Bristol Valley Theater’s production of Melinda Lopez’s play “Mala,” starring Mary Mendez Rizzo, enters its final week of outdoor performances.
drama
Posted inMovies
High Falls Film Festival 2015 preview
When the High Falls Film Festival was founded back in 2001, with a mission to highlight the contributions of women in the film industry, just 17 percent of jobs behind the camera were held by women. Sadly, 14 years later not much has changed. In fact, that statistic hasn’t budged an inch. The need to […]
Posted inMovies
Film Review: “Cake”
Jennifer Aniston’s surprisingly long and crowded career, which really began with the successful television show “Friends,” includes a variety of roles in some occasionally unusual movies. Although she has mostly starred in chick flicks and romantic comedies (probably a result of typecasting created by the TV series), she has also played a few unusual parts, […]
Posted inMovies
Film Review: “Beyond the Lights”
The release of “Beyond the Lights” signals the heartening reemergence of a film genre that’s sadly become increasingly rare to find at the multiplex these days: the adult romantic drama. Films in which the developing love between two characters gets treated as the focus of the story, and not a side product of whatever high-concept […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Theater Review: “The Hot L Baltimore” at Blackfriars
With “The Hot L Baltimore,” Blackfriars brings back an important play by an important American playwright, and does justice to an elusive piece. Lanford Wilson died in 2011, and his reputation seems to be undergoing that slight posthumous dip that many artists undergo. But I think he’ll eventually rate very high among American playwrights for […]
Posted inMovies
Film Review: “Short Term 12”
When it premiered at 2013 South By Southwest Film Festival, Destin Cretton’s “Short Term 12” enjoyed about as successful a debut as any young director could hope. It generated deafeningly positive buzz before going on to win the festival’s grand-jury award as well as the audience award. Despite such auspicious beginnings, the film mostly flew […]
Posted inMovies
Film Review: “Labor Day”
A love story about a brief and passionate romance between an escaped convict and a divorced single mother suffering a prolonged nervous breakdown hardly seems guaranteed box-office boffo, even for the weepie crowd. For reasons of his own, Jason Reitman, who previously directed some offbeat films like “Thank You for Smoking” and “Up in the […]
Posted inMovies
Film Review: “Nebraska”
Veteran character actor Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, an aging, unemployed alcoholic convinced he’s won a million dollars in a mail-order sweepstakes in “Nebraska,” Alexander Payne’s darkly comic fable of dreams unfulfilled. After several attempts to set out on foot from his home in Montana, his exasperated son David (Will Forte, in an understated performance) […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
“Tuesdays with Morrie”
Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” may have been a pop-culture juggernaut as a book; as a play it is pretty much Lifetime for guys. Albom’s memoir of afternoons spent in the company of a college professor he remembered fondly, during the professor’s last days, and the life lessons that resulted, was on the bestseller list […]
Posted inMovies
“The Counselor”
Ridley Scott’s pictures display the talents of one of the most visually creative directors in Hollywood. Movies like “Alien” and “Blade Runner” demonstrate his penchant for using established genres to reinterpret traditional material and move the forms in new and fascinating directions. His latest film, “The Counselor,” with a script by Cormac McCarthy, suggests once […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
“Me and Jezebel”
“Darling, there are no other stars.” That line is ascribed to Bette Davis in “Me and Jezebel,” the opening production in Blackfriars Theatre’s 64th season. The show tells the allegedly true story of what happened when Davis — the legendary movie star who won two Academy Awards for Best Actress, received 10 Oscar nominations, and […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
The profession that dare not speak its name
Rochester sees quite a bit of Shakespeare in the course of a theater season, but almost nothing from his runner-up in the Greatest English Playwright sweepstakes (and match in productivity), George Bernard Shaw. Last year Rochester’s Black Sheep Theatre presented Shaw’s early play “Widowers’ Houses”; this month it is presenting “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” — another […]
