Clik here to view.
Beauty and the Beast: The Heiress is a Bore, but Hensley is Monstrously...
Chastain in The Heiress. (Joan Marcus) A great play deserves more than the mediocre revival The Heiress is getting at the Walter Kerr—and it’s too bad Walter Kerr is not around with a few well-chosen...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Arid Abe: Lincoln Is as Wooden as Washington’s Teeth
Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln. Okay. So Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s bloated $50-million history lesson about Abraham Lincoln’s final days in office as he attempted, by hook or crook, to abolish slavery,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Corpse Bride: Knightley’s Beauty Can’t Save Anna Karenina’s Stale Script
Knightley in Anna Karenina. (Laurie Sparham) It’s once more around the block for Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping, complex saga about an adulterous heroine who loved too much and too well, ruining...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stand-In Ovation: Barrymore Takes Yet Another Posthumous Bow Thanks to...
Plummer in Barrymore. Christopher Plummer is, without contest, one of the greatest, most versatile and most distinguished actors of our time. Unbelievably, he was 82 years old when he won an Academy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cosmic Charm: After a 30-Year Drought, Sue Rains Down From the Sky in a...
Rainey. Despite the spate of inclement weather, New York lit up like a shooting star last week in the presence of Sue Raney’s luminous cabaret show at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. A singing legend in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s All in the Family: Durang Offers Up a Charmingly Neurotic Take on Chekhov
I never thought Anton Chekhov was even mildly amusing. To me, his writing epitomizes what the Gershwins wrote in the lyrics to “But Not For Me”: “With love to lead the way, I’ve found more skies of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bradley’s Blitz: Cooper’s Continued Growth as a Serious Actor the Only Silver...
Lawrence, left, and Cooper, right, in Silver Linings Playbook. A lot of critics have lost their proverbial cool over Silver Linings Playbook, a rom-com about mental illness, ballroom dancing and the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bienvenue Chez Vous: In Rust and Bone, Cotillard Shines in Best Role Since...
Cotillard in Rust and Bone. Proving again that her Best Actress Academy Award for playing Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose was no fluke, the marvellously sensual Marion Cotillard, with her wounded doe eyes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Id, Ego and I: Gervasi’s Hitchcock Opens a Rear Window Into the Madman Behind...
The stars of Hitchcock. There are many reasons why Alfred Hitchcock is the most famous and instantly recognizable film director of all time, and all of them are reliably, artistically realized in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Taps, Tunes and Tall Tales’: Texas Tommy Takes New York
Tune. (Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan) “Taps, Tunes and Tall Tales” is the perfect title for Tommy Tune’s cabaret debut at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency, and he delivers plenty of all three. You know...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scattershot: Killing Them Softly Is D.O.A.
Pitt. For a big star, Brad Pitt chooses to waste his talent in boneheaded ways that never cease to amaze me. For every single solid, carefully written, value-packed entry in his oddball career—like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
California Solo: A Melancholic Tale of a Britpop Star on the Skids
Carlyle. The versatile, underrated Scotsman Robert Carlyle finally gets a starring role in California Solo, an unusual character study about a retired Britpop guitarist from the 1990s who moved to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
That’s All, Folks: Feinstein’s Farewell Forgoes the Typical Holiday Fare
Feinstein. What are you doing New Year’s Eve? The cultured and the wise will be punishing the parquet at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency for the last time, saying goodbye forever to one of New York’s most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Very Hairy Christmas: The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Casts a Gloomy Glow...
Britton and Burns in The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. Seventeen years after his impressive 1995 debut film The Brothers McMullen, writer-director-actor and indie-prod summa cum laude Edward Burns...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s Bloody Brilliant!: Dynamic Direction and Scintillating Cinematography in...
Bana. A Western-style outlaw flick all dressed up like a contemporary thriller and set in a blizzard in the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan, Deadfall is an above-average genre piece with a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Wet, Hot American Summer: Hyde Park on Hudson Lets FDR Shed His Stuffy Layers
The marvelous Murray. Let others slobber over Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. In this year of looking over our shoulders at past leaders with more heroic leadership qualities than the ones we’ve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Comforts of Home: Amour Boasts No Melodrama
Huppert. It’s always reassuring to see a nutty director go straight. Austria’s Michael Haneke is famous for his lurid, violent and thoroughly sick exercises in torture and sexual depravity. Wait a sec....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Above Water: The Impossible Is a Harrowing Tale of Survival That Weighs Heavy
Watts. Put a staggering accomplishment called The Impossible, from Spanish director J. A. Bayona, at the top of the season’s must-see list. This intense nerve-shredder about a vacationing family...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bare-Knuckle Boxing: Golden Boy Makes Return Bout, but Gay Teenage Boarding...
bare. With so many second-rate revivals of first-rate plays clogging the marquees, it’s a pleasure to welcome one that succeeds. The fresh new Lincoln Center Theater production of Clifford Odets’s 1937...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bagging bin Laden: Zero Dark Thirty
Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. The critics have spoken (well, some of them, anyway), declaring the overrated Zero Dark Thirty the most important movie of the year. I wish I could agree, but I don’t....
View Article