‘Funny Girl’: Move Over, Barbra. Welcome, Beanie. A New Star Is Born.
Funny Girl | 2 hours 50 minutes | August Wilson Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St. | 212-560-2188 Rules unwritten but widely believed and rarely broken include the belief that some roles become so identified...
View ArticleReview: Billy Crystal Deserves Better Than ‘Mr. Saturday Night’
Mr. Saturday Night | 2 hours 35 minutes | Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St. | 212-921-8000 | TICKETS Mr. Saturday Night, the new Broadway musical starring Billy Crystal based on the 1992 movie that...
View ArticleMaybe Crime Does Pay. ‘The Duke’ is Charming, Understated and Completely...
The Brits make the most interesting criminals. From Jack the Ripper to John Christie, the fiend who murdered scores of girls and sealed them in the walls of his row house at 10 Rillington Place, the...
View Article‘Happening’ Should Be Screened for the Supreme Court
The title Happening doesn’t make much sense for a movie about abortion (adapted from a novel of the same name), but I suppose director Audrey Diwan means for it to be open to many interpretations....
View Article‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Is Skillful, Old-Fashioned Filmmaking That Goes With...
Planned for decades, with a release postponed for two years during the Covid pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick, the eagerly awaited sequel to the late Tony Scott’s 1986 action blockbuster Top Gun (a movie...
View ArticleDavid Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’ Is a Senseless Collection of...
Crimes of the Future is a load of crap. I would like to find a more civil way to describe even a sick and depraved barf bag of a movie like this one, but it defeats every reasonable attempt to try....
View Article‘Benediction’ Is an Exquisite Portrait of a Tortured Life
Beautifully designed and photographed, sensitively written and directed by England’s acclaimed Terence Davies, and impeccably acted by a distinguished cast that turns life into art, Benediction is one...
View ArticleBaz Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’: A Whole Lotta Fakin’ Going On
Elvis Presley has left the room, but not the screen. The swiveling hips, the lubricated lips and the voice that sounded like it was coming from a mouth full of grits are back again, in an erratic,...
View Article‘The Forgiven’ Is a Powerful Journey Not Everyone Will Want to Take
Richly designed and exotically executed, The Forgiven is an unusual film that holds interest even on the rare occasions when it challenges credibility. Set in the desert wastes of the Sahara, it...
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‘Mr. Malcolm’s List’ is Jane Austen-Flavored Period Fun
From Ireland, Mr. Malcolm’s List is a lavishly photographed romantic period piece with a cast of enchanting unknowns that attempts to be a colorblind Jane Austen social satire. Its failure is...
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‘#MeToo’ Horror Thriller ‘She Will’ Has Its Unconventional Moments
IFC Midnight/ Shudder It’s been ages since we’ve had a good ghost story or a lurid return to the terrifying subject of witchcraft. Interjecting aborted elements of both, a murky, pretentious bore...
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‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Is a Corny and Old-Fashioned Melodrama
As an overrated, best-selling first novel by Delia Owens, the successful book Where the Crawdads Sing is so popular and mediocre that it lands in the bewildering tradition of Love Story and The...
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Lesley Manville Triumphs in Heart-Warming ‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris’
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is the newest version of Paul Gallico’s popular and enduring 1958 novel about Ada Harris, a poor, widowed British cleaning woman who scrubs the floors of London on her hands...
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Documentary-Style Thrillers Don’t Get Much Better Than ‘Thirteen Lives’
MGM As scripted, documentary-style fact-based dramas go, it doesn’t get much better than this. Thirteen Lives is the third film to document the harrowing events in the summer of 2018 surrounding the...
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‘Bullet Train’ Might Be the Worst Movie Ever Made
Just when you think you’ve seen the worst movie ever made, along comes a pile of toxic waste called Bullet Train. It’s an action thriller about an army of incomprehensible assassins all trying to kill...
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In a Thriller About the Dark Side of Capitalism, Aubrey Plaza Shines as...
At a time when few movies display either a shred of originality or a fresh slant on an old genre, and so many are little more than cookie-cutter derivations of each other, it’s energizing to see...
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‘Beast’ Is a Waste of Time and Idris Elba
Lauren Mulligan/Universal Pictures Beast, a routine man vs. animal programmer that is making an appearance in theaters on its way to TV, opens in South Africa, where the criminal poachers who have...
View ArticleUnderrepresented Queer Stories Dominated TIFF—A Definitive Breakthrough for a...
Movies are back, and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is here to prove it. After three years of slumber, when the Covid pandemic severely affected the making of movies and nearly fatally...
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An Amazing Cate Blanchett Performance Can’t Save The Empty, Incomprehensible...
Cate Blanchett won the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her trenchant, offbeat portrayal of fictional composer-conductor Lydia Tár in the unconventional biopic Tár. The praise for...
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‘The Same Storm’ Seeks Connection, But Zoom Doesn’t Work For Filmmaking Either
I fear we’re in for a painful plethora of films about the Covid-19 pandemic. The latest to be released to a largely indifferent paying public is The Same Storm, written and directed by Peter Hedges,...
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