Arne Glimcher’s discursive documentary, “Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies,” argues that films, from the earliest days of Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers, were a crucial formative influence on Modern painting, especially Cubism.

Using prolific visual comparisons, it tries to show how Cubism, founded by Picasso and Braque in 1907, supposedly translated the movies’ revolutionary portrayal of time, space and motion into fine art. Photography had already captured moments that might have eluded the eye. The movies enabled visual artists to freeze blocks of time and analyze them at varying speeds. In consciously anatomizing motion and adopting multiple perspectives, the documentary implies, the Cubists may even have been trying to co-opt the brash new art form.

“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” is filled with celebrated talking heads, including Martin Scorsese, who produced the film with Mr. Glimcher and Robert Greenhut; artists like Julian Schnabel,...

...All summer “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be relived through at least 50 events around the country, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that became a cultural touchstone and an enduring staple of high-school reading programs.

Its publisher, HarperCollins, is trying to tap into what appears to be a near-endless reserve of affection for the book by helping to organize parties, movie screenings, readings and scholarly discussions. The publisher has recruited Tom Brokaw and other authors to take part by reading from the novel — which tells the story of the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, who defends a black man accused of rape, and his family — in their hometowns.

Of course, there is also the hope that the events, which are scheduled to run through Sept. 22, will drum up more sales of the book. HarperCollins plans to issue four new editions of the novel next month, each with a different cover and all to be placed on special “Mockingbird...

The obsessive urge to get airborne unites the singing dreamers in “Take Flight,” an ambitious concept musical about the pioneering spirits of American aviation making its United States premiere at the McCarter Theater Center here.

On a windy Southern beach Orville and Wilbur Wright pore over physics statistics to a disjointed melody, their progress confounded by problems of equilibrium. Anxious to be the first to cross the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh fights off an array of competitors who trade vaudevillian turns. Amelia Earhart sings ardently of emotional rebirth as she defies convention in her bid to become the first woman to defy gravity, Lindy style.

The separate but sympathetic quests of these famous figures have been stitched together to create a musical collage of dream chasing by three notable theater talents: the composer David Shire, the lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. and the book writer John Weidman, who collectively have logged plenty of hours...

You could listen to a lot of dry lectures by a lot of windy history professors and still not learn as much about race issues in the century after the Civil War as you do in “A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School.”

This hourlong film by Dave Davidson, Monday on PBS, seems on the surface to be a simple documentary: the history of an all-black school in Bordentown, N.J., that existed from 1886 to 1955. But by the time the story is told, you have come to see the school as a microcosm of all the good intentions, misguided theories and veiled prejudice that have made equality so elusive for so long....

Sounds like a laudable idea: establish a residential school where black educators could find employment and black youths could learn in a safe environment, free of the harassment by white students and teachers they might encounter at an integrated school. And Bordentown established itself as a model institution that emphasized discipline and personal...

The German actor Ulrich Tukur brings an understated intensity and psychological depth to the title role of “John Rabe,” a sweeping historical film that exalts a largely unsung real-life hero who risked his life to do the right thing. Rabe, a Nazi German industrialist stationed in China, is credited with saving the lives of more than 200,000 Chinese during the infamous 1937 massacre in Nanking (now Nanjing) in the second Sino-Japanese war. In a matter of weeks, the Japanese slaughtered at least 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war and committed mass rape.

The German director Florian Gallenberger has made Rabe the central figure in an old-fashioned historical epic that covers much of the same territory as the 2007 documentary “Nanking,” in which Rabe (pronounced RAH-bay) is mentioned. Because its hero was a “good Nazi” who courageously acted on his humanitarian impulses, “John Rabe” has a lot in common with “Schindler’s List.” But despite its gruesome scenes of hundreds...

Who exactly were the men who planned and administered the Nazi crimes? The new "Topography of Terror" documentation center opened on Thursday in Berlin at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. It reveals the faces of the almost unknown perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The index cards cover an entire wall, several hundred of them in pink, beige or green, containing names, dates of birth and handwritten notes. They are the details of some of the 7,000 former employees of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the amalgamation of the feared SS paramilitary group and Gestapo secret police force -- the men who worked at the very epicenter of the Nazi terror regime.

Sixteen of these thousands of cards that were collected by investigators in Berlin in 1963 jut out from the wall, representing the only former employees of this terror headquarters who ever faced prosecution. And three of these cards are raised further -- showing the trio who were eventually...

Hawaii's 19th-century colonization by the U.S. forms the intriguing backdrop for "Princess Kaiulani," a stirring romantic drama centering on the last royal heir to the native line of traditional monarchs.

Film

Retitled since screening as "Barbarian Princess" last year at the Hawaii International Film Festival, where it won the audience award, this independent film is attractively cast and produced with a distinct specialty luster. It's likely to appeal particularly in West Coast and island markets as well as to art-house patrons who appreciate period romance. The Roadside Attractions release opens May 14.

By the late 1880s, the independent kingdom of Hawaii, undermined by the influence of large American sugar companies, is struggling to maintain control of the islands' political and economic fate. Childless King Kalakaua (Ocean Kaowili), whose mixed-race niece, Princess Kaiulani ("The New World's" Q'orianka Kilcher), is...

As part of a slate of new shows, the "X-Men" creator will co-host "Stan Lee's Superhumans," which will find people whose genetic differences have given them remarkable abilities. Daniel Browning Smith, dubbed the world's most flexible man, will host the series with Lee.

"Superhumans" will debut on the network during the third quarter and is joined by five other series and a slew of specials being greenlighted in time for the network's "upfront" presentation to advertisers this week.

History's previously announced miniseries "The Kennedys" and its U.S. version of "Top Gear" are expected to be the headliners of the network's presentation, but the network also has a trio of new reality shows from prolific "Ice Road Truckers" producer Thom Beers....

Monday night at Lincoln Center in New York City, early-music expert Jordi Savall is taking his audience back to ancient Jerusalem.

But this project is different from the work that has earned Savall acclaim for resurrecting forgotten music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

The Jerusalem project spans six centuries — right up to the present day — and the clash of cultures and religions that has torn the city apart.

Savall says he doesn't believe in formal religion, but that there's something about Jerusalem — endlessly destroyed and rebuilt in a quest for sacred power — that calls forth the spiritual. Even in its topography, in the rise of its stony hills.

"Jerusalem is a city that makes you feel you are very close to the heavens because the clouds, they are very close," Savall says. "The city is in a high space, and you feel in a very different situation than anywhere else in the world."

Savall has...