Entertainment

You might not expect to find a glorious, uninhabited island in the middle of the Mississippi River. And even if you did, you probably wouldn't expect to find an unkempt and unsmiling Matthew McConaughey hiding out on it. That such a thing feels credible in the new film "Mud" is a testament to the skill of young Austin, Texas-based director Jeff Nichols, whose new coming-of-age adventure is rich with geographic specificity yet concerned with...

Aasif Mandvi knows how to get a laugh. Throughout his seven years (and counting) as a correspondent on TV's "The Daily Show," he has skewered politicians, celebrities and the media with a combination of incisive cultural commentary and goofball antics. Boasting mock expertise in a wide variety of fields, Mandvi has posed as the show's Middle Eastern affairs correspondent, senior financial analyst, Baghdad bureau chief, senior medical correspondent and whatever else the day's humor calls for. The big-screen comedy "The Internship" features him in a less familiar role: the straight man. FULL COVERAGE: Summer sneaks The film, opening June 7, reunites "Wedding Crashers" stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as a pair of fast-talking but outmoded salesmen who finagle internships at Google in the hopes of reinvigorating their foundering careers.

The photograph is almost famous: a shot by Kevin Winter of actress Jennifer Lawrence that caught her just as she stumbled on her way to receive an Oscar this year. The small drawings hanging beneath are less familiar: delicate images by P.E. Sharpe of a sparse figure, stripped of the voluminous Dior dress, in different positions as she recovers from her fall. It amounts to a strangely intimate meditation on our obsession with celebrity culture, made stranger by its location: The art installation hangs in a soundstage at the Paramount Studios as part of the new art fair Paris Photo Los Angeles, which runs this weekend.

With Montecito magically misted by a surprising spring drizzle Wednesday night, Jennifer Koh went, for a second time, beyond Bach. The violinist's awe-inspiring solo recital at the Music Academy of the West's Hahn Hall was the latest installment in her project of moderating a conversation between Bach's solo violin sonatas and partitas with history as a way to bring music of the past into the present. And this time Einstein may have had a little something to do with the violinist's penetrating playing of Bach and Bartók in this beach town.

"Kon-Tiki" is a ripping yarn torn from yesterday's headlines. Though somewhat forgotten now, the 1947 story of six men, an oceangoing raft and a wild and crazy theory was a media sensation that gripped the world's imagination - and launched a thousand tiki bars. Though scientists then and now largely believe that the original inhabitants of Polynesia came eastward from Asia, Norwegian scientist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl became convinced that they had come westward, from pre-Inca Peru, drifting over on the Humboldt Current on enormous balsa-wood rafts.

Antonio Méndez Esparza's assured first feature, "Aquí y Allá" (Here and There), has won festival awards from Mumbai to Thessaloniki, but the story the film tells is just across the border. Pedro (Pedro De los Santos) has returned to Mexico from his second tour of menial jobs in the States, and like the slow climb up the mountain to his home, re-integration is uphill. His daughters (Lorena Guadalupe Pantaleón Vázquez and Heidi Laura Solano Espinoza) barely know him, though the oldest knows better than to trust him to stick around.

A girl with a guitar, a roommate without a job and a drummer with a crush make up the boho trio at the center of "The Crumbles," writer-director Akira Boch's low-key multiethnic rock 'n' roll doodle about the ups and downs of Echo Park artistic strivers. Darla (Katie Hipol) works at a bookstore and dreams of rock glory, so when flighty keyboardist friend Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) crashes on her couch after a bad breakup, the pair start the titular band. That's about it, really, save for Elisa's party-hearty flakiness irritating Darla, flirtations between the gals and Jeff Torres' lanky, sad-eyed drummer, and occasional visits with the neighbors making a microbudget sci-fi movie.

Urs Fischer is an artist of the big gesture. It's a mixed blessing. Emblematic is a monumental outdoor sculpture in his newly opened, 16-year survey exhibition, which is divided between the Museum of Contemporary Art 's two downtown L.A. buildings. The monolith of cast aluminum, one of a series made over the last seven years, rises 45 feet above a parking lot. Its shape is chunky and abstract, the color a light-absorbent gray against a bright blue sky. TIMELINE: MOCA in flux Move in for a closer look, and soon it's apparent that the form has been blown up from a small lump of casually manipulated clay.

Spycraft has long been associated with the use of numbers stations - shortwave radio outposts sending cryptic numerical messages over the airwaves, often in a female voice. The thriller "The Numbers Station" employs this low-fi, high-enigma gimmick for a story about a disillusioned CIA hit man (John Cusack) assigned to protect a pretty American numbers reader (Malin Akerman) posted in a bunker in the English countryside. When the pair are ambushed in a brazen siege on the station, they try to suss out who their enemies are while overcoming each other's increasing mistrust.

Max von Sydow's mesmerizing performance in Ingmar Bergman's seminal 1957 drama "The Seventh Seal," as a 14th century knight who challenges Death to a game of chess, catapulted the tall, imposing Swedish actor onto the international scene. As part of Bergman's repertory company of actors, he starred in several of the landmark filmmaker's movies, including 1958's "The Magician," 1961's "Through a Glass Darkly" and 1963's "Winter Light. " After making his U.S. debut as Jesus Christ in George Stevens' final film, 1965's "The Greatest Story Ever Told," Von Sydow has appeared in numerous American films, including William Friedkin's 1973 blockbuster "The Exorcist," Sydney Pollack's 1975 thriller "Three Days of the Condor" and Martin Scorsese's 2010 psychological thriller "Shutter Island.