Court Disorder: Roe, reviewed.

Sara Bruner and Jim Abele as Norma McCorvey and Flip Benham in Roe.

My review of Lisa Loomer's Roe — an "openly didactic wiki-play" that was never meant to be as timely as it is — is in this week's Washington City Paper.

This would've been a good one to discuss with the student critics I had the privilege of working with at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival last week. Usually I'm loath to summarize the plot of a play, or to foreground my own political leanings in a review. But when the plot is a history, and our politics desperate, that puts one in a bind.

Don't the Dew: xXx: Return of Xander Cage, reviewed.

No sleeves can hold him: Vin Diesel returns as Xander Cage. (Paramount/Revolution Studios)

Just because no one involved with xXx: Return of Xander Cage was ever trying to make a good movie doesn't mean it isn't a bad one. I reviewed it for NPR, for my sins.

Patriots Day Makes Three for Berg & Wahlberg, LLC

It's not as good as Zero Dark Thirty or Captain Phillips. But it's better than you'd think. Reviewed for NPR.

Kitchen-Sink Drama: The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, reviewed.

Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett, Lynn Hawley, and Meg Gibson in Hungry at the Public in 2016.

My review of playwright/director Richard Nelson's three-play cycle The Gabriels, which I took in during a single nine-hour period at the Kennedy Center last Sunday, is in this week's Washington City Paper.

PREVIOUSLY: I reviewed Studio Theatre's two double-features of Nelson's four Apple Family plays in 2013 and 2015.

Unsinkable? Unthinkable! Signature Theatre's all-singing, all-dancing Titanic, reviewed.

Christopher Bloch, Nick Lehan, Lawrence Redmond, and Bobby Smith in Signature's Titanic. (Christopher Mueller) 

Signature Theatre has revived Titanic, a multi-Tony Award-winning musical from 1997 that almost no one remembers. Apparently it was upstaged by some movie? My Washington City Paper review is here.

Hat's all, Folks: Live By Night, reviewed.

Elle Fanning and Ben Affleck face off. (Claire Folger/Warner Bros.)

My NPR review of Live By Night, writer/producer/director/star Ben Affleck's second adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, is here. It aspires to be a sweeping period gangster film in the tradition of The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Miller's Crossing, and so many others, but it tries to bite off too much of Lehane's book to really resonate. It's the weakest of the four films Affleck has directed. Too bad.

Lost in Space: Passengers, reviewed.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers, a miscast and misbegotten fairy tale in space.

I had hopes for Passengers, from Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts and The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, because I root for science fiction films in general and because I've just edited a story for Air & Space/Smithsonian about research into human hibernation for long-term spaceflights, which is key to the premise of this movie. But its billion-dollar ideas are undermined by its five-cent guts, as I aver in my NPR review. Bummer.