SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010 >>>

1. The Secret in Their Eyes - screening today at noon, 2:45, 5:45 and 8:25 p.m. at The Grand Cinema -was the 2010 Oscar winner as best foreign film.  Moving between 1974 and 2000 in Buenos Aires, it completes the third acts of two stories, one involving a murder, the other a romance.  Writer-director Juan Jose Campanella brings extraordinary care to his lovingly crafted film, and his actors are well cast for why he needs them.  The kind of movie they literally don't make much anymore. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars.

2. International chess sets and individual playing pieces from prominent collections are on display at the Washington State History Museum from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

3. Bernard Shaw's famous play Major Barbara dismantles a cherished idea: "Right is right; and wrong is wrong; and if a man cannot distinguish them properly, he is either a fool or a rascal." Anyone in tonight's Tacoma Little Theatre audience, who believes this, is, like the twit who speaks it, in for a good moral tweaking by this socialist-capitalist-diabolical play, which begins at 2 p.m.

4. With John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, newly founded Tacoma theater company Gold From Straw jumps directly into the deep end of the theatrical pool. Doubt - which will be stage at 2 p.m. inside the Mecca Building - is carefully designed to raise questions and avoid answers. The audience is permitted to come to their own conclusions, if they wish, but that is not the intent. We are meant simply to know that we do not know, to wallow in our lack of certainty and to understand that how things seem does not dictate how things are. The characters, in turn, embrace, hide, foster, force and ignore the pervasive uncertainty of their lives. Read the full review here.

5. This month the Jazz Live at Marine View features reunites the ever popular singer Stephanie Porter with her longtime musical sidekick trumpeter Lance Buller from 5-6:30 p.m. inside the Marine View Presbyterian Church at 8469 Eastside Dr. in Tacoma.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound