Decades ago, a prize was won. Its winners have reveled since in their triumph. In the here and now, though, the victory is revealed to be hollow, and the victors still celebrating it, empty.
This is the crux of That Championship Season, which debuted at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1972, was transferred to Broadway Read More
With the exception of perhaps news about Eliot Spitzer, it’s been a quiet summer thus far with regards to television — and, no, that Jake and Vienna broke up after finding “true love” on The Bachelor doesn’t count. So greet this bit of casting news with as much excitement as you can muster: Read More
The Good Heart is a bizarre, idiosyncratic co-production from Denmark, Germany, France and Iceland, with all the torpor such a combination suggests. The great character actor Brian Cox plays Jacques, a cranky, mean-spirited New York bartender with a mouth as foul as week-old garbage. Alcohol and chain-smoking have wreaked havoc on his health, but in Read More
The Escapist
Running time 102 minutes
Written by Daniel Hardy and Rupert Wyatt
Directed by Rupert Wyatt
Starring Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Damian Lewis, Liam Cunningham, Seu Jorge
The prison escape movie—a tired genre—gets some fresh energy in The Escapist, a compelling, carefully written and totally gripping film from the U.K. that is acted Read More
Now that the worst summer anyone can remember at the movies
is thankfully over, a new season opens with great promise, and I can think of
no better way to start it than with L.I.E.
Resist all temptations to avoid this exceptional film because of its subject
matter (pedophilia) and see L.I.E.
fast. Trust me Read More
Well, now. They’re back! Though the Irish never really went away. It’s been said for generations: Where would English drama be without the Irish? But where would American drama be? Here we have two more plays by Ireland’s favorite exports-namely, Martin McDonagh of that Tony Award-winning spectral piece of grand old blarney, The Beauty Queen Read More
A while ago, I was in a pub in Dublin and a local guy, making conversation, turned to me and said, “What do you do for a living?”
I replied that I was a journalist, for anyone can be a critic. “I’m a journalist, sir!”
“Maybe so, sir!” he said. “But are you any Read More
