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A Provincial Lady: Tyne Daly Shines in ‘Mothers and Sons’
Bobby Steggert, Frederick Weller, Grayson Taylor and Tyne Daly, from left, in Mothers and Sons. (Photo by Joan Marcus) Terrence McNally has so many reasons to celebrate his 50th anniversary as one of...
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Heartstrings: ‘Breathe In’ Earns Points for Realism
Felicity Jones in Breathe In. The beguiling Felicity Jones and solid writer-director Drake Doremus, the team that turned Like Crazy into a runaway hit, reunite for the astutely calibrated drama Breathe...
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Dangerous Game: ‘Cheap Thrills’ Will Test Your Tolerance for Gore
Pat Healy, left, and Ethan Embry in Cheap Thrills. Horror flick fans who revel in New Age stomach churners are praising director E. L. Katz for breaking the rules. Prime example: a thing called Cheap...
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‘Hide Your Smiling Faces’ Captures Adolescence in Its Contradictory Moods
Ryan Jones, above, and Nathan Varnson in Hide Your Smiling Faces. Coming-of-age movies may be a dime a dozen, but at least first-time director Daniel Patrick Carbone has made one that focuses on...
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The Road Not Taken
Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp. (Photo by Joan Marcus) If the endless screeching of Idina Menzel in a deadly, misguided new Broadway horror called If/Then doesn’t drive you to decibel-shattering...
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Darren Aronofsky’s Bloated Biblical Biopic Is as Overstuffed as Noah’s Ark
Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe in Noah. Among the silly quotes they’re using in the movie ads to rescue the bloated biblical epic Noah, there’s a particularly idiotic one that claims, “If you...
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Scarlett Johansson Is a Sexy Alien Stalker in ‘Under the Skin’
Extraterrestrial seductress Scarlett Johansson. Dream girl Scarlett Johansson digs for oil and hits a dry hole in Under the Skin. As always, she has stunning sex appeal, stunning skin, a stunning smile...
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Tough Girl: M.M.A. Champion Gina Carano Flexes Her Way Through ‘In the Blood’
Gina Carano and Amaury Nolasco in In the Blood. This two-fisted gut buster serves no other purpose than to act as a contrived vehicle for a female Arnold Schwarzenegger named Gina Carano, a real-life...
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Prisoner of the Past: Colin Firth Stars in ‘The Railway Man’
Colin Firth in The Railway Man. Wrenching, profound and beautifully made, The Railway Man is one of the stunning don’t-miss surprises of the still-young 2014, teaming two of the screen’s most popular...
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Love at First Bite: Jim Jarmusch Stakes His Claim in the Vampire Film Genre
Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive. Vampires are a dime a dozen these days, but you’ll never find a more glamorously decadent couple with fangs than Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in indie...
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The Return of the Jazz Age
Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Barand Grill. (Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva) Fabulous! That’s a once-respectable word that has been sadly relegated, through exhaustion and...
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Ménage à Deux: Woody Allen and John Turturro Team Up in ‘Fading Gigolo’
Woody Allen, left, and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo. John Turturro is a gifted and charming actor, but he has a fatal desire to be a film director and is cursed with no talent whatsoever for the job....
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In ‘Transcendence,’ the Singularity Is Here
Johnny Depp in Transcendence. What fresh hell is this? Mankind has finally collided with technology. Water and food have joined all natural resources in a furnace of ashes. Computers have destroyed the...
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They Say It’s Spring: Lucie Arnaz Debuts at the Café Carlyle
Lucie Arnaz hits the cabaret circuit. (Photo by Stephen Sorokoff) Heeeeere’s Lucie! It’s hard to believe the one-woman show business gene pool named Lucie Arnaz has never played New York’s chic Café...
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As Tonys Near, Star-Studded Shows Make Their Case for Broadway’s Top Prize
Neil Patrick Harris in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. With a gridlock of Broadway shows scrambling to meet the deadline for 2014 Tony nominations, there’s a nightly reprise on the Great White Way of Cole...
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‘Walking With the Enemy’ Is Based on the True Story of War Hero Pinchas...
Jonas Armstrong, front, in Walking With the Enemy. Another hair-raising true story from the footnotes of World War II, Walking With the Enemy is a powerful piece of filmmaking that examines history and...
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Drive My Car: ‘Locke,’ Set Behind the Wheel, Redefines Economical Filmmaking
Tom Hardy as Locke. Filmed in eight nights for less than $2 million, with only one man behind the wheel of an automobile doing all of the acting, Locke has the passive elements of a radio show in the...
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Head Over Heels: ‘Casa Valentina’ and ‘Cabaret’ Ride Broadway’s Drag Wave
Reed Birney in Casa Valentina. (Photo by Matthew Murphy) It’s all over but the votes. The final Broadway competitors for the Tony Awards have met the deadline and results of the final tally will be...
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Belle Époque: Slavery finds an Unlikely Foe in Amma Asante’s Moving Film
Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Matthew Goode in Belle. Elegant and understated, Belle is a true story about the effects of slavery on 18th-century England, told in the style of a sweeping romantic saga by Jane...
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Teenage Wasteland: Gia Coppola’s Directorial Debut Examines Adolescent Ennui
James Franco and Emma Roberts in Palo Alto. Cobbled from a book of autobiographical short stories by ubiquitous polymath James Franco about his California hometown, Palo Alto was directed by Francis...
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