Film: Fans of director Michael Winterbottom’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story are likely to get a kick out of the ad lib road comedy The Trip, for he has again enlisted the duo of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in a sly verbal romp. As in the earlier film, the two British actors play themselves, or at least a comic exaggeration of themselves, on assignment to find and review the best eateries in Northern England. So off they drive, amusing themselves along the way with witty banter, a bit of jealousy and some sublime celebrity impersonations. The feature film version is a re-edit of a six-part television series, and you can see how this material might work better on the small screen, but chances are you will remain amused throughout the almost two-hour ride. Opening this weekend at Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park.

Theater: The region has other playwrights, but none as prolific as Davie’s Michael McKeever, whose latest work, Stuff, about those infamous Harlem hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer, makes for a diverting comedy with a dark underside. McKeever looks beyond the brothers’ need to collect stuff to the eccentricities of the wealthy, the gap between the haves and have nots in our society and the tragedy of squandered lives of promise. In addition to writing one of his best scripts, McKeever demonstrates his skill as a performer as Homer, the older, but less stable of the brothers. Also impressive is Angie Radosh as Momma Collyer, who wields a genteel, but iron will keeping her boys in line, at least while she is alive. Continuing in a world premiere production at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton, through July 31. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432 for tickets.

Music: Before you know it, the season will be here, and knowing that, the folks at Palm Beach Opera have scheduled their usual summer season preview. This time, three recent Young Artist singers – soprano Greta Ball, mezzo Irene Roberts, and tenor Evanivaldo Correa – will be on hand next Tuesday at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace with a program of selections from next season’s operas, as well as other pieces. Correa will sing Addio, fiorito asil from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which will open the company’s 50^th anniversary season Dec. 16-19, and he will join Ball for the duet O nuit divine, from Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, set for Feb. 24-27. Ball also will sing Regnava del silenzio, from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, planned for March 23-26, and Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta, from Puccini’s La Rondine. Roberts will sing Que fais-tu, from Romeo, and the always popular Chacun a son gout, from Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus. Joining the three will be veteran local baritone Graham Fandrei, who will sing Enrico’s Cruda funesta amara, from Lucia. The concert, which also is a music education benefit evening, is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Harriet. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org for more information.

The country singer Jason Aldean grew up in Macon, Ga., with his mother, but he spent summers in Homestead with his father. This Saturday, he returns to South Florida for a concert at the Cruzan Amphitheatre after years of major country music success, with songs such as She’s Country and Big Green Tractor. Like many of today’s country stars, his music has a distinctly hard-driving rock edge, a fertile ground for genre-mixing that is proving popular and lucrative. Opening for Aldean is the deep-voiced young singer-songwriter Chris Young (Tomorrow, Voices), nominated last year for top new vocalist by the Academy of Country Music. The concert starts at 7:30 at the Cruzan; tickets are $38-$67 (after fees), available through LiveNation.com.

Coming next week to Delray Beach’s unique Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is a major exhibit of ceramics that has toured France, Sacramento, Calif., Washington, D.C., Denver and Dallas over the past three years. Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women from Japan features 87 pieces by 25 different artists including Etsuko Tashima (b. 1959), who teaches at the University of Arts in her native Osaka. Curated to reflect the growing prominence of women artists in a traditionally male artistic culture, the exhibit holds works by pioneering women potters and contains work by ceramicists who look to Japan’s Noh and literary past for inspiration. Soaring Voices opens Thursday, July 21, and runs through Oct. 2 at the Morikami, which is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day except Monday. Admission is $12, $11 for seniors, and $7 for students and children ages 6 to 17. Call 495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org for more information.

Theater: Many of Palm Beach County’s professional theaters are idle this summer, but the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has a few special events, like this Saturday night’s talent competition, called -- what else? -- Palm Beach Idols. For the eighth annual event, some 90 locals of all ages who are convinced they have talent auditioned, but only 25 of them have made the cut to perform and vie for cash prizes and the Idol title. Tickets are $25, with proceeds going to the Maltz’s Theatre Guild, a volunteer service organization. Celebrity judges, largely from the media, will winnow the field down to three in each category -- youth, teen and adult -- but the ultimate winners are chosen by the audience. Call (561) 575-2223 for tickets.

Film: OK, I may be biased towards documentaries about the woeful state of print journalism in the face of new media, but I still contend that Page One: Inside the New York Times is engrossing viewing for anyone curious about the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking daily newspaper. Director Andrew Rossi takes a scattershot approach to his subject, but each of the pieces manage to be interesting, particularly when he focuses on gregarious columnist David Carr who is far outside the profile of a button-down Times newsroom employee. Page One has no answers to the woeful state of journalism these days, but it dredges up a lot of the questions in a thoughtful way. Opening Friday at FAU’s Living Room Theater in Boca Raton.

Music: The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, which begins tonight, isn’t the only hot-month classical series celebrating its 20^th season in South Florida. The other is Summerfest, the monthlong concert series presented by the Fort Lauderdale-based Symphony of the Americas. This year, the chamber group is teaming with the Remenyi Chamber Orchestra of Hungary in a program that recalls the 19^th-century violin virtuoso, Eduard Remenyi (1830-1898) for whom it was named. Remenyi had a big career, but he’s best known for the accompanist he chose for one of his first major tours in 1853, a young pianist from Hamburg named Johannes Brahms. The well-known Hungarian-born violinist Laszlo Pap, a longtime resident of South Florida and a former member of the Florida Philharmonic and the Delray String Quartet, is the soloist in music such as the Meditation from Massenet’s Thais, Vitali’s durable Chaconne, and concerti and divertimenti by Vivaldi, Boccherini, Mozart and the Hungarian composer Leo Weiner.

The groups, led by James Brooks-Bruzzese, will be playing 11 area concerts in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, plus a single stop in Vero Beach, and also do residencies in Panama (July 10-17) and Ecuador (July 28-Aug. 1). They begin tonight with an 8 p.m. concert at the Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale, and admission is free (though not for all concerts in the series). Call 954-335-7002 for more information.

The Venezuelan-American pianist Vanessa Perez makes her return Saturday night to the Piano Lovers series in Boca Raton with a program of music by Mozart (one of the sonatas and the fantasies), Chopin (the Barcarolle, Op. 60, and the Fantasy in F minor, Op. 49) and Albeniz (selections from Iberia). Perez, based in New York, has a long and impressive resume that includes studies at the Royal College of Music in London, performances all over Europe and the Americas in major venues, and a collaboration with Joshua Bell on his At Home With Friends album. Here she is, caught in the middle of Lavapies, from Book 3 of Iberia. The concert begins at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton; tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door. Call 929-6633 for more information.

Film: The British neurologist Oliver Sacks’ popular case studies have made good fodder for Hollywood (1990’s Awakenings), and in The Music Never Stopped, one of Sacks’ essays (The Last Hippie) is the source of the story. Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), long estranged from his father (J.K. Simmons, taking a break from all those Farmers Insurance commercials), shows up in a hospital with a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. With the help of a music therapist (Julia Ormond, taking a break from Law & Order: CI and keeping her American accent), father and son try to reestablish their relationship through the pop music Gabriel loves, especially the Grateful Dead. The film, directed by Jim Kohlberg (Trumbo), mines territory that would have been easily accessible to an outing on the recently deceased Hallmark Hall of Fame, but it does raise interesting questions about how memory works, and about the power of music. At Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth.

Theater: Before there was Hoarders, there were the Collyer brothers of New York, two eccentrics found dead in 1947 in their Harlem home, which was filled with decades of trash through which the men had to tunnel. Playwright/actor Michael McKeever turns his attention to this story for his latest comedy, Stuff, which opens in previews Wednesday at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton. The show, which stars McKeever, Nicholas Richberg and Angie Radosh, runs through July 31. Tickets range from $38-$50, performances are Wednesday through Saturday nights with Wednesday and Sunday afternoon matinees. Call 241-7432 or visit www.caldwelltheatre.com.

Music: One of the more interesting New Wave bands to come out of the early 1980s was the Pyschedelic Furs, led by the unmistakable rasp of Richard Butler (Love My Way, Pretty in Pink). They were popular on college campuses in those days not least because that last-named song got used as the title song for a well-known John Hughes movie. But the Furs had good songwriting on their side, too, and nice touches of instrumental color like that xylophone in Love My Way. The band plays Fort Lauderdale’s gritty Culture Room tonight at 9 (doors open at 8). Tickets are $25 through Ticketmaster.com.

There’s nothing more all-American for the Fourth than celebrating it the way generations of us have by going to a concert by a wind band. This Fourth, Kyle Prescott’s Florida Wind Symphony plans a patriotic effusion at 7:30 on the lawn outside the University Theatre. That’s preceded at 4 p.m. by a showing of The 1940s Radio Hour, a musical revue, inside the theater. Fireworks start at 9 p.m., and being out under the stars (bring blankets and chairs) on this great holiday is a perfect way to think about the whole fabric of American culture. For more information, call 393-7806.

Music: After conquering the world of popular music, bandleader Duke Ellington began branching out in more ambitious directions for the concert hall. In 1943, his suite Black, Brown and Beige had its premiere at Carnegie Hall, and in subsequent years there would be a landmark recording of the work with the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performing Come Sunday. And come this Sunday, Aaron Kula’s Klezmer Company Orchestra will present the work in what it believes to be its Florida premiere as part of an all-American concert at Florida Atlantic University’s Kaye Auditorium. Spirit of America, as the concert is called, also will feature Candy, a ballad by Glenn Miller (also in a premiere), and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring suite. Singers Lisanne Lyons and Daniel Cochran join Kula and the KCO for the event, which begins at 3 p.m. Tickets are $17-$38. Call 800-564-9539 or visit www.fauevents.com.

We last saw Paul Hewson and David Evans – aka Bono and The Edge – on the Tony Awards broadcast as they introduced a ballad from their musical Spider-Man. Next Wednesday night, we’ll see them again in their more familiar roles as the engines of the seminal rock quartet U2, which plays the Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens as part of its hugely successful 360° Tour. English up-and-comers Florence and the Machine open for the boys from Dublin. Tickets for the 7 p.m. concert: $30-$250, through www.livenation.com.

Film: Fans of filmmaker Terrence Malick know that he works on a different time schedule than other writer-directors and the results are completely outside the demands of commercial movies. His previous feature release, The New World, was six years ago, and frankly it was so ethereal that it tested the audience’s patience. Now in theaters is the remarkable The Tree of Life, also more of a tone poem than a conventional narrative, but compelling on its own terms. It is the story of a Texas couple (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and their three sons, seen in the 1950s, through the memory of their oldest boy, now grown (Sean Penn). Through a series of minor events, we see the sons grow up, come of age and learn about life. Ultimately, the film encompasses the very essence of life, exquisitely photographed, a Malick signature. Likely to challenge moviegoers who cannot adjust to its glacial pace, it contains some impressive performances and images and could well end up vying for Oscars early next year. In area theaters. – H. Erstein

Theater: Most youth training showcases are aimed squarely at the parents and neighbors of the cast members, but the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s Conservatory of the Performing Arts (COPA) often presents productions ever non-relatives can enjoy. This summer, the company of budding thespians in grades 6 through 12 is tackling Footloose, the stage musical based on the 1984 Kevin Bacon flick about an urban teen who tries to fit in when he and his mother love to a reactionary Midwest town where -- yikes! -- dancing is forbidden. The score by Dean Pitchford and Kenny Loggins (as well as several other composers) includes such breakout songs as Let’s Hear It for the Boy, Almost Paradise and the title tune. For the cast’s weeks of rehearsals, it performs only twice, today and Saturday, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for kids. Call (561) 515-2672 for reservations. – H. Erstein

Film: Can’t decide whether to go to the theater or to the movies this weekend? Do both, with the high-definition video of the recent concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, which was shamelessly promoted on last Sunday’s Tony Awards broadcast. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as marriage-challenged Bobby, which should restart the discussion whether the character’s dilemma is that he is actually gay. Among the ensemble of Bobby’s friends is Patti LuPone (who sings a powerhouse, boozy The Ladies Who Lunch), Martha Plimpton and, for some reason, Comedy Central’s musically savvy -- but not much of a dancer -- Stephen Colbert. Playing this Sunday at the Muvico Parisian, Cinemark Boynton Beach, Cinemark Palace, Shadowwood 16 and Delray Beach 18. This one is a must-see for any Sondheim devotee.

Theater: What do you do if you want to jump-start a 16-year-old off-season tradition, but keep down the budget in these economically tricky times? If you are City Theatre’s Summer Shorts, that annual celebration of short-form, 5-to-20-minute playlets, you reduce your performance ensemble to five and the number of sketches to seven, but you also cast a ringer, Queer Eye for a Straight Guy’s Jai Rodriguez. The ploy works because A) the ensemble includes such stellar talent as Stephen Trovillion and Finnerty Steeves, B) the scenes are all winners instead of the occasional sprinkling of disappointing head-scratchers, and C) Rodriguez turns out to be a versatile team player. The result is one of the most satisfying Shorts productions in years. Continuing at Miami’s Arsht Center through Sunday, June 26, then heading up to the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theater, from June 30 through July 3.

Art: The New York-born artist Pamela Larkin Caruso has focused on some specific kinds of images in her work: plants and hearts, above all, which she fills with vibrant color and simple shapes, and a strong inner life, as can be seen throughout the many samples viewable on her website (http://plarkinart.com). The Jupiter Heights resident’s art also can be seen on display through the end of August in the lobby of the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, and during shows. For more information, call 207-5905.

Music: In the last three or four years of Frederic Chopin’s brief life, the composer found it increasingly difficult to write, as his illness (which may have been cystic fibrosis) progressed inexorably. One of his last works, published in 1846, was the Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, an unusual, intimate, brilliant distillation of the Polish folk dance that inspired it. This Saturday, this great piece will be played by the Russian-born pianist Margarita Shevchenko, trained in Moscow and Cleveland, and resident in North Miami Beach, where she keeps a studio. At her recital at the Boca Steinway Gallery, she’ll also play two other Chopin pieces – the well-known Polonaise in A-flat (Op. 53), and the Barcarolle (in F-sharp), Op. 60 – as well as the complete Op. 116 Fantaisies of Johannes Brahms, also music written at the end of its composer’s career. Shevchenko takes the stage at 7 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. Call 929-6633 or visit www.pianolovers.org.