Hard rock fans know the name of Randy Rhoads, the exciting young guitarist who had shredded his way to center stage in Ozzy Osbourne’s first post-Black Sabbath solo band, a co-writer of “Crazy Train” and a standout on the two albums he blazed and helped co-write and co-produce, “Blizzard of Ozz” and “Diary of a […]
Category Archives: Review
Joni Mitchell Wins Gershwin Prize
The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize of Popular Music, in its 16 years has reliably been a solid night of tribute to a deserving artist and an anticipated D.C. event even after it moved from the intimate confines of the East Room of the White House to the nearby Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution […]
Film: The Greatest Player Nobody Knew
One of the great unsung stars of basketball — except maybe in Los Angeles — is Raymond Lewis, who became something of a high school legend, scoring as many as 80 points in a game, and drawing interest from 200 schools to recruit him. Yet he is also a basketball anomaly, as the only first […]
Film Review: Powerful ‘You Resemble Me’
Dina Amer’s mesmerizing, elegiac film “You Resemble Me” begins with the lovely interactions of a couple of sisters, age seven and 9, tumbling through life and the outskirts of Paris in their gaily colored dresses that do, in fact, make them resemble each other. That the dresses were lifted from somewhere (and the removal of […]
Movie: ‘The Seasons – Four Love Stories’
To everything there is a season. So say Ecclesiastes, Pete Seeger and the Byrds. And so there is for love, as Paul Schwartz depicts in his modest little film “The Seasons — Four Love Stories.” As its title make clear, the film presents four slightly interlocked stories of love involving very different stages of life. […]
Film: Documentary ‘Tiger 24’ Has Teeth
When Warren Pereira began making a documentary film in his native India about a tiger reserve he readily admits, “I don’t know what I was doing.” Of the dominant male of the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve he started to concentrate on, he says, “he had a cool beard.” What he didn’t know luckily didn’t kill him, […]
The Kansas City Ballet’s Own Nutcracker
Like the growing Christmas tree, the grand Tchaikovsky score and the sparkle on the snow queens, there are certain things audiences expect from their annual viewing of “The Nutcracker,” and the Kansas City Ballet production of it currently at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, provides most of them. If the sight of small […]
Film Review: ‘The Take Out Move,’ Remade
If you want to do a quick offhand comedy about a couple of guys competing in a frantic, slapstick cartoon style, you’d make a TikTok. If it got a smile, fine. If not, no harm done, scroll on. Back in the last century, to create such a work, you’d have make a short film, which […]
Movie Review: ‘Murder, Anyone?’
Before he died in 2019 at 68, the television writer Gordon Bressack left behind seven unproduced film scripts. As a dutiful son, the director James Cullen Bressack has decided not only to make one of them, but also fund most of its production himself. The younger Bressack’s previous films include one shot entirely on iPhone […]
Film: Martha Coolidge’s ‘I’ll Find You’
Music is often an important component of film, elevating the action and visual settings while usually taking a back seat. As effective as it can be, it’s rarely central to a film’s story or central emotion. The exception is Martha Coolidge’s “I’ll Find You,” a solid romance set during World War II in which a […]