NYT > Arts

Hundreds of artifacts are being prepared for the opening on Tuesday of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, a $9 million branch of the Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

It’s love at first look instead of first bite in “Twilight,” a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set.

The problems confronting the sprawling, anxious, compulsively talky Texan clan of 1987 in “Dividing the Estate” will be familiar to many American families at the moment.

“Art and Love in Renaissance Italy” at the Metropolitan Museum promises romance, desire, expensive gift items and possible sex in the land of Romeo and Juliet and delivers on all counts.

“Beyond Babylon,” a big, prescient, concentration-taxing exhibition, is the latest in the museum’s illustrious line of panoramic archaeological shows.

“Chinese Democracy” is the Titanic ship of rock albums: It’s outsize, lavish, obsessive, technologically advanced and, all too clearly, the end of an era.

When the National Museum of American History reopens, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution.

Kiefer Sutherland is back as Jack Bauer in “24: Redemption” on Sunday on Fox, but the title is a bit misleading.

A short poem about Calvin Trillin’s new book, which tells the story of the 2008 presidential election in light verse.

Faced with a severe financial crisis, officials of the Museum of Contemporary Art have had talks about a possible joint venture or merger with several other Los Angeles institutions.

The fleet’s in this weekend, at least on 55th Street, where a radiant production of “On the Town” has docked at City Center through Sunday.

“Pour Your Body Out,” a site-specific installation by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, is arguably the first project to humanize the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art.

The actress pushed for favorable coverage while negotiating magazine rights to pictures of her new twins.

Stephen Colbert is delightful, a few of the song parodies are clever, but over all, the show is too long and more than a little strained, much like the holiday specials it mocks.

Christian Hoff has his first shot at a major leading role with the lead in Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Pal Joey.”

The whimsical “Jester of Tonga” is a rare example of puppet theater about bad investments.

Marianne Weems gives a sleek multimedia look to Harry Sinclair’s drama about the creation of a social-networking site.

“Les Écailles de la Mémoire,” an exploration of black identity, has perfect timing politically speaking, but is only intermittently compelling to watch.

The bimonthly series tend to feature young composers who disregard the classical-pop divide. Wednesday’s installment was a showcase for the violist Nadia Sirota and the guitarist Andrew McKenna Lee.

The multimillion-selling band from Oklahoma performed an entertaining set of blues rock and power ballads to the willing crowd at the Nokia Theater on Wednesday.

The band seamlessly connected the dots between emo and early 1980s soft-rock in their show at the Roseland Ballroom on Wednesday.

“Bolt” is at once a knowing, satirical sendup of the Hollywood fame-and-fantasy machinery and a sleek product of the Disney-Pixar industrial complex.

When Sissy Spacek speaks her clichéd lines in the mediocre screenplay of “Lake City,” her delivery lends them a resonance that is not in the written words.

“The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” is quiet, contemplative and impressionistic, which makes the story it has to tell all the more powerful.

“Special” puts an indie spin on the current Hollywood vogue for moody superhero psychodrama.

Plugging the same two actresses into different Sapphic scenarios may be a valid filmmaking strategy but it can be an extremely boring one.

he CW network has canceled its low-rated Sunday lineup and ended a $15 million deal with Media Rights Capital, the company that produced the shows.

The News Corporation announced Thursday that Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of Fox News, had signed a new five-year contract with the company.

“Were the World Mine,” an indie alternative to Disney’s “High School Musical” franchise, is a small, endearing film.

Martín Ramírez at the American Folk Art Museum, “I Am a Man” at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Zaha Hadid at Sonnabend and more.

After the recent drop in auction prices, artworks that were once out of reach for museums have suddenly become affordable again.

Kentshire Galleries is hosting a selling exhibition of Chinese export porcelain in its Manhattan shop at 700 Madison Avenue, at 62nd Street.

Mr. Gertz was a prolific though often uncredited B-movie composer whose melodies haunt a spate of pictures with words like “Hell,” “Thing” and “Creature” in the titles.

Mr. Finkel was a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped illuminate the function of poetry itself.

The Tanglewood Music Festival, the annual summer arts celebration in Lenox, Mass., has announced its 2009 program.

The Broadway production of “American Buffalo” has posted a provisional closing notice and is likely to end its run on Sunday, a publicist for the show said.

A British court that nearly had to settle for video testimony from Michael Jackson will instead receive him in person.

Patricia Cornwell, the best-selling author, has made a commitment of $1 million to the Harvard Art Museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies.

The Rockefeller Foundation has announced the recipients of its New York City Cultural Innovation Fund awards, which will give a total of $2.7 million to 16 cultural organizations.

While the détente continues between Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama, normal relations have yet to be restored between Mr. McCain and the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne.

“Criminal Minds” and “CSI: NY” led CBS to another victory in the ratings on Wednesday, according to Nielsen’s estimates.

Laura Linney has been named the host of “Masterpiece Classic,” a spinoff of the PBS series “Masterpiece Theater,” which was divided into three different shows in 2007.