Reviews: Last News

John Proctor Is the Villain (★★★★☆) grabs hold early, building through pungent twists towards a fierce, freeing climax.Riffing on a feminist reading of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Belflower’s high school-set crucible, like Miller’s play, operates adroitly as both think-piece and thrilling drama. As Miller used the Salem witch trials to obliquely portray the witch hunt of the McCarthy-led Red Scare, Belflower remixes The Crucible‘s plot to produce an incisive allegorical take on another age of paranoia, fear, and accusations: the #MeToo era.The play is set in the bygone days of 2018, and it’s through that cultural lens that the kids in Mr.

it’s not a trip it’s a journey (★★★★☆), centering the four-woman dramedy around a character who can’t put into words the pain she’s feeling, yet talks plenty in trying to make sense of it all.In the throes of a crisis perhaps too profound to be reduced to a few sentences, June, a seemingly stable and strong New Yorker, speaks in abstractions and ellipses. She plucks analogies from wherever she can, searching for an image or expression that might help her understand her pain, so she can in turn help her friends understand what’s consuming her.June’s struggle to articulate her feelings comes through in the clipped, pointed, often very funny, dialogue spoken between her and the three dear friends — Willie, Frankie, and Rain — whom she invites on a girls’ road trip to the Grand Canyon.June needs the journey.

Mean Girls (★★★☆☆) are reprising roles from the 2019-2020 tour, and their experience shows in the well-honed comedy and character work on display.As Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith — two of The Plastics, the pastel-pretty apex predators of the story’s high school jungle — Megan Masako Haley and Jonalyn Saxer know where all the laughs are. They nail Gretchen and Karen’s dramatic beats, too.And Mary Kate Morrissey, with the pipes to elevate every song she takes on, delivers snark without resting on stereotype in her portrayal of proud misfit Janis Sarkisian, eager to see The Plastics toppled from atop the North Shore High food chain.Janis might get her wish with the arrival of new student Cady Heron, played by Danielle Wade, also reprising her role from the previous tour.An American girl raised in Kenya, Cady hasn’t a clue how to navigate the social savagery of a suburban Illinois high school, but she learns fast from Janis and vividly gay fellow outcast Damian Hubbard, performed by Eric Huffman, another in the cast with an engaging take on their character and firm handle on the comic timing.Damian and Janis’ tutelage in numbers like “Where Do You Belong?” sets Cady up for finding popularity.

Private (★★★★☆), would insist on at least that level of privacy in their own home.Others, like Corbin (Eric Berryman), Georgia’s “promising, up-and-coming engineer” husband, might more easily be persuaded to drop the fragile veil of privacy if it meant finally earning real money.Offered a dream job and fat salary at a Fortune 500 tech company, Corbin is ready to sign away “access to anything” to seal the deal.

Grace (★★★★☆), the audience was on their feet, ready to bathe the performer in a juicy, well-earned moment of gratitude.Had Payton launched into an immediate reprise, nobody would have minded. “Again?” is a really good song, among several composed by Nolan Williams, Jr., who also directs the fine eight-piece orchestra, and has got this ensemble cast’s vocals all the way together — save for a straggler or two.Director-choreographer Robert Barry Fleming has likewise fit the cast together firmly in their excellent portrayal of a large extended Black family in Philadelphia gathered for the memorial of their dear, deceased matriarch, Gran’Me.Preparing a picnic in the garden behind the family’s restaurant, Minton’s Place, a one-hundred-year tradition in the community and in their family, the Minton cousins and siblings and aunties comprise a lot of moving parts.Backgrounded by a recently dedicated mural that rises stories above the garden, family members are in and out of the kitchen, up and down steep staircases, carrying food, serving food, eating, singing about, dancing with, and arguing about food.All the movement and prop business looks effortless, as the cast weaves around Jason Ardizzone-West’s spare but expressive set.

“For once in my life, I wanted to make a movie without having all the responsibilities.” So moans Jeff, the director on the film-within-a-film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Beware of a Holy Whore.” The West German drama sequesters a movie crew in a coastal Spanish hotel, where the combination of cabin fever and psychological discord between a group of insecure, neurotic people breeds the rarefied level of hysteria only found in show business.

“For once in my life, I wanted to make a movie without having all the responsibilities.” So moans Jeff, the director on the film-within-a-film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Beware of a Holy Whore.” The West German drama sequesters a movie crew in a coastal Spanish hotel, where the combination of cabin fever and psychological discord between a group of insecure, neurotic people breeds the rarefied level of hysteria only found in show business.

Nobody who knows anything about war would claim there are good or bad conflicts. Still, the warfare seen in Sergey Loznitsa’s savage Ukraine-set satire “Donbass” manages to seem even more harrowing than the fictional fighting we are used to seeing on screen.

While they’re perennial favorites that arguably never go away, snowy survival dramas are having a moment right now. In the past month, we’ve been offered five of them from various distributors, including Hulu‘s “No Exit,” Netflix’s “Against the Ice,” and now, the nearly-silent thriller “Infinite Storm” from Bleecker Street.

What happens after you blow up your entire life to be with the person you love? The second season of “Starstruck” explores the question that rom-coms generally leave unanswered after their happy endings, wisely acknowledging that a big romantic gesture doesn’t erase all the obstacles present between two people getting — and staying — together. On its surface, the British import on HBO Max seems like a standard wish-fulfillment fantasy à la “Notting Hill”: a “normie” finds unlikely romance with a star.

Once Twice Melody (★★★★☆) was released in four installments, with a chapter landing once per month. Their decision to slowly titrate the album’s release allowed it to reveal its strength in an almost teasing way, as the majesty of the whole became gradually more apparent as the second and third chapters dropped.

Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, true to its title, seemed to put a satisfying capstone on their career, and the subsequent years of extensive touring as self-described “late-blooming road warriors” seemed like something between an epilogue and a victory lap. But defying expectations has been the theme of their late career, and after years coasting on their well-deserved iconic status, it turns out Tears for Fears had another album in them after all.The Tipping Point (★★★☆☆) is not only their first studio album in 17 years, but for Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, it represents a kind of hard-won artistic freedom.

I’d like to think that, in my time occupying a morsel of space on this pale blue dot we call home, I’ve developed the ability to follow the structure of a film from start to finish; granted, some may be more confusing than others, some may be an incomprehensible mess, some may hardly be worthy of being called movies. Whatever the case may be, I pride myself on what many would barely consider a skill to mostly decipher what’s happening in most films, no matter how perplexing or under the direction of Tommy Wiseau.

Love letters rarely include knock-off Barbie dolls engaging in incest, but the conventional is often off the table when it comes to French director Bertrand Bonello. “Coma,” Bonello’s latest, begins with a miscellanea of incongruent images, zoomed in and blurred, an amalgamation of amorphous shapes that exacerbates the sharpness of the accompanying words.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet can be a master juggler of a filmmaker, letting many different pieces achieve weightlessness while our attention is rapt. When it’s graceful and methodical, it can have the dreamy qualities of “Delicatessen” or “Amelie.” But when the trick doesn’t work, it can be mighty exhausting to follow along with, as with his new Netflix film “Bigbug.” This movie has Jeunet doing “The Jetsons” while ruminating on what a robot uprising might inevitably look like, but that proves to be less exciting than one could ever imagine.

Dear Mapel (★★★★☆) also profoundly honors the lost art of letter-writing. That distinctly direct and intimate mode of expressing what’s most deeply felt, and saying what often can’t be spoken, serves as Psalm’s chosen means of addressing the father he barely knew.Via letters to Mapel, the award-winning performer and playwright vividly evokes his own coming-of-age enriched by art and music, while examining the main thing, or person, that went missing.For this world premiere production, director and production designer Natsu Onoda Power engulfs Mosaic’s Sprenger Theatre stage in a sweeping deluge of paper missives.

For more information and reviews of every film screening at Reel Affirmations 27, check out our Complete Guide here!This gathering of uplifting, often funny shorts opens with Blocked (★★★★☆) an uber-gay parody in which filmmaker Kevin Yee tussles with writer’s block. With a not-so-subtle nod to The Sound of Music and a sharply funny, unexpected ending, it captures the simplicity and artfulness of the short movie format in under 4 minutes.

For more information and reviews of every film screening at Reel Affirmations 27, check out our Complete Guide here!The title of this magnificent collection of shorts says it all, but it’s the ways in which the coming out is achieved in each film that gives this series its sparkle. It opens with Caoi Scott’s positively inspired After that Party (★★★★★), in which Leo (Lucas Drummond) grapples with the fact that a family member may be gay.

For more information and reviews of every film screening at Reel Affirmations 27, check out our Complete Guide here!Reel Affirmation’s Cultures of Queer program celebrates identities — be they hidden, unexplored, or erased by those who refuse to accept them. Kicking things off, Robin Cloud’s engaging short 2 Dollars (★★★★☆) centers on African-American nonbinary office-worker Syd (Gabrielle Maiden) trying to choose between their stifling job and bigoted coworkers, or giving it all up and pursuing their artistic passions.

For more information and reviews of every film screening at Reel Affirmations 27, check out our Complete Guide here!The descriptor for this cluster of shorts claims the films are “sci-fi, fantasy, surreal, alternative reality.” That’s a pretty loose definition of what’s on offer here — don’t expect phasers set on stun. Still, the movies in this program manage to stun in their own ways, being sharp, interesting, and intelligent, even if their meaning isn’t always entirely accessible.

known as the Dixie Chicks, lit a forest fire with an offhand insult about George W. Bush in 2003.