Art: Surrealist art hasn’t been a current style for some time, but there are still practitioners out there, one of them being Jacques de Beaufort, who teaches at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth. Last night, a retrospective of his work opened at the new Box Gallery on Belvedere Road in West Palm Beach, within shouting distance of the interstate and Dixie Highway. The Box is the doing of Rolando Chang Barrero, a former Miami artist who came north a few years back to found an artists’s colony on Industrial Avenue in Boynton Beach. The Beaufort exhibit runs through Dec. 16, and features a talk with the artist next Sunday, Nov. 27. Tonight, the gallery celebrates surrealism with a showing of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and a reading of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. For more information, call 786-521-1199 or visit www.theboxgallery.info.
Film: While the crowds flock to the Harry Potter prequel this weekend, try instead a nasty little drama about a different brand of fantastic creatures — Nocturnal Animals. The title means several things, including the name of a novel that Jake Gyllenhaal gives his ex-wife (Amy Adams) to read, his pet name for her and a description of a group of homicidal rednecks in the novel. The film, directed with a great visual flair by Tom Ford (A Single Man), segues back and forth between the novel and the real-life couple’s parallel lives, as Gyllenhaal apparently attempts to woo Adams back. But Nocturnal Animals has its own perverse streak, which makes the bumpy ride all the more enjoyable. Opening in area theaters this weekend.
Theater: Kravis on Broadway has a genuine coup as the only South Florida venue to present the five-time Tony Award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, at its Dreyfoos Hall auditorium through Sunday. Based on Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel about the dramatic adventures of a 15-year-old British boy who has autism, the stage version is a dazzling sensory overload in the hands of adapter Simon Stephens, director Marianne Elliott (War Horse) and her team of imaginative designers. The title comes from a Sherlock Holmes story, appropriate since child-like Christopher Boone vows to sleuth out the killer of a neighbor’s dog, done in violently with a pitchfork. And when he learns who the culprit is, Christopher sets out from his suburban home into London alone, one of the most harrowing sequences ever depicted onstage. Tickets from $27 up. Call 561-832-7469.
Music: One of the biggest and most dramatic choral works in Western music, the Mass in B minor of Johann Sebastian Bach, is no easy undertaking. Many bouquets, therefore, to Brett Karlin, who this weekend is leading his giant community chorus, the Master Chorale of South Florida, through Bach’s epic Mass, uncut. He’s got the help of five excellent soloists (including soprano Nola Richardson, above) and some of the area’s best freelancers in the form of the Symphonia Boca Raton, and the chorale’s been working overtime to bring this massively difficult work to life. Tonight the Chorale is at the First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables, and on Sunday afternoon they stop in at the Roberts Theater on the campus of St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton. See www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org for more information