Critics At Large

From time to time, I'll haul down a DVD from my collection, throw it into the player and see if it still holds up. In most cases, it...

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show,  On the Arts , at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom F...

The refusal of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to commemorate the 40 th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Pal...

When I was about 13 or so, my recently widowed grandmother told me that every night for a week she would hear the chains rattle on the fron...

As humanity grows well past seven billion people, our small planet begins to feel smaller. Many millions of us cluster around densely packed...

The Importance of Being Earnest The only hard-and-fast rule about refurbishing a classic play should be that any new production has to be...

A few years ago, when I was working on my book Artificial Paradise , about the dark side of The Beatles' utopian dream, I was speaking t...

Note to readers: This post contains spoilers. This Pixar animated fairy tale Brave has a lot of charm; it’s one of the few movies this summ...

Desperate to earn money, a downhearted young woman is about to debut with a Vienna escort service. Her family quarrels in their dingy Bratis...

As fans of superhero pictures (and that’s most of the world, evidently) know, the Batman series divides into three categories. There are th...

When I was a young guy, hopeful about breaking into the singer/songwriter market I wanted to call my first record Love and Other Delights ....

The Universe of John Lennon (True North 2012) is the latest in a long series of tribute albums to one of the most famous songwriters in con...

Charlie Plummer, Alexa Niziak, and Kelli O’Hara in Far From Heaven (Photo: T. Charles Erickson) The biggest deal at the Williamst...

Los Angeles has always had a knack for attracting men (and it's almost always men) who saw an opportunity to take the City of An...

Sherlock , the recent brilliant BBC-TV series re-imagining and updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the present day are, of course, n...

Stuart Wilson, Ben Kingsley, and Sigourney Weaver star in Death and the Maiden In Ariel Dorfman’s play   Death and the Maiden , set in a...

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston star in Breaking Bad on AMC Television has a well-earned reputation for producing escapist fare....

“Masterpiece,” Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. Oil on canvas We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Anna-Claire Stinebring, to our group. ...

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentio...

Jeremy Jordan (centre-top) and company in Newsies (Photo by Deen van Meer) The latest Broadway hit musical from Disney is   News...