Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999
(123) 555-6789
email@address.com
You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab.
Link to read me page with more information.
search for me
Liev Schreiber and Ron Perlman in Philippe Falardeau's Chuck Wepner biopic. (Sarah Shatz/IFC)
Here's my NPR review of Chuck, a biopic about Chuck Wepner, the self-sabotaging New Jersey boxer who inspired Sylvester Stallone to write Rocky. It ain't bad, but I wanted to love it. Anyway, Rocky already has a wonderful latter-day lega-sequel.
Erin Weaver and Holly Twyford (Grace Toulotte)
Given that Aaron Posner's 2009 production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Folger Theatre, starring Holly Twyford and Erin Weaver (and Cody Nickell and Eric Hissom) remains one of my favorite theatrical experiences, it's a cinch I'd be susceptible to Posner's reteaming with Twyford and Weaver in Or, Liz Duffy Adams' erudite farce about seminal British playwright Aphra Behn. Here's my Washington City Paper review.
I'm on Pop Culture Happy Hour today for the first time since our bummed-out post-election Pop Culture Serotonin Spectacular. And it was all the way back in December 2015 that I last shared the studio with the great Gene Demby of the Code Switch blog and podcast, when we handicapped Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I always feel things have gone well when I'm with Gene; he's a calming presence I guess. Most of this week's episode was recorded live on stage in Chicago at last week, and neither Gene not I were present for that, so we're in the first segment only. The topic is The Fate of the Furious, a film I reviewed... unfavorably.
Read MoreBrie 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.
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.
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 MoreYakima 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.
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.
