The intertwining of Chinese art and music produced charming musical objects and scrolls, as the Freer Gallery of Art’s Virtue and Entertainment: Chinese Music in the Visual Arts, illustrates. Mixing a drum, bell and chime with paintings on porcelains and scrolls, the exhibit presents unusual and handsome objects dating from the 5th century B.C. to the 20th century A.D. At the Freer Gallery, Jefferson Drive and 12th Street SW, 10 a.m. through 5:30 a.m. daily through March 26. Free. 202/367-2700.
— Joanna Shaw-Eagle
Fateless, the official Hungarian selection for best foreign-language film in the Academy Awards, justifies a considerable amount of sales resistance, since it’s yet another account of Holocaust suffering and survival. Vivid memories of “Schindler’s List,” “The Grey Zone” and “The Pianist” may suffice for most serious moviegoers. If you decide to steel yourself for the experience, a distinctive and haunting movie does await. The novelist Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, adapted his own semi-autobiographical book of a generation earlier. The director, Lajos Koltai, brought years of experience as a cinematographer to the collaboration; scenic design plays an ominously prominent and sometimes paramount role. The 14-year-old protagonist, Gyura (Marcell Nagy) ends up in a succession of Nazi labor and death camps after being swept up in the mass arrest and deportation of Budapest Jews in the summer of 1944. After barely cheating death, he returns to a homecoming and repatriation so disenchanting that memories of captivity and victimization seem perversely preferable.
— Gary Arnold
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