Illustration by AMY HABER/Daily Bruin   By John Mangum Daily Bruin Contributor If John Schlesinger’s first love is film, then opera is his mistress. Schlesinger, the Academy Award-winning director of films including “The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and, most recently, “The Next Best Thing,” first tried his hand at opera nearly two decades ago when he directed Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Read more...

By Michael Rosen-Molina Daily Bruin Senior Staff The Tarantella is famous as the frenetic dance that victims of the dreaded tarantula used to perform to clean their systems of the deadly poison. Read more...

Oct. 18 FREE advance screening of "Bamboozled," 6 p.m. @ Freud Playhouse Oct. 20 FILM & TV: Movie openings: Animal Factory, The Yards, Bedazzled, Just One Time, Requiem For a Dream Radiohead, 8 p.m. Read more...

  Ancestral Voices (Left to right) Rene Auberjonois, Fred Savage and Katherine Helmond star in "Ancestral Voices," a new play at the Falcon Theater. By Andie Dingman Daily Bruin Contributor Changing family dynamics are a universal, yet personal aspect of life. Read more...

  Cyrus McNally McNally is currently extracting the text of the Bible from the human genome. He can be reached at [email protected]. As an adamant fan of Radiohead, I thought I’d let you know right off the bat that writing a column on the new album was not as easy as I thought. Read more...

By Dria Fearn Daily Bruin Contributor Everybody’s seen the voyeuristic boy band television show, “Making the Band.” Imagine something similar, only with Asians. A new pop group, At Last, is the result of a massive open call audition with one twist: it called for Asians. Read more...

By Andie Dingman Daily Bruin Contributor Everybody loves Raymond. He’s likable, comfortable, and, well, boring. Every sitcom and comedy variety show, from “Raymond” to “Saturday Night Live” to “Tom Green,” might be mildly entertaining, but do any of them make you think? Read more...