“Mona Lisa Smile” AMC AVCO Cinema Dec. 4, 7:30 p.m. UCLA students have a chance to catch the female version of “Dead Poet’s Society” before it’s released with this special sneek preview. Read more...

For anyone who has ever suffered through “Miracle on 34th Street” or turned off the radio in disgust during the 88th song about bundling up in the snow (especially when it’s 75 degrees outside), Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Sugar Plum Fairy” offers an interesting, funny new taste of the holiday season. Read more...

You don’t have to know anything about home runs or Sammy Sosa to learn how to pitch a movie. Hosted by the UCLA Professional Screenwriting Program, professor Fred Rubin will be teaching a pitching seminar this Saturday, Dec. Read more...

In a scene from Tobias Wolff’s latest novel, “Old School,” a group of teenage boys are huddled around a fire in the lodge of their elite New England prep school while feisty writer Ayn Rand vehemently argues with the main character, a student consumed by literature, on the artistic merit of Ernest Hemingway. Read more...

In the arena of comedy, he is regarded as the go-to guy for physicality. His bragging rights extend to being chosen as the “Coolest Comic of 2003″ by Stuff Magazine. Read more...

“Please do not clean this room!!! Or throw anything away. Thank you.” Scrawled on a small scrap of paper and taped onto a wall of his exhibition room, 31-year-old Edgar Arceneaux’s note to the Hammer Museum’s cleaning crew shows that he is cautious about how others perceive his space, which will serve as his exhibit and personal studio until the end of February. Read more...

Film&TV: “Angels in America” HBO Dec. 7 and 14, 8 p.m. HBO’s $60 million movie has arrived. The Mike Nichols-directed, Al Pacino-and-Meryl Streep-starring six-hour movie epic based on the hugely successful Tony Kushner plays will premiere on Dec. Read more...