San Francisco Chronicle: Entertainment

If it’s noir and the title is “Free and Easy,” you know it’s going to be anything but. The film is actually an absurdist farce set in a remote northern corner of China, and director Geng Jun’s film won a special jury award for cinematic vision at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

When her voice student Bernie Dalton was diagnosed with bulbar-onset ALS — an aggressive disease that affects swallowing, speech and respiration — San Francisco singer-songwriter and vocal instructor Essence Goldman made it her mission to bring his songs to life.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Wagner had written three operas before tackling “The Flying Dutchman,” but that vivid, darkly Romantic tale of love and redemption is where you can first hear him coming into his full artistic persona.

For the teenagers performing, it’s often their first professional, paid theater gig. For their much younger audiences, some not much older than toddlers, it’s often their first theatrical experience, period.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Each year, the David Brower Center in Berkeley honors an environmental advocate with the Art/Act Award and an accompanying exhibition. This year’s awardee is the late conservationist Doug Tompkins.

In addition to being an avid photographer, Tompkins founded the North Face Inc.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

A bunch of clean-cut white guys — dressed all in white, to drive the point home — sing “We are Africa!” The dramaturgically unsound founding myth of the Mormon religion finds fitting analogues in “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings.”

15:17 to Paris: The real heroes from Sacramento play themselves in this film based on their bravery in thwarting a terrorist attack on a train to Paris. Clint Eastwood directs.

There is a space at the heart of “The Third Muslim” reserved for Numair Abbasi, a Pakistani artist whose art frequently includes nude male bodies. His work, however, does not hang there.

Ed Sheeran has added a handful of dates to his previously announced 2018 stadium tour, including a stop at San Francisco’s AT&T Park on Aug. 21.

The British pop star was originally looking to book his Bay Area concert at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on the same date (a spot frequented by his good friend and duet partner Taylor Swift) but dropped the venue due to the City Council’s 10 p.m.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The title of the film “A Fantastic Woman” only means what you first think it does once you get to know its heroine, a transgender singer named Marina Vidal, who is dismissed, denigrated and worse for living what others believe is a “fantasy” existence in Santiago, Chile.