Critics At Large

A shot from The First Monday in May (2016). The first Monday in May is when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art holds its annua...

 Rebecca Naomi Jones and Damon Daunno in Oklahoma! . (Photo: Teddy Wolff) Daniel Fish’s new, stripped-down production of Rodgers and H...

 Julie Halston, James Moye, Santino Fontana, Lilli Cooper, John Behlmann in Tootsie . (Photo: Matthew Murphy) The new musical of  Toot...

The ultimate anti-author, ca. 1919. A review of the new book by Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial , from Norton, Penguin/Rando...

Ellie Fishman and Edward Watts in The Music Man . (Photo: Diane Sobolewski) Meredith Willson’s The Music Man became a classic as soon...

Steve Carell and Merritt Wever in Welcome to Marwen . The almost universal disdain with which Robert Zemeckis’s Welcome to Marwen ...

John Goodman and Ashton Sanders in Captive State ( 2019). Look, some films are just garbage; that’s just a fact. But sometimes when y...

Jayne Houdyshell and Glenda Jackson in King Lear. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe) Of the thirteen or fourteen professional productions of ...

Kim Min-hee in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017). There seems to a a trend of metafiction in South Korean arthouse. Before ...

Nikola Tesla’s lab in Colorado Springs, calmly making environmental electricity in 1901. Review of the new book by Richard Munson, ...

Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele's Us . The first few minutes of Us , written and directe...

Jared Leto and Diane Kruger in Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody (2009). There’s nothing in the world more terrifying than a restauran...

Matthias Schoenaerts in The Mustang . The first images of The Mustang , of a herd of wild mustangs racing vainly across a western...

Published by Black Rose Books, 2019. “There is no such thing as seeing any object or event without the act of seeing being affec...

Eddie Korbich, Chandler Williams, and Arnie Burton in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense . Photo by T. Charles Erickson I fell fo...

Makiko Esumi in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi ( Maboroshi no Hikari / 幻の光, 1995). Grief is a many-faceted thing. I’ve often felt t...

Sara Mearns and Mark Evans in I Married an Angel . (Photo: Joan Marcus) I Married an Angel is the sixth musical by Richard Rodge...

Brian Wilson, 1966, the fragile reason why The Beach Boys matter. Brian fought hard against the industry attitude that if it works,...

Josie Lawrence and Joan Plowright in Enchanted April . During World War I, two middle-aged women, fed up with their dreary marria...

Robert Pattinson in High Life . Despite having seen Trouble Every Day (2001) , nothing could’ve prepared me fo...