Andy Warhol was ahead of his time. He was living the celebrity culture before there even was a celebrity culture. Art enthusiasts are familiar with Warhol’s silk-screen prints of celebrities, but less well known are his photographs of them. The University of Richmond will put a number of these photos on display in the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art beginning Friday and running through May 22.

Film review: ‘The Class’—summa cum laude     audience with school settings that feel real     The French classroom film “The Class” is so real you can almost smell the chalk.  Set at a Paris middle school and showing the efforts of a dedicated teacher to help his unwilling students learn, “The Class” looks like a documentary. It feels like a documentary. The only clue that it isn’t a documentary is that it is ever so slightly too slick—no one looks at the camera, and the camera always knows where to be.

Why we’ll watch ‘Watchmen’        Everyone knows “Watchmen” is going to be big. It’s going to be huge.  But why?  The anticipation seems to be based on the affection comic-book fans have for the original graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons—a serialization of 12 comic books that tell one story.

The most unintentionally hilarious moment in “Watchmen”? There are so many to choose from, so very many.  But it would have to be the love scene played out on a desert planet at sundown, the two naked lovers standing and kissing in front of a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud.

Remarkable Power!“ plays out less like the workings of a clock than like one of those brightly colored children’s toys. You turn a crank, which turns a seemingly unconnected gear, which then turns a different seemingly unconnected gear, and so on until you wind up with a toy monkey playing cymbals. All the pieces have to fit together just so. But they do, and it results in something insubstantial but entertaining.

It’s almost beside the point that “Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience” is well made. Millions of Jonas Brothers fans would flock to it even if it were shot on cell phones. Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas have a wholesome, youthful appeal that drives their almost exclusively pubescent female audience wild. One of the pleasures of the movie is the way it captures the peculiar sociological phenomenon of mass teenage adulation—the screams, the outstretched arms, the hyperventilation and even the fainting from excitement.

Like a latter-day Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread in “Les Miserables,“ the desperate Wendy Carroll steals a can of dog food for her hungry dog. The differences between “Les Miserables” and “Wendy and Lucy,“ in which this action takes place, are that “Les Miserables” is good and things happen in it, and Jean Valjean doesn’t spend the entire rest of the book looking for a lost dog.

Film review: Loving the human “I’ve Loved You So Long”    When we first see Kristin Scott Thomas in “I’ve Loved You So Long,“ she is bone-weary and emotionally damaged.  In movies, there are only two directions a character like that can take. Either she will work her way through her problems and find a form of redemption, or her situation will deteriorate further until it becomes intolerable.

When the building housing Richmond’s newest movie theater was built, movies had not even been invented.  The 17-screen Movieland at Boulevard Square opens tomorrow, the first new movie theater in the city of Richmond in 15 years.

Review of ‘Waltz With Bashir’      WALTZ WITH BASHIR Movie review   Voices: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag At: Westhampton FYI: Running time: 1:23. In Hebrew with English subtitles. Rated R (atrocities, violence, brief nudity, strong and graphic sexual content)  lead to conclusions in roundabout way   The Israeli animated film “Waltz With Bashir” draws to a stunning and important conclusion, but it goes an awfully long way to get there.

Conventional wisdom: The momentum is all going to “ Slumdog Millionaire ,“ which perhaps not coincidentally is the only movie of the five with a happy ending. It’s a great movie, too, so there should be no complaints if it wins.
  Daniel’s pick: Well, “The Wrestler” was the best movie of the year, but it isn’t nominated. Most of these are nearly as worthy, with the innovative and emotional “ Benjamin Button “ edging out “Slumdog Millionaire” by a nose—which in turn edges out “Frost/Nixon” by a different nose.

Film review: ‘Madea’ funny but uneven If you have ever watched TV and flipped back and forth between two movies, you know the sensation of watching “Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail.“ On the one hand, you have a genuinely funny comedy, featuring one of the great and iconic comic characters of our time. On the other hand, you have a fairly ordinary drama that slides occasionally into melodrama.

Bob Greene is famous in some circles as the man who helps Oprah lose weight—when she’s losing weight. He has ridden this celebrity to 10 books, including cookbooks. But Greene is not, as it turns out, a chef. He is an exercise physiologist. The recipes in his latest work, “The Best Life Diet Cookbook,“ taste as if they were created by an exercise physiologist. Even though they were created by an actual chef, Sidra Forman (mentioned once in the acknowledgements and never again), they still taste all physiologisty.