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Movies

A minor auto accident triggers a chain of escalating retaliations in the suspense thriller “Changing Lanes.” Ben Affleck, above left, and Samuel L. Jackson, right, play a young attorney and a businessman, respectively, who engage in a high-stakes game of road rage. Opens Friday.

Also: Best friends Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate hit the road in pursuit of an elusive Mr. Right in the unconventional romantic comedy “The Sweetest Thing.” Thomas Jane and Selma Blair co-star. Opens Friday.

Theater

Da da kamera, Canada’s leading-edge English-language theater, presents the West Coast premiere of “In on It,” a spiraling narrative about a dying man trying to make his final plans, a pair of lovers trying to make their relationship work and two men trying to make a play. Da da kamera founder Daniel MacIvor and Darren O’Donnell wrote, produced and star in the intense dramatic work. Runs Wednesday through Saturday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

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Also: Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” the last repertory show in A Noise Within’s spring season, opens Friday at the company’s Glendale venue. A masterpiece of symbolic realism, Ibsen’s 1885 play is about a contented if struggling photographer whose belief in the truths of his life is shattered by his reacquaintance with a childhood friend.

Jazz

Female artists dominate the jazz concert week with pianist Keiko Matsui at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and composer-pianist Maria Schneider at Cal State Northridge today. Grammy-winning singer Dianne Reeves is at Pepperdine in Malibu on Friday and at El Camino College in Torrance on Saturday.

Pop Music

In its third annual staging, the Audiotistic festival sticks to its mission of uniting the pop world’s diverse dance cultures while it ratchets up the star power. The million-selling, poll-winning, Grammy-owning OutKast (Antoine Patton, below left, and Andre Benjamin) is the headliner on Saturday at the National Orange Show Events Center in San Bernardino, joined by such fellow hip-hop stars as the Roots and Mos Def and electronic emissaries Roni Size and Christopher Lawrence, among a host of DJs.

Art

“Situaciones Humanas/Human Conditions,” the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of paintings by noted Dominican artist Jose Garcia Cordero, opens Saturday at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. His paintings, full of invented creatures, offer a satirical, eerie look at the human condition. Above: Cordero’s “Self-Portrait in the Pool of Auvergne.”

Dance

The Perm State Ballet, Russia’s third largest company, returns to local stages dancing two full-length works set to music by Prokofiev. On Wednesday, the company performs Nikolai Boyarchikov’s “Romeo and Juliet” at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. Perm then moves its 70 dancers and 50-member orchestra to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, presenting “Romeo and Juliet” on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, but switching to Oleg Vinogradov’s “Cinderella” for two Saturday performances.

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