As a piece of stagecraft, "Dog Day Afternoon," directed by Mauk Kaufman, does a canny job of translating the film's action, keeping the flow taut and exciting. But it also does something tha…
The show practically invites us to chuckle at the neatly interlocked way that a song like "Honey, Honey" or "Knowing Me, Knowing You" will dovetail with the (thin) motivation for singing it.…
As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature " and I say that as someone who mostly doesn't like them.
Led Zeppelin, if you take in the full measure of their annihilating sunburst grandeur, are a very hard band to categorize. They're usually thought of as the gods of metal, and few would deny…
It's not unusual to see an acceptance speech at an awards show fall prey to the lure of oversharing. ("You like me, you really like me!" is the mother of all oversharing Oscar moments.) What…
James Hamilton is a photographer who could and should have been far more famous " a household name, like Weegee or Arbus or Annie Liebovitz. Yet part of the fascination of "Uncropped," direc…
The sly beauty of "The American Society of Magical Negroes" is that it's a wicked satire of white people that's also an empathetic satire of Black people. As a filmmaker, Kobi Libii sees the…
A few weeks ago, there was every reason to be skeptical about "Cruella." The creative track record for live-action remakes of Disney animated films was middling to dismal (the only one of th…
Last weekend, the season finale of "Saturday Night Live" featured a satirical promotional spot for AMC Theatres that became a delectable skewering of what's left of the megaplex experience. …
Olympia Dukakis, who died on May 1 at 89, had a face like no one else's. Stern but perpetually amused, with a warm leer of a grin that could light up a scene, she looked like the comedy and …
What's the thing that a good movie director does? In a way, that's a silly question, since good directors do a thousand things, and filmmakers are diverse creatures. But in an age of freeze-…
Here's a vintage Spongebob moment, the kind that makes some of us who are years past the demo feel like we can't get enough of him. In "The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run," our hero, voi…
The gifted and mercurial Lee Daniels, director of "Precious," is one of the only filmmakers I can think of who would dare to drop a badass-diva moment of Billie Holiday violently slapping he…
It's some kind of paradox " he probably thought of it as a joke played on him by the gods " that Christopher Plummer, the impishly irascible, velvet-voiced star of stage and screen who died …
"Mass," a drama that consists of two couples seated across a table from each other in a placidly sterile church antechamber, discussing the unthinkable (two of them are the parents of a teen…
In "Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)," which opened the Sundance Film Festival tonight on a note of heady historical exuberance, we see images from the 1969…
Releasing alternate or expanded versions of big-hit movies into theaters isn't a new idea. The first one I remember seeing was "Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition," whic…
Serial killers are the ultimate compartmentalized criminals " the fear and horror they represent isn't just there in the gruesomeness of their violence, but in the way they pass among us, im…
“A Star Is Born,” Bradley Cooper's justly celebrated remake of the venerable Hollywood romantic fable, starring Cooper as the bad-ol’-boy rock 'n' roller Jackson Maine and …
In “Her Smell,” Elisabeth Moss tears into the role of Becky Something, a strung-out hellion indie rock star of the early ’90s, like an angry lioness ripping through a slab …
“A Star Is Born” is that thing we always yearn for but so rarely get to see: a transcendent Hollywood movie. It's the fourth remake of a story that dates back to 1932, but this o…
Denzel Washington is a great actor, but as varied as his performances can be, he doesn't change his aspect very much. The talky boastful energy and toothy sunburst smile, the defiant alertne…
“La La Land,” in theory, is a movie that needs no explanation. The simplest thing you could call it is “an old-fashioned musical” " which means, of course, that it's …
“Fences,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by August Wilson, was written in 1983 and had its premiere on Broadway in 1987. But the play is set 30 years before that, in a lower-mi…
A big-spectacle Broadway production is, quite visibly, a collaborative effort " actors, sets, choreography, costumes, lighting, orchestra. On rare occasions, though, beneath the razzle-dazzl…