Noomi Rapace, center, in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
Film: The long waited third shoe in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – has just dropped locally, and it snaps the trilogy back into form, paring down the third weighty, introspective novel about Goth computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) into an involving, fast-paced thinking person’s action flick. No, it is not up to the intricacy or originality of the first installment, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but it will suffice. It should certainly satisfy fans of the series, who wait with apprehension to see what director David Fincher does to and/or for the franchise with his Hollywood remakes, expected to start arriving next year. In area theaters. – H. Erstein
Theater: There are just two weeks left to catch the remarkable Karen Stephens, breathing life into the one-person, multiple-character tour de force, Bridge and Tunnel, at the Women’s Theatre Project in Fort Lauderdale. Stephens shows herself to be a rubber-faced master of dialects populating a South Queens amateur poetry competition with the melting pot of personalities in Sarah Jones’s acting exercise. Sure, there are themes of how immigrants deal with the American experience, but you will probably come away from Bridge and Tunnel talking more about Stephens’ performance than the play’s message. And you will probably come away smiling. Through Nov. 7, Call (866) 811-4111 for tickets. – H. Erstein
Moon Viewing over Sarashina Rice Fields (1891), by Yoshu Chikanobu
Art: Toyohara (Yoshu) Chikanobu (1838-1912) was one of Japan’s most popular creators of nishiki-e, or brocade prints from woodblocks, and his work ranged from the advocacy of late 19th-century Western-style modernism to a nostalgia for the Edo Period. On Tuesday, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens opens Modernity and Nostalgia, an overview of Chikanobu’s career featuring 60 single-sheet and triptych prints. The exhibit opened in August 2006 at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., and has just finished a stop at International Christian University in Tokyo. The exhibit lasts through Feb. 20. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Tickets: $12, $11 for seniors, $8 for children and college students. Call 495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org.
Emanuel Ax.Music: The American pianist Emanuel Ax is a frequent visitor to South Florida, and in March you can catch him in a solo recital at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre. But this weekend, he’s sitting in with the New World Symphony at the Knight Concert Hall in Miami for a reading of the Piano Concerto No. 2 of Brahms (in B-flat, Op. 83). In recent years, while the piano concerti of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin are steadily heard in local concerts, it’s been a while since one of the two big Brahms concerti has had a local hearing. And the Second is massive in every way: four movements, with extensive solos for horn and cello as well, and a gigantic piano texture that is enormously difficult to pull off. Trust Ax to do it, though. Also on the program is the Arnold Schoenberg arrangement of the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, with its memorable xylophone touches. Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the program twice: 8 p.m. Saturday at the Knight, and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Lincoln Theatre on Miami Beach, which will mark Tilson Thomas’ last appearance in that hall before the orchestral academy’s move to its new Frank Gehry campus. Call 305-673-3331 or visit www.nws.edu.