World News Gathered & Syndicated

By TERI AGINS

Q: I am male, one of 15 vice presidents—half are women—at a large medical supplier, where we are preparing a video for training the new members of our sales team. We want to dress in a way that will project authority and professionalism, but we don’t want to come across as “the suits.” Our usual office attire is business casual.

—D.M., New York City

A: I vote for the dressiest version of business casual for your training tapes. That means a sport coat and woven open-collar shirt without a tie for the guys and a nice blouse and skirt or casual dress for the women. This will telegraph professionalism without looking too stiff.

Tim Goldman

As Webcam meetings and video training have become popular, more businesspeople are taking cues from newscasters, who have mastered on-camera dressing. Study the relaxed look of the hosts and guests on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” The men tend to wear shirts in French blue, pink or lilac, instead of white, and the women don solid-colored dresses or blouses that cover their arms, as well as light makeup and earrings.

Also, consider stagecraft—such as a potted plant to make the room more inviting. Your colleagues should rehearse at home in front of their Webcams to sharpen their speech and improve eye contact with the camera. Everyone should smile from time to time and minimize hand gestures. That way, the executive team will look confident and in control.

—Email questions to askteri@wsj.com

Watch a clip from the film ‘Contraband’ starring Mark Walberg. (Video; Universal Pictures)

Only one thing moves slowly in “Contraband”—a container ship whose cargo includes a potential fortune in counterfeit bills. Everything and everyone else hurtles along at breakneck speed, leaving no time to dwell on the standard-brand plot, or the surfeit of events—including an episode of being buried alive—that could fill three more movies. Yet the pounding pace is matched by perfect clarity; you really do understand what’s going on, and come to accept all sorts of preposterous stuff as perfectly plausible. This is an uncommonly well-crafted action adventure, or an action misadventure, given how much goes wrong for the resourceful hero. It’s a genre film, not great art, though there’s a good joke about art—a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough—but it’s a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

Mark Wahlberg is Chris Farraday, a master smuggler gone straight and determined to remain so; his performance is a masterly display of quick intelligence, easy warmth and cool authority. Ben Foster makes Chris’s friend Sebastian hard to read—intentionally and intriguingly so. Giovanni Ribisi’s psychopathic thug, Tim, has a chillingly pinched voice. Kate Beckinsale is strong and yet vulnerable as Chris’s wife, Kate. (How did they think up her name?) Caleb Landry Jones is Kate’s kid brother, Andy, a hapless fool who sets the plot in motion by forcing Chris to make one more smuggling run out of love for his family. (I told you the plot is generic, but did I say it doesn’t matter?) To prepare for the fateful run, Chris rounds up a team of trusted professionals, à la “Ocean’s 11,” but they’re grizzled merchant sailors on a container ship, under the command of J.K. Simmons’s malign Capt. Camp, that shuttles between New Orleans and Panama.

A container ship turns out to be a terrific place to shoot part of an action movie. At least it is for the adroit director of this one, Baltasar Kormákur, and his cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd. (The film editor was Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir.) Shooting aboard ship means giving the audience a chance to see colorful men who know how to do skillful things, and who do them with machines that fill the screen commandingly. (Watch out when a loss of hydraulic fluid sends the ship out of control.) Container ports prove impressive too, what with their giant cranes and controlled tumult. The density of detail is extraordinary throughout—police cars flashing their lights like swarms of fireflies in the New Orleans night; the labyrinthine slums of Panama City; a psychotic counterfeiter’s lair (when this guy says he’s thrown someone to the wolves, he isn’t speaking metaphorically); the fine points of counterfeiting. (If you plan to print your own money, make sure you do it on starch-free paper.)

“Contraband” was written by Aaron Guzikowski, Arnaldur Indridason and Óskar Jónasson. It’s an English-language remake of “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” an Icelandic thriller in which the director—who was born in Iceland—played Mr. Wahlberg’s role. Of the Icelandic films that Mr. Kormákur has directed, I’ve seen only the creepily intense and extremely accomplished “Jar City”; he has also done a couple of English-language films that haven’t set the movie world on fire. This one, however, should do very good things for his international career. His touch is sure in the action sequences, and he’s willing to dial the action back at crucial junctures for intimate encounters involving Chris, his family and his incarcerated father. Instead of slowing the film down, these scenes enrich it. There’s nothing like emotional substance, even in an ostensibly unsubstantial thriller.

‘Joyful Noise’

Watch a clip from the upcoming film ‘Joyful Noise’ starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. (Video: Warner Brothers)

The members of the poor, mostly black church choir at the center of Todd Graff’s would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief). Queen Latifah’s Vi Rose Hill and Dolly Parton’s G.G. Sparrow have conflicting notions of how the choir should go about winning the National Joyful Noise Competition, which is the movie’s pretext for everything that happens after the first two minutes. Vi is a traditionalist, while G.G., the church’s longtime benefactor, wants to shake things up. Feel free to guess which view prevails.

One of the movie’s distinctions, if that’s the right word, is its disdain for any details that might interfere with the musical numbers. The people who made it know we already know the hoary plot: There’s a competition, they’ll win the semifinals, then they’ll go from their humble town in rural Georgia to glamorous Los Angeles and win the finals, though not without some cliffhanging complications. As a result, suspense plays second fiddle to the music, which is a good thing, since the music is pretty great, though also to the two leading ladies’ store of folk wisdom. That’s no so good, since Vi makes such statements as “I swear your train of thought makes all local stops,” and G.G. issues such warnings as “tryin’ to fool me is like tryin’ to sneak sunrise past a rooster.”

Another distinction is the movie’s willingness to address Ms. Parton’s physical appearance by referring to it directly. “I am who I am,” G.G. declares, to which Vi replies: “Maybe you were five procedures ago.” Ms. Latifah’s vibrant presence owes everything to her verve and vocal cords. When Vi lets loose with the gospel strains of “Fix Me,” gorgeous music fills the air and all’s right with the movie and everything else. The cast includes Romeo and Juliet surrogates played, and ardently sung, by Jeremy Jordan and Keke Palmer, and Kris Kristofferson doing one of the weirdest cameos in movie history.

‘Pina’

A couple of weeks ago, after Wim Wenders’s 3-D film about the late dance icon Pina Bausch had already opened in New York, the Journal’s dance critic, Robert Greskovic, wrote about it in detail. Now that “Pina” is in limited national release, as of Friday, I’ll add a few words of my own—not so much as a critic, though I do want to discuss the use of 3-D, but as someone who has viewed Bausch’s theatrical works over the years with a mixture of excitement and bafflement.

Sundance Selects

Ditta Miranda Jasjfi in ‘Pina.’

First the technology, which enhances its subject as cinema technology rarely does. Using 3-D was a stroke of genius, but only because it’s been used in such a self-effacing way. The sense of a proscenium is preserved, more or less, yet the invisible wall that stands between the camera and the dancers in most dance films disappears in this one. The 3-D camera gets close enough to the dancers to make them corporeal, and place them in tangible space, yet never intrudes on their dance.

As for the substance, Mr. Wenders manages a phenomenal trick of demystifying his subject (who died shortly before the film went into production) and preserving the profound mysteriousness of what she created. Pina the icon becomes Pina Bausch the enigmatic provocateuse who tells one of her dancers, “Don’t forget, you have to scare me,” and tells another, “You’re just going to have to learn to get crazier.” The images captured by the film—dancers in theatrical sets, dancers in surreal exterior settings—are deeply scary for their loneliness and pain, and crazily thrilling for the intensity of their joy.

DVD Focus

‘The Fighter’ (2010)

Mark Wahlberg had long championed this story about boxing in a blue-collar Boston family, and then, when financing finally came through, chose to play the role that’s initially distinguished by its passivity. He’s Micky Ward, a fighter who’s become a punching bag, but supports his family by absorbing physical punishment. Christian Bale is his trainer and half-brother, Dicky Ecklund, a wild-eyed, crack-addicted caricature of the boxer he once was. David O. Russell directed a superb cast that includes Melissa Leo as the family matriarch and Amy Adams as Micky’s tough and fearfully tender girlfriend.

‘Laurel Canyon’ (2002)

Kate Beckinsale plays opposite Christian Bale in Lisa Cholodenko’s pleasantly time-warped romantic comedy, set in a Los Angeles canyon where hippie culture survives in modern dress. She’s Alex, a beautiful young scholar and the fiancée of Sam, an earnest young psychiatrist who’s more vulnerable than Alex knows to the ministrations of Natascha McElhone’s resident physician from Israel. The movie’s high point—its very high point—is Frances McDormand’s sensational performance as Sam’s mother, Jane, a pansexual record producer who can’t suppress a nervous giggle when she introduces her strait-laced son to a gaggle of indolent musicians.

‘Bringing Down the House’ (2003)

Queen Latifah is Charlene, a lusty prison escapee who employs an Internet ruse to invade the home of Peter Sanderson, a repressed lawyer played by Steve Martin. Don’t expect too much of Mr. Martin in this sloppy sitcom, but do expect to be seduced and entertained by Ms. Latifah. Full-figured, amply-fleshed and almost preternaturally—though not groundlessly—self-confident, this rap star turned actress turned movie star makes the most of every moment on screen. She doesn’t steal scenes; she simply dominates them. Adam Shankman directed from a script by Jason Filardi.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By CANDACE JACKSON

New York

When he’s not vacationing on his yacht, partying with celebrities like Kim Kardashian or traveling between his so-hip-it-hurts hotels in Miami, Bangkok and India, hotelier and socialite Vikram Chatwal can be found in his grown-up SoHo bachelor pad.

On the second floor of his two-story, 4,000-square-foot condominium, purchased in 2010 for just under $6 million and designed and furnished for roughly $2 million, is his “wall of self-realization,” featuring framed magazine articles of himself as well as photographs with him and his father with heads of state like Bill Clinton.

On a recent afternoon, housekeepers clad in tan tunics shuffled around as Mr. Chatwal, 40, hung out between meetings and a fashion party. Earlier that week, he’d attended a Kanye West and Jay-Z concert. “I have also been playing a lot of chess and Scrabble,” he said.

Located on a quiet side street, Mr. Chatwal’s four-bedroom, 4½-bathroom townhouse with its own street entrance is housed in Soho Mews. Completed in 2009, the Gwathmey Siegel-designed complex has large windows and residents like Justin Timberlake. While the building has a modern, metal-paneled facade, Mr. Chatwal’s home’s interiors have incorporated more traditional elements and are darker and decidedly guy-like, with a slightly more classic atmosphere than Mr. Chatwal’s sleek-looking hotels

Mark Zeff, a designer who collaborated with Mr. Chatwal on some of his hotels, said the townhouse was originally “just a big white box. It had very little character.” To give the contemporary-feeling space more of a “turn-of-the-century feel,” he incorporated darker colors like brown hardwood floors and wall paneling.

When he’s not vacationing on his yacht or partying with Kim Kardashian, hotelier and socialite Vikram Chatwal can be found in his grown-up SoHo bachelor pad, Candace Jackson reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Dustin Aksland for The Wall Street Journal.

In the living room, there’s an antique-looking trunk coffee table with an elaborately designed chess set on top, flanked by dark leather couches. The bedroom walls of the master bedroom are upholstered in dark leather. In the dining room there’s a long rectangular table with burgundy upholstered chairs and benches. The main living space has a glass wall overlooking a backyard patio lined with bamboo trees.

Inspiration also came from Mr. Chatwal’s 150-foot yacht, Fathom, which he said he spent a year and a half designing with Mr. Zeff. Some of the shiny surfaces, including a mirrored wall in the living room with an invisible, built-in television screen, are reminiscent of the boat’s sleek design.

The art is contemporary and eclectic. There are neon red light bulbs in the shape of the word “Vicious” in the sitting room, next to large nude photo of a seductively posed Pamela Anderson, by the fashion photographer Sante D’Orazio. Upstairs, a surfboard leans against the wall, with the word “Gratitude” painted on it. Hanging near a wall-size frosted glass pivoting front door is a large painting comprised of rows of colored dots, by Ross Bleckner. In the upstairs hallway and near the main entry are pieces by M.F. Husain, an artist often described as the “Picasso of India.”

“The collection is very much like Vikram; from one minute to the next you don’t know what he’s going to do or say,” said Mr. Zeff.

Born in Ethiopia, Mr. Chatwal is the son of Sant Singh Chatwal, the India-born founder of Hampshire Hotels & Resorts, which owns and operates hotels around the world. In 1999, with his father’s backing, he opened the Time, his first hotel in New York, known for its futuristic design. He subsequently opened nine hotels through his father’s company under several different brands, including the moderately priced Night brand.

The higher-end Dream Hotels, with their velvet-roped lounges, high-tech touches and elaborate design elements like a swimming pool with a clear bottom visible from the lobby, have attracted high-profile parties thrown by designers like Marc Jacobs. (Rates at the Dream Downtown start around $425 a night.) Over the next few years, in a partnership with Wyndham Hotels, his company will roll out nearly 50 more Night and Dream hotels world-wide.

A former model who has acted in a handful of films, Mr. Chatwal is as known for his social life as his professional doings. He befriended celebrities like model Gisele Bundchen and, in 2006, was married in a lavish ceremony spread across three Indian cities to Priya Sachdev, a former model and investment banker, with guests like P. Diddy, Deepak Chopra and Mr. Clinton in attendance. (Now separated, Mr. Chatwal said his wife stays with him when she visits with their daughter.) Last year, he hit the tabloids when he was linked to actress Lindsay Lohan (a representative for the actress said they never dated).

Mr. Chatwal, who also owns a home in London and frequently visits India for business and to see his daughter, said he spends about seven or eight months out of the year in New York. A 3,200-square-foot unit with three bedrooms and three bathrooms in Soho Mews is currently on the market for just under $5 million.

Though he said he has slowed down his partying a little as he has gotten older, Mr. Chatwal said when he’s at home, he is rarely alone. He likes to have gatherings at his house every couple of weeks and have friends or relatives over most days.

His father recalled he once chastised his son for spending too much money on a hotel’s design, pointing out that the design bill was nearly as much as he’d spent buying hotels. The elder Mr. Chatwal said he told his son at the time, “You don’t know the value of money.”

The Time hotel eventually gained widespread recognition for its design, and Mr. Chatwal said he generally no longer questions his son’s expensive tastes. The elder Mr. Chatwal said his son’s home has a homey feel that “doesn’t make you feel like you’re in Manhattan.”

West Palm Beach, Fla.

It’s puzzling to watch a good play fall out of fashion. Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” was written in 1964, opened Off Broadway in 1970, wowed the New York critics, won a Pulitzer Prize, was turned into a movie by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in 1972 and looked like a deservedly sure thing in the posterity sweepstakes for many years thereafter. But while it continues to be performed by students and amateurs to this day, I’m not aware of any major professional staging that’s taken place in recent years.

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new production of “Gamma Rays” would be worthy of note for that reason alone. Fortunately, there’s a better reason to see it: William Hayes, the company’s artistic director, has given Mr. Zindel’s play the kind of revival of which every frustrated playwright dreams, one so profoundly comprehending and persuasively acted that you’ll leave the theater wondering how “Gamma Rays” could ever have been forgotten, however briefly. Enhancing the immediacy of the staging is the troupe’s unusually shallow 218-seat theater, whose last row of seats is only 34 feet from the stage. The handsome new venue, which opened in November, manages to preserve the striking intimacy of the fast-growing company’s old 84-seat performing space.

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much to “Gamma Rays.” It’s a one-set drama about the plight of a fatherless family teetering on the edge of abject poverty, a subject that has been done to death ever since “The Glass Menagerie” opened on Broadway in 1945. It has five characters, all of them women, one of whom has a bit part and one of whom never speaks, and it is dominated, as is customarily the case with such plays, by the unhappy mother, whose soul has been crushed by the struggle for survival. It is (mostly) told from the point of view of one of her children, a sensitive young girl who is clearly the author’s alter ego, and its tone alternates between delicate poetry and harsh realism.

You’ve heard it all before? Maybe—but not like this.

To be sure, Mr. Zindel’s plot is as simple as his premise. Tillie Hunsdorfer (Arielle Hoffman), the sensitive child, has been encouraged by one of her teachers to compete in a science fair, and she and Ruth (Skye Coyne), her older, epileptic sister, long desperately for Beatrice (Laura Turnbull), their mother, to come to the awards ceremony. But Beatrice, incapacitated by self-pity and drink, is no longer capable of summoning up any love for her children, and when they lose patience with her at last, she lashes out in a way that is shocking enough to make the audience gasp with horror.

Stock stuff, in other words, but Mr. Zindel has charged it with the kind of passionate feeling that can ennoble the least original of scripts, and no sooner does “Gamma Rays” get under way than you are drawn irresistibly into the Hunsdorfers’ unhappy lives. He also takes care to provide just enough hope to make the play bearable, though never so much as to undercut its hard-earned anguish. Why, then, did “Gamma Rays” slip into obscurity? Partly because Mr. Newman’s misbegotten film version was an orgy of overacting and partly, I suspect, because of the title, which makes sense in context but sounds irritatingly fey if you don’t know the plot. In addition, the script doesn’t read well: You have to hear the dialogue to appreciate how well it plays.

Above all, though, Beatrice must be played not as a blimplike monster of malice but as a life-size woman at the end of her frayed rope—and Ms. Turnbull delivers the goods. Never for a moment does her vicious bitterness smack of the stage. Her performance as Beatrice Hunsdorfer is as real as a hangover, and when she tells Tillie that “I hate the world,” you shudder at the thought of so complete and irreversible a loss of hope.

Ms. Hoffman, a high-school senior who is Ms. Turnbull’s real-life daughter, is more than equal to the challenge of playing a shy, mousy character without letting her become dull. Ms. Coyne’s part is flashier and thus easier, but she is every bit as credible as her colleagues. Gracie Connell is excellent in the small role of Tillie’s odiously smug competitor at the science fair, and Harriet Oser, who plays the Hunsdorfers’ senile boarder, is heart-catchingly memorable without saying a word.

Mr. Hayes’s chief contribution to the proceedings is to keep every element of the production, including the performances, in perfect equipoise. Nothing is exaggerated or disproportionate. He has also assembled a stellar production team led by Michael Amico, whose grimy storefront set reeks of what Ruth Gordon once called “the dark-brown taste of being poor,” and Sean Dolan, the lighting designer, who ends the play with a gorgeously well-calculated effect that sweeps the audience into and out of the Hunsdorfers’ dark world in a single evanescent flash of beauty. Rarely have I been so moved by a play, or so impressed by the company that produced it.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

By the time cable and most other news outlets had ceased reporting on the sensational case of Drew Peterson, the Illinois police officer whose fourth wife had mysteriously disappeared, while his third had suffered a mysterious death in the bathtub, it would have been hard to imagine wanting to know much more. But life provides its small miracles. In this case, a film that so deepens the dimensions of the known—all thanks to a masterful performance by Rob Lowe—it has the force and mystery of a new story. Not that the old one didn’t grab the imagination in its own grim way.

Relentlessly upbeat, Officer Peterson became—once fingers of suspicion were pointed at him—an object of fevered news coverage that would intensify all the more as he made his way through the glare of camera lights and hordes of persistent reporters, with unshakable aplomb. Through it all the gray-haired Peterson maintained an easy man-about-town jokiness. In his mid-50s, he also flaunted his new decades-younger girlfriend, while maintaining he had no idea where wife number four, Stacy Cales (age 23), had gone. Infuriated neighbors, still searching for her, were not amused when Officer Peterson, with help from the media, set up a celebrity dating game of sorts. The theme: finding a date for Drew.

He had, in fact, become a celebrity, with appearances on “Today” with Matt Lauer, on the Greta Van Susteren show, the cover of People, and lots more of the kind. All that ended with his arrest in May 2009, on the charge that he had murdered his third wife, Kathleen Savio, found dead in her bathtub five years earlier. It had taken the Bolingbrook, Ill., police some time, apparently, to deduce that the bruises and other signs on her body pointed to something other than “accidental death”—their original conclusion.

Mr. Lowe’s Drew Peterson is an undeniable improvement on the original both in appearance and charm. He looks far younger and, even with grizzle around the mouth, is incomparably better looking than the paunchy Officer Peterson of the puffy eyelids. It’s a lot clearer why his Peterson can lure beautiful 20-somethings into throwing their lives away on him than was the case with the actual one. All this may not go down well with history purists, but this is, after all, a movie—one that homes in on undeniable realities. For this and a lot else we can forgive Mr. Lowe his good looks and, also, his off-key rendering of the local accent.

His portrait of the accused in “Drew Peterson: Untouchable” reflects, marvelously, a profound grasp of the coldness beneath the geniality on display in all those real-life, jolly media sessions starring Officer Peterson. The picture of this menacing authority figure is all the more ominous for that sustained amiability, more ominous still as the film shows his shell of cool assurance cracking in private. He’s obsessed by suspicions, all baseless, that beautiful young wife number four is carrying on with other men.

The Peterson trial, subject to delays, won’t begin until the spring of this year. That may raise some objections to the film’s timing. It will do nothing to diminish the power of this portrait.

***

“Touch” is the kind of series better seen than described. Particularly when one of the chief describers, show creator Tim Kring (“Heroes”), puts out descriptions like the one that came with the review DVD, announcing that this work represents his fascination with “the theme of interconnectivity and global consciousness” and the attempt to put a positive message out into the world that we are more connected to each other than we ever knew.

Blood-freezing stuff. It’s a relief to report that the aforementioned claptrap bears no resemblance to the high quality and tone of “Touch,” whose preview episode shows every sign of a series likely to hold audiences in thrall. That’s in part because of its complex story, and in part despite it.

But above all because of Kiefer Sutherland. He’s the clarifying force that brings all the disparate aspects of this complicated storytelling together—that informs the whole mess with his wonderfully earthbound presence. No small feat. Mr. Sutherland plays Martin Bohm, widower and father of 10-year-old Jake (David Mazouz), an autistic child incapable of speech. Not, however, an ordinary autistic child, but one with the special power to perceive, through numbers, patterns in the world whose analysis will allow people on the far corners of the earth to make vital connections. In the preview episode (the series begins in March) the connections include a boy in Baghdad desperate to get money for a new family stove, a British man in search of vital personal material on his cellphone, the winner of a lottery in New York, and more. Still, it’s Mr. Sutherland’s portrayal of the father—unyielding in his effort to break through to his mute child and grasp what he’s trying to say with his numbers—that is the heart of this story, the power likely to sustain this promising enterprise.

***

A film on Phil Ochs—activist, would-be revolutionary, and singer with a golden voice—could not have come at a more propitious time for comparisons. Ochs, who died a suicide in 1976 at age 35, spent years writing protest songs against the Vietnam War, against the CIA, in support of all the social causes dear to the hearts of 1960s activists. “Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune” is a long journey through the era, with familiar pictures—the Chicago Democratic Convention, the street marches, speeches. A fine opportunity to compare the pathetic posturing of the Occupy Wall Street movement with the political protest movements of those times. It’s impossible to imagine a Phil Ochs, or any of the crowd of ’60s protest singers, emerging from the hordes now sprawled in encampments around the country, demanding care, space and trying daily to figure out what they should protest that day.

The picture of Ochs is in the end a tragic one—he suffered from manic-depressive illness, he became a heavy drinker. He was convinced when he was robbed, beaten and left for dead by attackers on a remote African beach that the CIA was behind it. Nonetheless, there had been that voice, those wit-filled lyrics, the unforgettable “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and they’re here now, a rich bounty, in this film.

Por ALAN ZIBEL

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–Los bancos de Estados Unidos con más de US$10.000 millones en activos pronto podrían tener que realizar sus propias pruebas de resistencia a fin de medir su capacidad para resistir pérdidas bajo diversos escenarios económicos.

La medida marcaría un cambio significativo en la forma en que las autoridades reguladoras federales supervisan a los bancos.

La propuesta, que fue publicada el martes por el Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos de Estados Unidos, o FDIC, requeriría que los 23 bancos regulados por el FDIC que cumplen con el límite de activos mencionado, realicen sus propias pruebas basados en tres escenarios económicos desarrollados por la agencia, utilizando información hasta el 30 de septiembre de cualquier año.

Los bancos tendrían que usar los escenarios para calcular pérdidas potenciales, reservas para pérdidas y el impacto sobre sus posiciones de capital al cierre de cada trimestre por más de dos años.

Las instituciones tendrían que presentar un informe al FDIC el 5 de enero de cada año y hacer público un resumen de las pruebas de solvencia dentro de los 90 días posteriores.

If starting an art collection is among your New Year resolutions, here are 10 tips to set you on the right road.

1. Despite all the hype about art as a safe asset class, don’t consider a collection primarily as an investment. The art market isn’t the stock market, where you can easily buy and sell. Art doesn’t supply dividends or earn interest, and selling with a gain is far from a sure thing.

2. Buy what you like, not fashionable status symbols. You have to live with the works; their dividends should be the pleasure of looking at them.

Christie’s

‘Maquette for Gaudi XV’ (1975) by Joan Miró is estimated at £25,000-35,000

3. Do your homework by visiting galleries and studying auctions. Fairs are the way to compare a wealth of galleries under one roof. Auctions are transparent, providing collectors with benchmark prices that serve as a guide to how much collectors should be paying. Auction houses provide an enormous amount of price information on their websites.

4. Contemporary art galleries build up new artists who only appear at auction later. So roaming the galleries is the way to pick up emerging talent. Getting to meet both established and young artists is one of the joys of collecting contemporary art, and that is done through galleries.

5. There’s an excitement in buying at auction, where enthusiasts compete against one another. But beware of auction fever when heated bidding can push prices to crazy levels. Set a maximum above which you will not go, and stick to it. This limit should take into account costs on top of the price at which a piece is hammered down. They include buyer’s premium (commission paid to auction house) and, in many countries, a royalty for the artist’s resale right. Always check the condition of your desired piece. I neglected to do this once, and consequently paid handsomely for its restoration.

6. Before buying think of where you will place the piece so that it has maximum effect. Art is made to be seen and not to end up in the garage. You can mix styles, eras and regions, but the pieces must speak to each other.

7. A mistake often made by new collectors when starting out is in buying too much. It is better to move slowly so as to build a quality, rather than a large collection.

8.Works on paper are a common route for beginners. Limited-edition prints and multiple objects are a way of owning a work by a famous artist you like at a reasonable price. Christie’s Paris on Thursday will offer colorful, abstract prints by Sonia Delaunay from 1969-71 (estimates between €500 and €2,000). Drawings, watercolors and other unique works on paper are also a promising starting point. There are striking pieces in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper auction in London on Feb. 8. Delaunay’s bright, geometric gouache, watercolor and black crayon “Rythme couleur, Paris” (1966) is estimated at £20,000-£30,000; carrying the same estimate will be Otto Freundlich’s cheerful pastel “Cosmic Rainbow” (1922). Joan Miró’s gouache, pastel, collage, pen and pencil over a printed base “Maquette for Gaudí XV” (1975) is expected to fetch £25,000-£35,000.

9. Photo art also provides an affordable start. The big names, such as Andreas Gursky, can sell in the millions, but there are a range of photographers today in many countries that have reasonable prices and produce superb images. Any beginner should look at the photo-art talent that surrounds us everywhere.

10. Be prepared to hang onto the art you buy for some time. One of the major selling points for any work at auction is that it is fresh to the market. Buying today and selling tomorrow is out.

Write to Margaret Studer at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

Por JONATHAN HOUSE

MADRID (EFE Dow Jones)–A cambio de un renovado compromiso con la reducción del déficit, el Gobierno español está estudiando establecer una línea de crédito para ofrecer ayuda financiera a sus atribuladas regiones, anunció el martes el ministro de Hacienda, Cristóbal Montoro.

“El objetivo es renovar el compromiso de todos, del Gobierno y de las autonomías, (…) de cumplir los objetivos de déficit”, dijo Montoro de camino a su reunión con los responsables de Economía de las 17 comunidades autónomas españolas.

La reunión será una prueba fundamental de la capacidad del nuevo Gobierno para controlar los presupuestos de las autonomías, que manejan más de un tercio del gasto público del país. España es una de las naciones con problemas económicos de la eurozona.

Tras llegar al poder el mes pasado, el Gobierno del presidente Mariano Rajoy dijo que el déficit público de España en 2011 estaba en torno al 8% del Producto Interno Bruto, muy por encima del objetivo del 6%, debido sobre todo al gasto excesivo de las comunidades autónomas.

Los analistas indicaron que la gran desviación del objetivo acordado con la Unión Europea supone un duro golpe a la credibilidad de España.

Además de pedir a las regiones que reiteren su compromiso con el control de sus presupuestos, el Gobierno iniciará el debate de nuevos controles presupuestarios en la reunión del martes. Está preparando nuevas leyes para desarrollar a los principios de equilibrio presupuestario introducidos en la Constitución española el año pasado a instancias de Alemania y otros países de la UE.

Las comunidades españoles han protegido celosamente su autonomía en el pasado, pero se han vuelto más flexibles debido a la grave crisis financiera que viven, la cual se ofrece a aligerar el Gobierno central.

Aunque los costes de financiación estatal se han incrementado mucho en el último año, varias comunidades autónomas han perdido todo acceso a los mercados de crédito. El Gobierno central se vio obligado a intervenir el pasado mes para evitar la quiebra de la Comunidad Valenciana, adelantándole parte de su financiación habitual.

Montoro dijo que el Gobierno está considerando establecer una línea de crédito para las autonomías a través del Instituto de Crédito Oficial, con el fin de “garantizar la financiación de los servicios públicos” a los ciudadanos de todo el país.

By ELIZABETH FITZHERBERT

British actor Paul Bettany says his knowledge of global finance was limited prior to the financial meltdown of 2008. “I knew I had a bank account and a PIN number, but I really understood nothing about anything else,” he notes.

All the more intriguing then that Mr. Bettany, 40 years old, gives such a convincing performance in his latest screen incarnation as Will Emerson, head of his firm’s risk department. Emerson is a cynical, gum-chewing Wall Street trader faced with the prospect of possible unemployment as his 170-year-old investment firm struggles for survival over an intense 24 hours in the drama “Margin Call.”

“I admit, I was starting from a deficit, which was a challenge,” Mr. Bettany says.

The film, which was released in the U.S. last fall and is opening in European cities over the next few weeks, was made on a $3.5-million budget and has taken in $10 million world-wide so far, according to Box Office Mojo.

Directed by debut feature-film director J.C. Chandor, who also wrote the script, the story follows the lives of a group of traders and executives at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, struggling to save their firm from collapse after discovering that it is essentially bust (the risk department’s projected losses equal the entire value of the firm). The high-caliber cast includes Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons and Zachary Quinto, of “Star Trek” and “Heroes” fame (who also worked as a producer on the film). But Kevin Spacey, who plays an investment bank executive, is described by Mr. Bettany as “the linchpin” of the production, helping to make the financing of the film possible.

Drawn to the project after seeing the script, Mr. Bettany says he wanted to be involved straight away. “There is a dearth of good scripts. So when something this well-crafted turned up, I met the director immediately, who talked a really good fight, was incredibly passionate and enthusiastic.”

Mr. Chandor’s father worked for Merrill Lynch for over 40 years, which enabled the director to explain the often complex city terminology to the cast. Mr. Bettany says Mr. Chandor was extremely open to change if something didn’t feel right, and they ended up adding in some scenes together.

“Paul’s ability as an actor to bring humanity, depth and life to a character that, on its surface, is the least likable in the script was beyond what I could have ever hoped for when I sat down and wrote it,” says the director. “I will never forget his professional and personal generosity toward me as a first-time director, from the first day of shooting to the last.”

Mr. Bettany says the production was shot over 17 days and was on such a tight schedule there was no rehearsal time and a second take was “a supernatural event.” But he says he was able to fit in a couple of days on a trading floor shadowing a trader, listening to his deals and mentoring junior traders.

“Talking to him about his life was confounding, because I was faced with a human being who has a wife, two kids and a mortgage,” he says, adding that he was able to meet a lot of the challenges of the part after having spent time with his dopplegänger.

Over the years, Mr. Bettany has successfully juggled independent and big-budget films, accruing a portfolio of screen credits that show his versatility and range, including a 14-century English poet in “A Knight’s Tale” (2001), a tennis champion in “Wimbledon” (2004) and an Opus Dei monk in “The Da Vinci Code” (2006).

So what attracted him to the part of Will Emerson, which he describes as “totally amoral”? “I really liked the fact that he was so unapologetic about his view on the world. He sees life like a sporting event and is determined to be the first through the tape. It is a dog-eat-dog world and he is going to eat dog. These are people at the very top who call themselves ‘masters of the universe.’”

Indeed, Mr. Bettany’s character discloses a $2.5-million salary the previous year—$76,520 of which was spent on “hookers, booze and dancers,” and most of which he is able to claim back on expenses. Mr. Bettany says, “I think our whole culture is becoming more and more pitched toward judging your success by what you are able to purchase and not by the happiness you feel.”

What has his role in “Margin Call” made him think about capitalism, such as it is now? “It is voracious. An energy company makes enough energy to supply the people it needs to supply. A finance company keeps making money and keeps churning it over and will not stop unless you make it stop. It seems to me that this is the very core of capitalism and you absolutely have to manage the beast, otherwise it won’t stop.”

The actor, who moved to the U.S. in 2001 and now lives in Lower Manhattan, where the Occupy Wall Street protests have taken place, says he is sympathetic to the protesters’ message but at the same time feels there shouldn’t be a “lynching party.” “I think it is a bit churlish to ask a trader not to be greedy. It is his job. The onus should be on a government to regulate that industry,” he says.

Born in London, Mr. Bettany decided to become an actor at 19 and secured a grant to study at London’s Drama Centre. Following an unhappy stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, the actor’s big break came when he won the role of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 2001 Hollywood film “A Knight’s Tale.” Other projects soon followed, and the same year he was cast opposite Russell Crowe and his now wife, Oscar-winning American actress Jennifer Connelly, in the poignant story about U.S. mathematician John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind.”

These days, Mr. Bettany mostly lives in New York with his family—a son and daughter with Ms. Connelly and a stepson. They also have a house in Vermont and a base in London. Juggling a healthy work/life balance is, he says, one of the hardest things, especially when he and his wife get offered jobs they both really want to do at the same time.

However, family will always come first. He says he was offered the role of King George VI in the Oscar-winning “The King’s Speech,” but turned it down to spend time with his family. So far the couple have managed to be no longer than two weeks apart.

Mr. Bettany says he will start working on his next movie, “Blood,” in February. “It is a cop thriller set in England and I am thrilled to be working back in the U.K. on a project that I feel passionately about,” he says.

Write to Elizabeth Fitzherbert at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

Por JAMES HERRON

LONDRES (EFE Dow Jones)–La Organización de Países Exportadores de Petróleo puso de manifiesto el lunes el riesgo de que un mayor deterioro de la economía europea pueda desviar al mercado petrolero de su trayectoria equilibrada en 2012, aunque ignoró en gran medida las tensiones entre Irán y Occidente que han provocado aumentos de los precios del petróleo en las últimas semanas.

El grupo de exportadores dijo en su informe mensual que espera que la demanda de su crudo alcance los 30,15 millones de barriles diarios en 2012, muy cerca del nuevo techo de producción acordado en diciembre.

La OPEP no cambió su opinión sobre la fortaleza de la demanda petrolera este año, pero advirtió que un agravamiento de la crisis económica en Europa reduciría su consumo y tendría un efecto contagio en las economías emergentes en las que actualmente se prevé un crecimiento sólido de la demanda.

Admitió que “las preocupaciones geopolíticas en Oriente Próximo ayudaron a cambiar el curso del mercado” e hicieron subir los precios del crudo, pero no hizo mención a la disputa entre Irán y Occidente que amenaza con interrumpir el comercio de petróleo, por unas sanciones más duras al país asiático o por un conflicto en el transporte por mar de las existencias del Golfo Pérsico.

Además de los riesgos económicos, “unos mayores precios de los productos petroleros podrían afectar también negativamente a la demanda de petróleo en el planeta”, indicó.

La OPEP produjo 30,8 millones de barriles de petróleo al día en diciembre, el nivel más alto desde octubre de 2008, según el informe. Esto implica que algunos miembros tendrán que reducir la producción para cumplir el nuevo techo de producción de 30 millones de barriles diarios acordado en diciembre.

La OPEP espera que el crecimiento de la demanda total mundial de petróleo en 2012 no varíe y se mantenga en 1,1 millones de barriles al día. Este aumento se cubrirá con el incremento de la oferta de petróleo fuera de la OPEP y la mayor producción de líquidos de gas natural y otros tipos de petróleo no convencional por parte de la OPEP, dijo.