Gunsmoke Gets in Your Eyes: Free Fire, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Brie Larson protects her personal space. (A24)
Ben Wheatley's new comic thriller Free Fire is a feature-length-gun-battle-as-anti-gun-PSA. I enjoyed it, as far as it goes.
Latest Work
search for me
Diesel Fumes: The Fate of the Furious, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Xander Cage as Dominic Toretto. (Universal)
We all know the inexplicably prolonged Fast & Furious series can't touch Mad Max: Fury Road or even its closer competitor the Mission: Impossible franchise, right? We all know that?
Even by the series' own standards of allegedly intentional badness, the new The Fate of the Furious is a sour lemon. (136 minutes, four good scenes.) Here's my NPR review.
Von Braun play Ad Astra, assessed for Air & Space
Chris Klimek
Two of my main beats—aviation/space and theatre—overlapped last week when I attended a reading of Ad Astra, a new play by James Wallert about the life of pioneering rocket scientist—and Nazi—Wernher von Braun. I wrote a post about that for Air & Space/Smithsonian, but at my editor's suggestion we removed a paragraph where I named the four actors who performed the reading. That was the right call for Air & Space's audience; after all, when Ad Astra gets fully staged it will likely be with a different cast. Still, the cast—all members of New York's Epic Theatre Ensemble, which Wallert co-founded—was terrific, so I'd like to name them here.
Read MoreNasty Women, Repped: Dry Land and What Every Girl Should Know, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Yakima Rich and Emily Whitford in Ruby Rae Spiegel's play Dry Land. (Forum Theatre)
My review of Forum Theatre's "Nasty Women Rep," comprised of Ruby Ray Spiegel's Dry Land and Monica Byrne's What Every Girl Should Know, took longer to appear than it should have, but it's up now. These two shows sustain Forum's reputation for bold, timely work, and I recommend them—Dry Land, especially.
Imperfect Organism: Life, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson are better than Life. (Sony)
Life, the new anti-space-exploration space movie from Swedish director Daniel Espinosa and starring my beloved Rebecca "Ilsa Faust" Ferguson plus some other famous people, is no Gravity. Or Interstellar. Or The Martian. But it's aight. I reviewed it for NPR, and then, having finished reviewing Life, I recalled The Onion's lovely backhanded obituary for Roger Ebert from 2013.
Sisters of No Mercy: Three Sisters and No Sisters, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Kimberly Gilbert and Todd Scofield in No Sisters. (Studio Theatre)
Studio Theatre is putting on a ballsy experiment for the next month or so, running a new production of Three Sisters and No Sisters—Aaron Posner's companion play—not in rep but literally on top of one another. I review both in this week's Washington City Paper.
FURTHER READING: My April 2015 review of Round House's Uncle Vanya. My January 2015 review of Posner's Life Sucks, or the Present Ridiculous at Theatre J. My June 2013 review of Stupid Fucking Bird. And my August 2011 review of the Sydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya, starring Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving.
Ape-Pocalypse Now: Kong: Skull Island, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
This Bell UH-1 Huey is 'bout to get rung. (Warner Bros.)
Look, I'm no hero, but did you happen to notice that my NPR review of Kong: Skull Island contains not one occurrence of "titular" or "eponymous"? Please notice that.
Time for Carrousel: Logan, reviewed
Chris Klimek
The family that hides together, abides together. Dafne Keen, Patrick Stewart, and Hugh Jackman in Logan. (Fox)
I'm looking forward to the argument we're going to have over beers, you and I, about whether Logan is the best comic book movie since The Dark Knight or the best Western since No Country for Old Men.
Here's my NPR review, where I ran out of space to cite all the things I loved about this movie (Eriq La Salle! Autotrucks!), or to warn you that if you know you will recoil from the sight of an 11-year-old girl defending her life with lethal force, you should skip it. And it would probably be more correct to call it the Rocky Balboa of Rocky movies than the Creed of Rocky movies, but sometimes clarity is more important than pinpoint accuracy.
Bring tissues.