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Caught in the Web: The Latest ‘Spider-Man’ Is a Tangled Retread of Old Material
Spider-Man is played by Andrew Garfield this time around. I don’t know why fans and reviewers alike call The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a sequel. This knuckle-headed bore is the fifth (and silliest) movie...
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D.C.’s Iron Butterfly
John Aylward, Kristen Bush, Kevin O’Rouke and Jan Maxwell, from left. (Photo by Joan Marcus) The stages at Lincoln Center are bustling with success. To the droll, admirably staged, dramatically...
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Unusual Suspects: Atom Egoyan Revisits the Story of the West Memphis Three
Seth Meriwether, James Hamrick and Brandon Carroll, from left. The prolific Canadian director Atom Egoyan, whose work has never met with much success elsewhere, travels far afield from his usual...
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Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Philip Seymour Hoffman, left, and John Turturro in God’s Pocket. Timing is everything, unless you’re dead. Then I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re early, late or don’t show up at all. As tragic as the...
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‘The Double’ Is a Dark Adaptation of Dostoevsky’s 1846 Novella
Jesse Eisenberg in The Double. Another eccentric example of style over content, The Double stars creepy Jesse Eisenberg in two roles, when one is always more than enough. The further away he gets from...
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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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Shailene Woodley Melts Your Heart in ‘The Fault in Our Stars’
Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars. There’s no shortage of tears in The Fault in Our Stars, the movie version of John Green’s runaway best-seller for the young adult market...
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In the Navy: ‘Top Gun’ Meets ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in D.M.W Greer’s Debut Feature
Rob Mayes, left, and Trent Ford in Burning Blue. A good idea gone bad plagues this movie adaptation of D.M.W. Greer’s controversial 1992 play Burning Blue, a sensitive study of two dashing Navy pilots...
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In ‘The Moment,’ Jennifer Jason Leigh Plays a Shell-Shocked War Photographer
Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Moment. The Moment is another in a long string of thrill-free psychological “thrillers” that fail from start to finish. This time, Jennifer Jason Leigh displays new lows in...
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Jonesing for Java: ‘A Coffee in Berlin’ Is as Tepid as a Day-old Pot of Folgers
Friederike Kempter, Marc Hosemann and Tom Schilling, from left, in A Coffee in Berlin. From Germany’s New Wave, a tedious exercise in tedium called A Coffee in Berlin is a black-and-white template of...
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A Father-Daughter Relationship Gets Murky in Jocelyn Towne’s ‘I Am I’
Jocelyn Towne and Kevin Tighe in I Am I. When her mother dies, a woman recognizes an elderly man at the funeral as the long-lost father who deserted her as an infant. Curiosity leads her to his...
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In ‘Lullaby,’ an Estranged Rock Musician Returns Home to Watch His Father Die
Garrett Hedlund in Lullaby. Two hours of terminal agony in a New York cancer ward is too long for almost anybody. Even when the people in the downbeat Lullaby aren’t dying, they spend every minute of...
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Lost Continent: ‘The Rover’ Is an Exercise in Bleakness
Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover. Austerity is a quality rarely found in today’s noisy, hopped-up movies. Most of the blatant junk we’re getting lately could use a lot more of it. But when...
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Cherry Jones Moves Gracefully Through ‘When We Were Young and Unafraid’
Cherry Jones, left, and Cherise Boothe in When Were Young and Unafraid. (Photo by joan Marcus) Cherry Jones is the only reason to see When We Were Young and Unafraid, a load of time-wasting tedium by...
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Clint Eastwood’s Musical Biopic Looks Back on Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons
From left: John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda. Jazz aficionado Clint Eastwood hates the bubblegum pop-rock noise of all those ’50s groups like The Four Seasons as much...
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‘Third Person’ Is a Puzzling Triptych of Stories Folded Every Which Way
Olivia Wilde and Liam Neeson in Third Person. Paul Haggis is a Canadian writer-director who specializes in long-winded bores that bind together multiple parallel stories with chewing gum. The fact that...
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