After a lunch with some distant cousins of my wife's, we headed to the Broadway Theatre (the only Broadway theater actually on Broadway) to see one of the final previews of a musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Because it hasn't officially opened yet, my critical comments are embargoed, but suffice it to say the production brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald's much … [Read more...]
‘Game Night’ has a monopoly on other people’s ideas
While enjoying, to a point, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Game Night, I spent much of the picture wishing it had gone in a completely different, and subtler, direction. It’s easy to imagine some other project titled Game Night gestating and then languishing in the primordial muck of preproduction: a lo-fi, low-budget, semi-improvised mumblecore ensemble about a … [Read more...]
‘Doctor Strange’ mesmerizes with digital wizardry, sense of fun
Note to future directors of blockbuster bombast: Gone are the days of watching metropolises simply explode or collapse from such banally familiar tropes as nuclear blasts, alien death rays or picayune fisticuffs of levitating Avengers. Doctor Strange, himself a future Avenger, and the new Marvel movie that dramatizes his origin story, have rewritten the disaster playbook, … [Read more...]