Seven

In the special skills section of every actress’ resume, she ought to consider adding the phrase “gives good phone.” That’s because even the most gifted women in Hollywood are all too often called on to deliver a prosaic phone scene – worrying about, cheering on, pining for – their men.

It should be a match made in comedy heaven – director and writer Christopher Guest, whose fake documentary films explore the sad desperation in American subcultures, turns his attention to the wacky world of sports mascots. But this time, heaven is missed by quite a lot.

Badass Backyard Brewing is moving away from home. The beer still will be brewed in a detached shed at Charlene Honcik and Kendra Wiiest’s house in Millwood. But it will be served in a new taproom at 1415 N. Argonne Road, next to Chan’s Bistro in the Argonne Mission Center.

Dinosaurs will take over the Spokane Convention Center this weekend. Jurassic Quest will bring more than 50 replica dinosaurs to town to create a museumlike display of scenes from the Jurassic period, said Chris Arnold, an advanced planner for the show.

Rod Man has been performing stand-up since the mid-’90s, but he’s best known for winning the eighth season of the NBC reality competition series “Last Comic Standing.” The comedian, real name Rod Thompson, brings his raucous, slyly observational brand of comedy to the Bing on Saturday.

Comedy juggernaut Kevin Hart isn’t content to merely share the screen in buddy comedies like “Ride Along” and “Central Intelligence.” He wants to own the screen, as he does in his latest stand up comedy film, “Kevin Hart: What Now?” It’s his fifth stand up film since 2009, with 2013’s “Let Me Explain” raking in $32 million dollars at the box office. For his latest trick, he sold out Lincoln Financial Field in his hometown of Philadelphia, a record-breaking, history-making crowd.

Director Gavin O’Connor’s thriller “The Accountant” almost seems like an excuse for Ben Affleck to try his hand at playing a math whiz for once. But Affleck’s Christian Wolff is a far cry from Will Hunting. Chris is a high functioning math savant on the autism spectrum, who finds solace in ritual, routine, patterns and finishing his tasks. He leads an unassuming and mundane life in rural Illinois as a strip mall accountant, but of course what looks simple and quiet never is. His unique gifts allow him a lucrative side-hustle as a forensic accountant for “some of the scariest people on the planet,” according to Ray King (J.K. Simmons), director of crime enforcement at the Department of the Treasury. But that part of his life isn’t so much what “The Accountant” is about. There’s no globe-trotting or cavorting with cartels and mob bosses. The film is a bit of a bait and switch. We think we’re diving into the antithetical world of the criminal accountant, but what the film wants to explore is where Chris came from, and how he works.

Russell Volz used to hate coffee. Then he began roasting his own beans.

It’s not often you see a movie that captures the all too torturous years of middle school – perhaps because we’d all rather forget the horrors of seventh grade. Which is why “Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life” feels a bit unique. It’s not about children, or teenagers, but those awkward in-betweeners, kids straining at the boundaries of childhood. In this story, based on the book written by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts, boundaries are in fact, the enemy.

Mandolin Orange is the project of Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, North Carolina-based writers and musicians who stop by the Bartlett on Sunday night. Marlin and Frantz, who are also a couple, have been writing and performing music together since 2009, and their music, mostly sweet and solemn and a little melancholy, make for a perfect soundtrack to the opening grace notes of autumn.

The Spokane Symphony’s season rolls along this weekend with a Classics concert that bridges generations and explores man’s relationship with nature. Titled “Northern Lights,” the program will showcase the work of two Scandinavian composers, Finland’s Jean Sibelius and Iceland’s Valgeir Sigurðsson, and a masterpiece by one of Russia’s greatest artists.

Spokane’s bi-annual Visual Arts Tour kicks off this weekend, pumping up an already super-charged October First Friday. The added bonus with the self-guided Visual Arts Tour is that the fun doesn’t end on Friday night, but continues throughout the weekend, with many venues keeping their doors open both Saturday and Sunday.

Actor Sean Murray’s dad spent 30 years as a naval officer. In an odd twist of fate, Murray finds himself playing an investigator burrowing into naval crimes in CBS’ hit show “NCIS.”

What’s new for home viewing on video-on-demand and Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming services.

“The Birth of a Nation” arrives on screens this week amongst a whiplash cycle of celebration and backlash. The indie historical epic about the bloody 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner is written, produced and directed by Nate Parker, who also stars in the film. After the Sundance premiere in January, it was snapped up for a record-breaking $17.5 million by Fox Searchlight (no doubt with visions of future little gold men) during the height of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.

Paula Hawkins’ debut novel, “The Girl on the Train,” is a story told through multiple points of view that takes on the malleable, fallible nature of memory through the tale of an alcoholic divorcee attempting to solve a crime through her own boozy blackouts. In this mystery, Hawkins deftly illustrates how a single point of view might contain one truth, but is never really the whole truth. In the film adaption, Emily Blunt plays Rachel, a broken, sad woman who rides the commuter train to and from New York City each day, dressed in a suit for a job she no longer has, sipping vodka from her water bottle and sometimes guzzling it from a martini glass. Her daily pleasures are glimpses of the houses that slip by her window and the lives within. One house contains her ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and their new baby; in the house next door, a sexy young couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), flaunt their passion.