Asheville area performing arts calendar for the coming week

Kopecky Family Band, 8 p.m. today, The Altamont Theatre, 18 Church St., Asheville. $10.

Inside China

ANALYSIS/OPINION : 'NINE MUST-HAVES' FOR TIBETANS China is engaged in the most repressive crackdown on Tibetans since 2008 and is intensifying a communist brainwashing campaign that is targeting Tibetans. The government in Beijing is calling the new campaign the "Nine Must-Haves." Beginning in early December, the government is forcibly imposing the ...

Cast Me If You Can

Recommended Mild but nonetheless enjoyable, Cast Me If You Can ( Wakiyaku monogatari , or "Story of a Supporting Role," 2010) is a Japanese romantic-comedy about a journeyman actor and his relationships with his famous playwright father and an ambitious but abrasive young actress. Though highly predictable and a bit artificial, it's hard to dislike. Japanese-born but Harvard- and MIT-educated ...

Branded to Kill (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)

DVD Talk Collector Series Straddling, irresistibly, the yakuza thriller and the Japanese New Wave, Branded to Kill ( Koroshi no rakuin , 1967) is the epicenter of director Seijun Suzuki's wild and wooly universe, the controversial film from which he's built his reputation as one of the leading (as writer Chris D would put it) "outlaw masters" of Japanese cinema. A busy contract director ...

Exclusive Clip & Interview: Flowers of War Director Zhang Yimou

ComingSoon.net has a rare sitdown interview with director Zhang Yimou ( Hero , House of Flying Daggers ) to talk about his latest film The Flowers of War , which teams him with Oscar winner Christian Bale to explore one particular moving story set during the invasion of the Chinese capitol of Nanjing by the Japanese army in 1937.