A Sentimental attachment to Woody Allen's movies and a disgust at trial-by-Twitter make me want to consider Magic in the Moonlight outside all the Internet racket of Dylangate. Unfortunately, it's all about a middle-aged man trying to expose a young girl as a liar. This stuffy, creaky comedy, photographed in a runny pastel by Darius Khondji, concerns misanthrope British stage magician Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth). » Read More

The model for the Tate Taylor (The Help) biopic of James Brown, Get On Up is Walk the Line: the influence is there from the opening murky backstage roar of an off-screen audience waiting to be fed, to the easy diagnosis of childhood trauma to explain its subject's drug-abuse and coldness. (It's a little wrong to blame the crimes committed by a man pushing 70 on his inner child.) If Walk the Line saw the past as a sunny idyll, here Georgia is in the permafrost of the Depression and WWII—it's full of the fallen leaves and fog of a Civil War movie. » Read More

Late last year, Kyle Lambert had a big moment. The British visual artist became famous nearly overnight after uploading a time-lapse video of his frame-by-frame photorealistic recreation of a Morgan Freeman photograph. You may have seen the clip, which has more than 13 million views on YouTube. Seth Schalet, executive director of the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, saw the video, and he was blown away. It would have been one thing if Lambert had made the image using a variety of precision brushes, but the artist had used little more than his finger and an iPad. » Read More

As a photojournalist firmly dedicated to telling stories of global significance, Doug Menuez has borne witness to some incredibly difficult and terrifying things. He's seen people killed, has run toward raging forest fires and spent time in squalid drug dens. He and his fellow "hardcore" news photographers "were all willing to die to make a picture that would make an impact," Menuez says. » Read More

The hand-me-down clothes stuffed into a backpack and a black, scratched-up VCR, the only things she owned in the world, became her ticket out of foster care. With no cash, 13-year-old Sonya Pineida traded the video player for cab fare from a cramped Madera County house to a friend's home in Fresno. Away from the foster mom who treated her like a paycheck. Away from a father locked up in prison for life and a mother addicted to drugs. » Read More

Thanks to the San Jose-Dublin Sister City Committee, the 58th annual Sister Cities International conference will unfold in San Jose this weekend, featuring hundreds of officials, diplomats, youth and young professionals and business leaders from around the world. None of them know, however, the space-time continuum-shattering implications of including Dionne Warwick and Norman Mineta in the agenda on the very same weekend that the San Jose Earthquakes play the first sporting event at Levi's Stadium, the 49ers' new facility. » Read More