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, […]
Category Archives: Review
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 […]
Also posted in Film
Comments closed
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 […]
Also posted in Film
Comments closed
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 […]
Also posted in Film
Comments closed
Stage: ‘Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci’
Leonardo Da Vinci predated William Shakespeare by half a century; their paths never crossed. Both were artists who changed the world with their vision; each had flinty intellects interested in a wide variety subjects that the Renaissance opened up to them. And while the Bard had a superior command of words — it was his […]
Also posted in Theatre
Comments closed
Stage: Back to the ’50s in ‘Maple and Vine’
Even as patrons file in Spooky Action’s basement theater space at the Universalist National Memorial Church, the central couple of the new production “Maple and Vine” are already on stage in bed. But Em Whitworth’s Katha can’t quite sleep. She’s sitting up, staring into space, continually looking at her phone. She’s caught up in the […]
Also posted in Theatre
Comments closed
Documentary Review: ‘Everybody Dance’
“Everybody Dance” is the motto of Bonnie Schlachte’s Center of Ballet for All Kids in Agoura Hills, Calif. where special-needs kids of a wide age and abilities can learn and enjoy the elements of classical dance. “Everybody Dance” is also the name of Dan Watt’s sensitive documentary about the enterprise, its enthusiastic participants and their […]
Also posted in Film
Comments closed
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns On the Prowl
Rock ’n’ roll is a sound and it is a style and Tav Falco’s been straddling both since the late 1970s. The latest version of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, on a cross country tour, stopped at The Runaway in D.C. for a midweek show that was strangely mesmerizing and altogether rocking thanks largely to his […]
Also posted in Music
Comments closed
Music: The Decemberists at Wolf Trap
The Decemberists, the charming chamber folk-rock band from out of Portlandia, became famous for live performances as elaborate and detailed as their ornate songs, staging obscure battles or sea scenes with sudden appearances by man-eating whales into their shows. There was none of that Wednesday as the band took the stage at Wolf Trap in […]
Also posted in Music
Comments closed