The Black Angels’ music often sounds as if the world is coming to an end, which is just how singer Alex Maas likes it. The Austin, Texas-bred band has been spreading its ominous, reverb-drenched drones for more than five years now, along the way converting a flock of passionate followers who likewise believe that 1966 was popular music’s creative apex.  

The Black Angels' music often sounds as if the world is coming to an end, which is just how singer Alex Maas likes it. "I think the world is a very scary place," Maas says by cellphone from the band's latest tour stop in Washington, D.C. "It's obviously a beautiful place, too. Maybe this is our outlet to emit this underlying warning about how things would be if everybody lost faith and hope."  

Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Xavier Beauvois' impressively restrained humanist drama centers on eight French Trappist monks whose faith is tested when the remote Algerian monastery in which they reside is threatened by a group of ruthless Islamic fundamentalists. Grade: B.  

Stories about real people dealing with real situations are an endangered species in a contemporary American moviemaking landscape dominated by lowest-common-denominator teen-oriented fare and creativity-deficient sequels, remakes and the like. Writer/director Tom McCarthy is doing his best to fight against this development.  

Director Neil Burger returns with a gleefully addled thriller starring the suddenly ubiquitous Bradley Cooper as Eddie Marra, a sputtering aspiring writer whose life is turned upside down when he starts taking an experimental drug that allows him to unlock his brain's full power. Grade: C-plus.  

Ra Ra Riot grabbed a slot at the CMJ Music Marathon less than six months after forming on the campus of Syracuse University in early 2006. It’s been onward and upward ever since. The sextet released its 2008 full-length debut, The Rhumb Line, amid a rush of hype earned by the album’s vibrant, instantly addictive Indie Pop, which was set apart by a deft rhythm section and the unconventional use of cello and violin.   

Sick and tired of the lame, creatively challenged cinematic offerings currently crowding the multiplex? Head over to Cincinnati World Cinema's most popular event, the annual Oscar Shorts & More, which takes over The Madison Theater in Covington tonight, Wednesday and Sunday. The films are presented in two different programs ("A" and "B"), each of which features five nominated films (including one Oscar-winning effort) and a bonus short of "comparable caliber."  

Ra Ra Riot grabbed a slot at the CMJ Music Marathon less than six months after forming on the campus of Syracuse University in early 2006. It's been onward and upward ever since. The sextet released its 2008 full-length debut, 'The Rhumb Line,' amid a rush of hype earned by the album's vibrant, instantly addictive Indie Pop, which was set apart by a deft rhythm section and the unconventional use of cello and violin.  

Michael Dowse makes his feature directorial debut with a cliche-ridden coming-of-age comedy that is content to rip off a variety of like-minded ’80s cinematic touchstones rather than do or say anything remotely new or interesting. Grade: D.  

Acclaimed writer Chang-Rae Lee's latest deftly crafted novel, 'The Surrendered,' tells the story of three people whose fraught connection was forged, in one way or another, by the Korean War. The book's dense, non-linear narrative moves from 1950s Korea to 1930s China to New York City and Italy in the 1980s, a juggling of settings that represents Lee's most ambitious effort to date.