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Movies

A man (Val Kilmer) sits beside a duffel bag of money and plays a trumpet as flames consume the room around him in the opening scene of “The Salton Sea,” a noirish thriller that traverses a Southern California underworld where nothing is as it seems. The ensemble cast includes Peter Sarsgaard, right with Kilmer, Deborah Kara Unger, Vincent D’Onofrio and Adam Goldberg. Opens Friday.

Also: Superficial Seattle television reporter Angelina Jolie starts to rethink her priorities when a homeless savant tells her she has one week to live in “Life or Something Like It.” Edward Burns, Tony Shalhoub and Christian Kane co-star. Opens Friday.

Dance

In her six-part “Chicanos: The Spirit of Aztlan,” award-winning Southland choreographer Gema Sandoval depicts the mythical homeland of the Aztecs--and by extension the origin of much of Mexican American culture. Inspired by a 2001 exhibition at the L.A. County Museum of Art, this full-evening epic traces the evolution of Mexicano identity from pre-Columbian times to contemporary California. It will premiere Saturday at the Japan America Theatre in downtown L.A., performed by Sandoval’s Danza Floricanto/USA. Below: Rafael Ponce, left, Rocio Delgado and Sandoval.

Theater

Marcia Rodd stars as the upright Southern Jewish matron and Lance E. Nichols plays her chauffeur in Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Driving Miss Daisy.” The play follows their relationship as it evolves--along with the country’s race relations--from the late 1940s to the early ‘70s. Presented by Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities, it opens Friday at Hermosa Beach Playhouse.

Music

James Conlon makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic subscription-concert debut this week with a Russian program that includes the suite from Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” that he recently recorded. The 52-year-old American conductor is familiar from his summer Hollywood Bowl visits from 1978 to 1980, but he has since concentrated his activities in Europe--principally at the opera companies of Cologne and Paris. Besides excerpts from “Khovanshchina,” his program offers the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with soloist Sarah Chang.

Video

Director John Moore jumped from commercials to features with the old-fashioned action-adventure “Behind Enemy Lines.” Owen Wilson plays a hotshot navigator stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Adriatric, where the U.S. is enforcing an international cease-fire in Bosnia. But he and his pilot (Gabriel Macht) see something they shouldn’t during a Christmas Day fly-over and are shot down. Gene Hackman plays the carrier’s admiral. The militarily authentic film deploys Tuesday on VHS and DVD.

Pop Music

In its third year, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival lives up to its ambition of replicating the European-model pop festival. It will flood the Empire Polo Field in Indio with an international lineup of rock, pop and electronic acts, from new contender the Strokes, below, to returning prodigals Oasis and the Prodigy.