Best Bets

Movies

Curmudgeonly LAPD detective Robert De Niro, above left, is forced to partner with hotshot patrol officer Eddie Murphy, above right, for an unscripted TV show in “Showtime,� a spoof of the buddy-cop genre. Rene Russo co-stars as a slick TV producer. Opens Friday.

Also: It’s getting a bit cold for a mismatched herd of prehistoric critters as “Ice Age� dawns. A sloth named Sid (voiced by John Leguizamo) latches onto woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano) and ropes him into a mission to return a human infant to its family. The two are joined by Diego (Denis Leary), a saber-toothed tiger. Opens Friday.

Theater

Annette Bening, Kathleen Chalfant, Tyne Daly, Daniel Davis, Swoosie Kurtz, Valerie Mahaffey and Brenda Wehle star in award-winning British dramatist Alan Bennett’s series of solo plays, “Talking Heads,� directed by Michael Engler (“Sex and the City�). A rotating schedule of three plays each night will be presented in the seven-play, three-week festival. Featured are four plays from Bennett’s first “Talking Heads� series--�Bed Among the Lentils� with Chalfant, “A Chip in the Sugar� with Davis, “Her Big Chance� with Mahaffey, and “A Lady of Letters� with Kurtz--and three never-before-staged plays from the second series: “The Hand of God� with Wehle, “Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet� with Daly and “The Outside Dog� with Bening. Opens Saturday at the Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood.

Pop Music

“All Tomorrow’s Parties� is a classic song by the Velvet Underground, and one of that New York band’s spiritual heirs, Sonic Youth, left, is now in charge of an ambitious festival called All Tomorrow’s Parties. The New York band will deploy an army of rock, alt, experimental, hip-hop and what-have-you around UCLA’s Westwood campus Friday through next Sunday, including an Eddie Vedder solo set.

Music

The Berlin-based Artemis Quartet returns this week, playing a program of music by three of Hungary’s most important 20th century composers--Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti and Gyorgy Kurtag --as part of a Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Dance

Equally capable of preaching about nonviolence or resorting to physical combat if necessary, the Shaolin Monks are ecclesiastics with attitude, exponents of Chinese kung fu traditions dating to 525. Wielding 18 weapons and choreographed for the optimum display of their abilities, one group appears Thursday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts under the title “Shaolin Warriors,� while another takes over the Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City on March 20 as “Shaolin: Wheel of Life.�

Art

“Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930,� opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art today, looks at cross-fertilization among avant-garde painters, sculptors and designers in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the former Yugoslavia during the evolution of Modernism. The survey will examine the cities that evolved from regional centers into cosmopolitan communities as well as the exhibitions and performances at which intercultural exchange inspired diversity. Below: Gocar Joseph’s desk (1915).