Bigger, Longer, and Uncut: "Gladiator II," reviewed.

Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal get down to it. (Paramount)

“Gladiator was the one where Ridley Scott revived the sword-and-sandals genre that had been dormant for decades while also managing to suggest that our addiction to spectacle—one he himself had then been nurturing for 20 years—might not be altogether healthy, for individuals or democracies. 

“Gladiator II is the one where he throws in a CGI shark. “

My Washington City Paper of the unlikely 24.5-years-later sequel is here.

The Resilience of Laughter: "Dance Like There's Black People Watching," reviewed.

Jillian Ebanks, Breon Arzell, Max Thomas, Tamieka Chavis, and Arlietta Hall. (Teresa Castracane)

The Second City’s first show at Woolly Mammoth, Barack Stars, from those heady first months of the Obama Administration, was the subject of one of my first reviews for the Washington City Paper. My Washington Post review of their latest, offered in more dire times, is here.

The Conscience of a Coder: "Data," reviewed.

Isabel Van Natta and Karan Brar in the tech thriller Data. (T. Charles Erickson Photography)

Imagine, if your capacity for speculative, blue-sky doomsday pessimism can possibly conceive of such a scenario, the union of a morally flexible tech oligarch and a U.S. government hostile to immigration and intolerant of dissent.

My Washington Post review of Data, playwright Matthew Libby’s world-premiere thriller at Arena Stage, is here.

A.I., Boomer: "Here," reviewed."

Robin Wright and Tom Hanks get decades shaved off by an A.I. tool called Metaphysic Live in Here. (Sony)

On Here, the reunion of Forrest Gump principals, for the Paper of Record.

Lots here about Bob Zemeckis’s obsession with still-janky digital de-aging tech. Spike Lee’s 2020 war-vet drama Da Five Bloods achieved more stirring results by making no attempt to hide its 60-something-year-old cast members’ ages in the flashback scenes set during their combat tours in Vietnam half a century prior.

I’m rooting for Zemeckis. Flight is great. I liked Allied, his 2016 WWII espionage thriller that no one saw, too.

R & J, IRL: Folger's "Romeo and Juliet," reviewed.

Cole Taylor and Caro Reyes Rivera as those star-cross’d young lovers. (Erika Nizborski)

You know that game where you try to think of old movies or plays where the introduction of cell phones would spoil the plot? Romeo and Juliet has always seemed like an obvious one, but Raymond O. Caldwell, director of the Folger’s season-opening update of the tragedy, begs to differ. My Washington Post review is here.

Mid by Midwest: "Babbitt," reviewed.

Matthew Broderick in Babbitt. (Teresa Castracane)

My Washington City Paper review of Babbitt, a Matthew Broderick-anchored adaptation of a Sinclair Lewis novel that premiered at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last year ahead of its current STC engagement, is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Joker: Folie à Deux"

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga need to talk. (Warner Bros.)

I saw The Silence of the Lambs again at the Alamo Drafthouse two nights before I saw Joker: Folie à Deux, which reminded me of author Thomas Harris’s Silence sequel novel (and Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, after Silence director Jonathan Demme declined to return) Hannibal in the way it wants to punish those who loved 2019’s Joker.

I didn’t. But I liked Folie à Deux even less. And I’m still higher on it than my conversation-mates Joelle Monique and Glen Weldon!

The Centrists Cannot Hold: "Mister Lincoln" and "Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground," reviewed.

Tony Award winner John Rubinstein in Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground. (Maria Baranova)

My joint review of Ford’s Scott Bakula-starring production of Mister Lincoln, and of Olney’s show about the president elected four score and seven years after his assassination, Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground, is up at the Paper of Record.