Critics At Large

David Hyde Pierce and the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical . (Photo: Joan Marcus.) At sixty-six, David Hyde Pierce is so slender and li...

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up . (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.) The current production of All Shook Up , Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebo...

Superman (David Corenswet), looking glum. (Warners Brothers.)  The beginning of James Gunn’s new iteration of the Man of Steel is somewhat p...

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.) “What remains to be said about an absence that canno...

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot . (Photo: Daniel Rader.) Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals...

My coverage of short films has fallen off a bit lately, but I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones. Here are eight more since my ...

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence , Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning , as well as a tribu...

(McGill/Queen's University Press.) “Much we long for what we lack, for what is closed within the grave, our treasure and triumph, our gl...

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night . (Criterion Collection.) Mark Harris’s wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution ...

Heather Ogden and Ben Rudisin in Anna Karenina . (Photo: Karolina Kuras.) Christian Spuck’s Anna Karenina made its North American debut wit...

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”                              -- Franz Kafka (to Max B...

Studio Ghibli’s 1995 Whisper of the Heart ( Mimi o Sumaseba / 耳をすませば ) is one of those films about nothing in particular that end up being...

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw . (Photo: Matthew Murphy.) The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first...

Guillaume Côté in Grand Mirage . (Photo: Karolina Kuras.) After 26 years at the National Ballet of Canada, Guillaume Côté could have chosen ...

(New Directions.) “It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.” --Kenzaburo Oe Yoko Tawada’s beau...

Emily Skinner in The Huntington Theatre's The Light in the Piazza . (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.) The new Huntington Theatre mounting of T...

Jon Michael Hill and Harry Lennix in Purpose . (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.) I’m a fan of the African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkin...

“1966 was the high point of British pop art, and with hits like The Yardbirds’ 'Shapes of Things,' there was an incredible compressi...

The artists of Atelier Ballet in Opera Atelier's production of Charpentier's David and Jonathan . (Photo: Bruce Zinger.) Opera Ateli...

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights . (Photo: Warner Bros.) Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The...