Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in New York and Olivier Award in London, is the play I’ve been waiting for since the 1980s. Although Norris previously wrote six dramas for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Steppenwolf will finally stage his ...
Why are there always rumors about male stars being gay? Maybe they’re true. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) claimed in his amusing 2006 book The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, “With the exception of Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson, there are few stars able to play supermacho parts ...
It’s not uncommon for me to get into discussions about celebrities that go something like this: Him: Hey, you’ve heard of Mr. Big Name [a world-famous icon of masculinity], right? Me: Sure. Who hasn’t? Him: Well, he’s gay. Me: Really? That’s interesting. Him: Yeah, my buddy Al, who was a ...
Summer blockbuster movies often allow the popular imagination to engage metaphorically with topics that aren’t discussed honestly on the editorial page—topics such as IQ, race, and heredity. (Personally, I don’t think it ought to be necessary to spend tens of millions on computer-generated ...
Perhaps no movie this year generates more concussive laughter from audiences than The Guard. This low-budget, highbrow Irish comedy stars redheaded character actor Brendan Gleeson as a small-town cop in County Galway in the tranquil West of Ireland. Smart, cultured, lazy, and mischievous to the ...
Project Nim is a critically praised documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of one of those attempts to teach American Sign Language to an ape, a fad that once fascinated the popular imagination. Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2008 documentary Man on ...
I never thought I’d say this about a Harry Potter movie, but the eighth and culminating installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, should have been a good half-hour longer. Instead, although saddled with the most convoluted plot of the series, it has the shortest running time. ...
The Guardian, a high-minded leftist broadsheet, had been campaigning for years against Rupert Murdoch’s populist London tabloids. In 2007, private detective Glenn Mulcaire and News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman went to jail for “hacking” into the voicemail accounts of aides to ...
I had long wondered why critics loathe the Transformers movies about giant alien robots more than they hate any other summer blockbuster series. On the other hand, I’d never wondered enough to see one. Unlike reviewers who have to watch every movie that comes out, my policy is: If it sounds ...
Watching the misanthropic comedy Bad Teacher, I was reminded of how my late father-in-law, who supplemented his careers as a tuba player and union boss with a day job in the Chicago public schools as the world’s most cynical substitute teacher, liked to tell this old joke: “I can’t get a ...
