By Any Means Necessary, Any Which Way You Can: War for the Planet of the Apes, reviewed.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) came to eat bananas and kick ass, and he's all out of bananas. (Fox)

What a Craig Finn-style blockbuster summer we're having this year. Nothing as visionary as Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015, maybe, or as congruent with my own sensibilities as The Nice Guys from last year, but everything I picked sight unseen for my Village Voice/LA Weekly summer movie preview—Wonder Woman, The Beguiled, Baby Driver, Spider-Man: Homecoming—has so far avoided embarrassing me. I even liked Rough Night okay. It's possible I'm not all that discerning a critic.

But my praise for War of the Planet of the Apes is well-founded. Even though I saw the movie weeks before I was assigned to write about it, which might be why the review is uncharacteristically (I hope) light on specific observations.

I'm seeing Dunkirk—and talking with Christopher Nolan!—as soon as I get home from my present holiday in Scotland, and Atomic Blonde and Detroit in short order after that.

Rosebud the Sled: Spoilers, considered.

1968: Humanity learns the location of the Planet of the Apes.

Last year, a brilliant new play premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company called Mr. Burns, a Post-Apocalyptic Play. Everyone who reviewed it told their readers far too much about it. Everyone but me... he said modestly.

The cycle repeated itself when Mr. Burns opened last month at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. So I wrote this for the Village Voice.