Approaching Wes Anderson's mostly delightful The Grand Budapest Hotel can give you the foreboding you feel when encountering the word "artisanal." It's seriously under-femaled, and it pauses to congratulate itself for its cleverness. At worst, Anderson is a director of ducky films, but this nested story of Central European skullduggery seems to have more of a spine than anything he's made since Fantastic Mr. Fox. » Read More

The switched-baby melodrama has been dormant for some time now. One of cinema's great living kid-wranglers, Hirokazu Kore-eda, brings the once popular genre to life in the overlong, occasionally poignant Like Father, Like Son. As always, Kore-eda is capable of subtle, tender moments, but the too-stark contrast between the victimized families oversimplifies his story. » Read More

A subject no less than life in all of its complexity is the focus of a new exhibition by Katherine Levin-Lau, at artist-owned and -operated art store/gallery The Arsenal. "I want it to be curious," Levin-Lau says, referring to her intensely colorful, collage-like interpretations of the detritus of the natural world. A native of upstate New York, Levin-Lau moved to Santa Barbara as a child. She gleaned early inspiration from local Westmont College, peeking around unlocked science buildings, taking in the vast array of natural oddities on display. » Read More

Inside the Triton Museum, the lights will be dimmed for Beverly Rayner's art reception. Seemingly a hundred antique artifacts-conjuring and spell-casting devices, mesmeric and illusionist tools, spirit photos, divination equipment, levitation and witchcraft gear, plus items related to alchemy, mystical matters and seances-now occupy one of the galleries at the Triton. The exhibition, titled "Beverly Rayner: Museum of Mesmerism & Psychic Art," opens this weekend. » Read More

It's standing-room-only at the Kaiser Permanente Arena, and the atmosphere inside is decidedly high-voltage. The hometown Santa Cruz Warriors are taking it to the visiting Reno Bighorns in an NBA-Development League battle, up by 15 points in the final minutes of the third period. The "D-League," as it's popularly referred to, has quickly become the best bang-for-your-buck ticket in professional Bay Area basketball. » Read More

Identification tags tend to hang when they're attached to human beings. A piece of string runs through an eyelet, so that a piece of paper stamped with a number can simply hang off the person's clothing, limbs, luggage or whatever it's tied to. One usually sees such tags attached to dead corpses in morgues. However, in the case of 120,000 American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who were forced to live in internment camps after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, they were forced to wear identification tags. » Read More

Dinner and wine with friends. Snow-and sledding. Stark, wide-angle winter landscapes. As Uneasy Lies the Mind opens, it's a string of familiar moments: snapshots that could have turned up on Facebook, posted by a friend who's in Tahoe for a few days. The saturated colors, darkened edges of frames and washes of overly warm or cold tones blend into a blown-out, lo-fi look that confers a patina of instant nostalgia, like Instagram shots come to life. And that's not far from the truth. » Read More