Four Christmases” hurls towering Vince Vaughn at tiny Reese Witherspoon, and a lot of Oscars at a lightweight holiday farce. This comedy about a happy couple made miserable by having to visit four divorced parents begins with a bang but settles into sentiment so maudlin that even this cast can’t save it.

The director of the third “Transporter” movie has given himself the name “Olivier Megaton.” Too easy, you say? Very well. Make your own “bomb” joke.

The family drama “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” depicts the Holocaust through the simplistic eyes of a child: all the brutality, all the absurdity, crystallized by the innocence of an 8-year-old boy.

Overlong and self-indulgent, Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia,” an homage to epic adventure films, feels like a slog through the outback itself. And yet it can be a visually wondrous journey, one with striking visuals that will take your breath away again and again. No one ever doubted the director’s capabilities as an inventive aesthetic stylist — this is the man, after all, who dared to set the balcony scene in a swimming pool in his revisionist “Romeo + Juliet” and who turned “Moulin Rouge!” into a dizzying dance of light and color, complete with Elton John and Nirvana songs.

Obviously, not every musician becomes a cultural icon. But two bands with local roots have discovered a freedom that comes with being normal guys and entertaining hometown crowds. Hybrid Ice, a rock band that formed in 1969 in Danville, will play at the Pennsylvania Roadhouse this weekend.

Seven years in the making, the Flaming Lips’ new “Christmas on Mars” is a lo-fi feat of obsession and endurance.

Jason Thomas is a small-town guy with a major-label voice. As a regular performer in the Centre Region, the 28-year-old has been crooning modern pop-rock for the past few years and crooning it well.

Combining party tunes, dirty jokes and lots of loud rock ’n’ roll, the guys of central Pennsylvania band Wiskerbisket make it a point to bring the party everywhere they go. As a regular fixture on the music scene throughout region, band members Doug Snook (vocals), Robert “Burk” Burkholder (guitar), Tommy Lynch (bass) and Harry Bleyer (drums) have made their passion for a party a paying gig.

Wrecked cars, old washing machines, twisted metal garbage. Where one might see trash, Elli Groninger sees lizards, wizards, monsters and madmen.

Daniel Kalbach had driven along the same road again and again on his many trips to western Pennsylvania, and he had seen the same sites along the way every time. Then, one day, what most of us would consider an eyesore became a canvas for the artist’s latest exhibit of works, “Soft Bombing,” a collection of 28 black-and-white photographs taken at a salvage dump.

Whether it’s majestic mountains or seemingly boundless valleys, landscapes have long played a significant role in American art, so it shouldn’t be surprising that artists would be drawn to the beauty and splendor of the longest river on the Eastern Seaboard: the Susquehanna River.

Most of us — even those who don’t know much about art — are familiar with certain types of modern art, for example, the liquid paint drips and splatters of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock or the brightly colored Marilyn Monroe portraits of pop artist Andy Warhol. A new exhibit at the Palmer Museum of Art offers a glimpse into the transitional phase between abstract expressionism and pop art.