Best Bets / June 24-30, 2001

Movies

Set in the distant future, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” is a tale of humanity in an age of intelligent machines. Harley Joel Osment, right with Jude Law, stars as the first “mecha” boy programmed with a human-like capacity for love. Opens Friday. Also: The teenage drama “crazy/beautiful” stars Kirsten Dunst and Jay Hernandez as Pacific Palisades High students of different backgrounds and temperaments who fall in love, both for the first time, and confront challenging consequences. Opens Friday.

Theater

Created as a Depression-era WPA theater project in 1938, “The Cradle Will Rock” was a musical tribute to the labor force and a powerful cry against corporate disregard for workers’ rights. Among the original Broadway cast was the late Will Geer, founder of the hillside Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga, where a revival of the show will open Saturday.

Music

A contingent of cellists headed by former L.A. County Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman, takes over the Sundays Live broadcast at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, today at 6 p.m., for a program of music for cellos only: Bach’s Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto and Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 6. Cellists from the community are invited to join the players onstage in the Villa-Lobos work.

Pop Music

This could be the loudest-fastest-hardest week of the year in Southern California. The Vans Warped Tour (AFI, Pennywise, the Vandals, Rancid, and others) is digging in at the Ventura County Fairgrounds on Thursday and the L.A. Memorial Coliseum on Friday, and Ozzfest (headed by Black Sabbath and Marilyn Manson) follows on Saturday at Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion in Devore.

Jazz

After performing with the great John Coltrane early in his career, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, above, established his own mighty reputation by exploring musical territory from hard bop to avant-garde jazz. Sanders and his quintet will be at the Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood Tuesday through next Sunday.

Museums

An exhibition of textiles, jewelry, paintings and photos from 1865 to the 1960s illustrates the impact of the Navajo people on American culture and the American West in “Dine ‘The People’: Life and Culture of the Navajo,” opening Saturday at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. The show will be paired with “Masters of the American West,” featuring paintings and sculpture by artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington, among others. Above: a necklace of turquoise nuggets and bracelet.

Video

Playwright Kenneth Lonergan wrote and directed the deft, intimate “You Can Count on Me.” Laura Linney received an Oscar nomination for her work as a small-town single mother whose life is turned upside down when her younger, troubled brother (Mark Ruffalo) returns home. Matthew Broderick also stars as Linney’s bank boss in this comedy-drama that arrives Tuesday on VHS and DVD.