caught in the middle is the mysterious Russian Nina (Dina Korzun), who smuggles souls within her own being. When Giamatti wants his soul back, it's gone missing; Nina intercedes, and the two travel to St. Petersburg, hoping to sort out all the misaligned souls. Barthes' film isn't as loopy (or maddening) as some of Charlie Kaufman's cinematic who-am-I-really ponderings, nor is it as smugly post-modern. Cold Souls has the air of a clinical sci-fi thriller, while remaining primarily a tweedy rumination about the nature of the soul. While Barthes treats this self-examination seriously, there's also an implicit bemused critique of our bourgeois obsession with our interior lives. Yet, the film also resonates with plenty of humor. Cold Souls does grow more dreamlike in the final reel -- right up to an enigmatic conclusion -- but rather than become solipsistic, Barthes hews to her relatively simple conceit of soul-removal, soul-swapping and, if you'll forgive the pun, soul-searching. What begins as a winky comedy about the self-absorbed ends as a surprisingly emotional affirmation of humanity. Making a theatrical debut with an existential broody comedy is a quite a leap, but Barthes has nailed her landing with this thoughtful yet entertaining feature. In English, and some Russian, with subtitles. Manor [3 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Liverpool

In this lean, slow-paced drama from Lisandro Alonso, a merchant marine named Farrel (Nieves Cabrera) returns to his home after many years at sea. Home is a remote spot deep in the mountains of Tierra del Fuego; it's not even a village, but a cluster of houses near a sawmill. There is virtually no dialogue (nor anything of substance), and only the merest suggestion of what motivates any of the blank-faced Farrel's few actions. Alonso's camera is mostly static, holding long shots of banal activities. Yet, the spare scenes accumulate, sketching in, if not quite a portrait of Farrel, then at least a few scattered snapshots. And within those frames, what's missing comes to feel more weighty than what we can see. Alonso's is an esoteric form of cinema, committed to a naturalistic purity, and stridently unconcerned with conventions such as narrative or even focusing on its main protagonist. As such, those looking for story are apt to find this film, even at 86 minutes, ponderous and frustrating. Those who have the patience to let Alonso's tableaux percolate in their minds may connect to the work's unvoiced meditations about absence, loneliness, estrangement and the ongoing muddle of life where perhaps nothing does, or can, change. In Spanish, with subtitles. Fri., Sept. 25, through Sun., Sept. 27. Melwood (Al Hoff) [2.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Love Happens

If you're not put off by the utterly generic title of this reputed romantic comedy from Brandon Camp, you may be undone by the dreary maudlin filler. This contrived tale of a professional grief counselor (Aaron Eckhart) still devastated by his own loss, who meets an agreeably quirky florist (Jennifer Aniston) is just a feeble rom-com mish-mash crammed onto the back of a postcard from Seattle. Most of the film is like being trapped in a self-help seminar you never signed up for. (If I really could move forward, I'd get up and walk out of the theater.) When we're not sharing and caring with grieving strangers, we're the third wheel on a couple of those silly only-in-the-movies dates. (If you've ever wanted to see Aniston pilot a cherry-picker, this is your chance.) What this film lacks in too-cute kids and fancy cupcakes, it makes up for with a mouthy parrot and a hookah bar. There's also a nutty bit with Martin Sheen as a sempre fi Marine that made me wonder if the actor had lost a bet with the director. So, to recap: lots of boo-hoo and a forced giggle or two; Eckhart looks good in expensive suits and Aniston wears a lot of cute wool hats; Martin, we hardly knew you -- and for me, that's about all that happened. (AH) [1.5 out of 4 stars]

• by Al Hoff

Tim Kaulen readies his giant scrap-metal toys for his Artist of the Year show.

"As much as I try to manage [the material], it manages you," he says.

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Summit Talk

An open message to the G-20 attendees

• by Chris Potter

This Just In: September 24 - October 1

Highlights from the local TV news: Jail Break!

• by Frances Sansig Monahan

Pittburgh n'@

Dispatches from the blogosphere: G-20 angst

I Write to the G-20 Leaders in Advance of Their Pittsburgh Summit

A poem by Richard St. John

The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century

• by Chris Potter

Dorothy in Oz

The show is lumpy, but it's mostly lumps of fun.

• by Michelle Pilecki

Over the River and Through the Woods

The Little Lake production is as every bit as big-hearted as the script ... maybe even more so.

• by Ted Hoover

Philadanco marks its 40^th anniversary with a new work that brings the funk.

"By Way of the Funk" celebrates funk music by recounting its roots and paying homage to its heyday in the 1970s.

• by Steve Sucato

A new music-theater piece attempts to tell what it's like to have Parkinson's disease.

"I fall every day!"

• by Bill O'Driscoll

Short List: Week of September 24 - October 1