Critics At Large

“Making a good and successful movie is a minor miracle every time.” – Ron Shelton, The Church of Baseball . I love Ron Shelton ’s movies the...

Chun-Yao Yao in Au Revoir Taipei ( Yi Ye Taibei / 一頁台北 2010). Writer-director Arvin Chen’s feature debut, Au Revoir Taipei ( Yi Ye Taibe...

Martin Happer and Julia Course in The Importance of Being Earnest . (Photo: Emily Cooper) Tim Carroll ’s production of The Importance of Be...

W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. “Having looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively ...

Tosa Kazunari in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020). Somehow, Kato doesn’t freak out. The essence of time travel is narrative. Like th...

Jay Turvey with the Ballplayers in Damn Yankees , at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Michael Cooper) Richard Adler and Jerry Ross might have ente...

Colm Feore, Lucy Peacock and Qasim Khan star in The Miser , at Canada's Stratford Festival. (Photo: David Hou) This summer I was able to...

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in Gerry (2002). This review contains major spoilers for Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002). In 2002, Gus Van San...

(W.W. Norton Press) “The Beatles, like Duke Ellington, are virtually unclassifiable musicians.” – Lillian Ross, writing in The New Yorker i...

Juliette Redden and D.C. Anderson and cast in Anne of Green Gables . (Photo: Diane Sobolewski) Based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 childre...

Harrison James and Jurgita Dronina in Swan Lake . (Photo: Karolina Kuras) As far as highly anticipated world premieres go, Karen Kain ’s S...

Matthew Mcfadyen and Colin Firth in Operation Mincemeat . For anyone who follows British actors – and that includes just about everybody I ...

The Sublime Void (Ludion Press, Antwerp / DAP, 1993); Art in the Age of Anxiety (MIT Press/Morel Books, 2021) “Perhaps it was always lik...

The cast of Epiphany . (Photo: Jeremy Daniel) The new Brian Watkins play Epiphany , which closed last weekend at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. N...

A scene from Ottó Foky’s Scenes with Beans (1976). It’s been a year and a half since my last shorts roundup , and the pandemic is still o...

Laakan McHardy and Jeremy Beck in Chains . (Photo: Todd Cerveris) The Mint Theater Company, an off-Broadway house in the business of revivi...

Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly in Top Gun: Maverick . Top Gun , which came out in 1986, was a Reagan-era special if there ever was one. It h...

Allison Blackwell, Jarvis B Manning Jr., Maiesha McQueen, Arnold Harper II and Anastacia McCleskey in Ain't Misbehavin' . (Photo: Da...

Jude Law and Dan Fogler in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore . The third chapter of the Fantastic Beasts series, The Secrets of Du...

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman . (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.) In his 1957 architectonic study ...