- David Denby: “Empire of the Sun,” at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun,” from 1987—screening in the “See It Big!” series at the Museum of the Moving Image on Dec. 3—is a procession of visual astonishments. Tom Stoppard adapted J. G. Ballard’s semiautobiographical novel about . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Hereafter” and “Inside Job.”
Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” begins with a magnificent re-creation of the 2004 tsunami as it hits an unnamed resort town in Southeast Asia. An initially receding ocean returns as a thick, unstoppable wave that surges ashore and rushes down a street, washing away buildings, tossing cars . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Creation” and “The Girl on the Train.”
The year has barely begun, yet we already have a safe bet for best actress of 2010. Jenny, in Jon Amiel’s “Creation,” is certainly a hell of a role, beginning with an action sequence in the nude, switching to a flirtation scene—in which Jenny . . ....
- Joan Acocella: David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry Five.”
David Gordon has always been postmodern dance’s premier minimalist. So you could say he was almost showing off when, in 2004, he took on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”—with its massed armies, its take-charge king, its pretty princess—and made his own . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Contagion” review.
You’re a school nurse who sends home a little boy flushed with fever; you reach into a bowl of peanuts at a bar; you pick up a cell phone left on a counter. It doesn’t take much contact to become infected in “Contagion,” Steven . . ....
- Books: “The Magician King,” by Lev Grossman
The sequel to Grossman’s visceral “The Magicians” finds the protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, and his friends complacently reigning over a magical land called Fillory. Once an Ivy-bound Brooklyn teen, Quentin became king of Fillory after graduating from an élite wizard college and vanquishing a villain . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Mr g” review.
A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “The King’s Speech” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.”
The object of “The King’s Speech” is to make us care, as deeply as possible, about the vocal impediment of a dead British monarch. This is not a topic that, until now, has received our most fanatical attention, but the film’s director, Tom Hooper . . ....
- Rivka Galchen: David Deutsch and quantum computing.
On the outskirts of Oxford lives a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist named David Deutsch, who believes in multiple universes and has conceived of an as yet unbuildable computer to test their existence. His books have titles of colossal confidence (“The Fabric of Reality,” “The Beginning of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “44 Inch Chest” and “Police, Adjective.”
The new British movie “44 Inch Chest” is a very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way. Five of the best actors in England have been handed a ranting, foulmouthed script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the same vituperative pair who wrote . . ....
- David Denby: “Source Code” and “Meek’s Cutoff.”
8220;Source Code,” a techno-thriller about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from nuclear destruction, is much more enjoyable than “Inception,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Limitless,” and other fantastical jaunts of recent seasons. The movie may begin as a sci-fi . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “American Egyptologist” by Jeffrey Abt, review.
Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
David Nicholls’s novel “One Day” was recently made into a movie staring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, and Patricia Clarkson. He reads from the book and discusses it with Lisa Birnbach, a co-author of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” and . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
Sam Weller, the author of “Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews,” talks with the great writer himself, using Skype. (52 Prince St. 212-274-1160. July 21 at 7.)
“MAD. SQ. READS”
The writers Emily Barton, David Gates, and Stacey D . . ....
- David Denby: “The Last Station,” “Crazy Heart,” “Brothers,” and “The Lovely Bones.”
In “The Last Station,” Christopher Plummer, at the crest of a long career, gives an impassioned portrait of the artist as an old man—Leo Tolstoy in his eighties, imposing, stentorian, and almost alarmingly active. Helen Mirren, letting her age show and still the most sexual actress . . ....
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: “Avatar” and the new Oscar-voting scheme.
The Academy Award nominations were announced last week, and two movies came out on top: “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker,” with nine nods apiece. At the box office, however, the score is not tied. “The Hurt Locker” has taken in a little more than . . ....
- Books: “A Wicked Company.”
From the seventeen-fifties through the seventeen-eighties, Paul Thiry d’Holbach, a German baron brought up in France, presided over a Paris salon so brainy that one regular called him the “maître d’ of philosophy.” Adam Smith, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume were . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Art Spiegelman: “Crossroads”
In “MetaMaus,” Spiegelman employs prose, drawings, documents, and photographs to trace the intersecting paths of history, family, and comics which led to the creation, twenty-five years ago, of “Maus,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book about the Holocaust . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Pee-wee Herman comes to Broadway.
8220;Turn again, turn again, turn once again,” Tennessee Williams wrote in “Carousel Tune.” “The freaks of the cosmic circus are men. / We are the gooks and the geeks of creation; / Believe-It-or-Not is the name of our star.” Enter Pee-wee Herman . . ....
- Goings on About Town: This Week
The Theatre
CLOWNING AROUND
Mark Rylance, last seen here in “Boeing-Boeing,” returns to Broadway in David Hirson’s comedy “La Bête,” also directed by Matthew Warchus. David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley star as well, at the Music Box.
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- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Dance
goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET
George Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” has something for everyone. The cast is announced on the company’s Web site a week in advance. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-870-5570. Dec. 15 and Dec. 17 at 8; Dec. 16, Dec. 20-21, and . . ....
- David Denby: “This Is Not a Film,” “Wanderlust,” “Safe House” reviews.
Jafar Panahi is a fifty-one-year-old Iranian film director with a restlessly intense manner and a sturdy, undefeatable sense of the absurd. A maker of nonpolitical films (“The White Balloon,” “The Circle”), Panahi has nevertheless been sentenced by the Iranian authorities to six years . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Knight and Day” and “Winter’s Bone.”
Tom Cruise was very funny in the 1999 movie “Magnolia.” Playing a satanic sex guru dressed in black, he effectively spoofed the over-galvanized acting style of his youth. But in “Knight and Day” he has reverted to his old whirling-arms, flashing-choppers mode of . . ....
