Except for a few excursions to his crowded Connecticut parties, I really did not know Arthur Carter well at all. I was much closer and friendlier with his brilliant editor, Peter Kaplan, who began working with me in 1987 and continued until his death after 15 years as one of the most powerful and impactful voices in American journalism. Kaplan was the longest-standing editor of The New York Observer. Carter was what you might technically label his “boss,” but he consulted Kaplan on every issue, large and small, and never made a move without him.

Carter admired Kaplan for his extraordinary kindness and brilliant intellect. “I’d never seen that combination before and have never seen it since,” Carter said. “He was a superb talent, a gentleman with a rare quality of just plain niceness.” Before joining their liaison, I had always been limited by working relationships with important but self-involved editors, who were more obsessed with personal achievements and political accomplishments than personal pride.

Carter cared more about writers than their editorial opinions. He was devoted to quality. He never rejected a single idea of mine and never failed to share enthusiasm for an article or review that particularly appealed to him. An expression of approval, no matter how small, is meaningful to a writer and is often overlooked. Carter was careful to make his approval every bit as valuable as his occasional criticism. As the only journalist known to have appeared in The New York Observer from its inception, I am proud to say that I have no memory of any negative reaction to any single review or feature I ever wrote. That, for any journalist with the remotest controversial reputation, is something uniquely unheard of.

On a personal level, he threw lavish Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners that included just about everyone you ever longed to meet on a professional level. My days of collaboration with Arthur Carter extended to such privileges as a personal recommendation from his ex-wife, Dixie Carter, beseeching him for a healthy raise for this reporter, which he countered with, “I appreciate your admiration, but I already thought of it first. A Rex Reed salary increase went into effect yesterday.” You hardly ever get a boss like that anymore, and if you do, you’d be a fool to look the other way.

Where would the movies be without World War II? That’s not a frivolous question. Every year, the two infamous decades devoted to the cruelest and most heinous conflict in world history provide fresh material for a plethora of new movies, books, plays and even Broadway musicals. The range of Holocaust classics and other war-related subjects covers everything from the bravery of Americans on the home front (who can or will ever forget David Selznick’s Since You Went Away, with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple?) to action epics such as A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, not to mention the endless variety of stars who fought for freedom, peace and the end of war on the screen, from Margaret O’Brien to Boris Karloff. There’s always a new one, and the latest entry in the overcrowded genre is a sobering, well-made drama that is well worth seeing, titled Truth & Treason, about the youngest person ever executed by the Third Reich for his dedication to criticizing Adolf Hitler.   

Helmuth Hübener (played by Ewan Horrocks) was a handsome, intelligent teenager in Hamburg who was more interested in bicycles, swimming and hanging out with his buddies than polishing personal political ideas. He was a good student, the son of a liberal clergyman, whose radical new stepfather demonstrated early signs of racial intolerance and an alarming loyalty to the harrowing ideals of the Nazi party. When one of his best friends was murdered because he was Jewish, Helmuth was so traumatized that his revised opinion of the German rules of law and order that dominated his country was reflected in a change of conscience—slowly at first, typing warnings like “Down with Hitler!” and posting them throughout urban areas of Germany. The agitprop, the outraged response from the government and the press and the many careless fingerprints inadvertently left behind began to add up as the film catalogues the participation of Helmuth’s friends, enemies and even family members.  

The result of so much bravery and sacrifice is eventually disastrous, and Helmuth, without once admitting he ever did anything wrong, melds determination and innocence to become one of the war’s noblest heroes at the ten. Devoted to the truth and a dangerous cause regardless of the consequences, even when condemned to death by guillotine, he stated for posterity, “The judge will be judged—and truth will prevail.”  One can only salute him for being so heroic—and wish he hadn’t also been so unnervingly naïve.

Filming in Lithuania, director Matt Whitaker guides a perfect cast that includes the dynamic British actor Rupert Evans as the secret Nazi police officer Erwin Mussener, who was both bemused and fascinated by young Helmuth while he reluctantly pursued him to his doom, and the film discovers in newcomer Ewan Horrocks an extraordinarily gifted talent about whom I predict we’ll soon see and hear a great deal more.

Like almost every other actor of renown in today’s diminished world of second-rate movies, Emma Thompson is forced to face the challenge of inventing her own projects to keep her film career alive. This now includes starring in a hackneyed, uninspired dime-a-dozen horror film called Dead of Winter. She also produced it herself. Times are bad all over.

In this waste of a great actor’s talent and intelligence, she plays an aging, gun-toting hag unwisely revisiting an old fishing hole her late husband loved to spread his ashes. On a snowy road in the frozen wastes of northern Minnesota, her truck breaks down in a storm and when she hikes through drifts of ice up to her eyeballs seeking warmth and shelter in an abandoned shack in the wilderness, she finds a young kidnap victim handcuffed to a frozen basement pipe by a pair of married of demented killers (Judy Greer, especially menacing as the wacko wife) for reasons that are never convincingly explained. The movie is about the old woman’s futile efforts to save the girl from an endless series of assaults and tortures, narrowly escaping near death at every turn. It’s a preposterous story to follow, but thanks to the expertise of Emma Thompson, it keeps you interested.

Shot, slashed, bleeding, and half frozen to death, she copes remarkably well, fortified by memories of her happy marriage and her ability to keep a fire going in a deserted cabin, medicate her gunshot wounds and sew the pieces of her arm together (“Just like sewing a quilt,” she quips through the pain.) The white backdrop of constant snow and zero temperatures also add to the intensity of the winter ambience with enough discomfort that your teeth will chatter just looking at it. The movie is a far cry from the star’s collection of elegant Jane Austen period pieces, but Ms. Thompson is always worth watching, even when she’s wasting her time—and ours.

Unfortunately, the sloppy screenplay by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb asks more questions than it answers, deriving most of its style from Fargo. Knowing the territory, why did Ms. Thonpson’s character choose the Midwest’s worst season to spread ashes from a dilapidated truck not safe to drive, even in the best weather? What did the kidnap victim do to get captured? Where are the vicious kidnappers going, and why? Director Brian Kirk does nothing to explain, elaborate or justify. Worse still, the two lunatic villains are identified as fentanyl addicts, but that doesn’t explain why the female half of the team goes through most of the movie with as many as five hypodermic needles at a time lodged in her tongue.

What attracted such a fine actress as Emma Thompson to so much carnage in the first place is anybody’s guess. According to the end credits, Dead of Winter is set in Minnesota but filmed on location in Finland, Germany and Belgium, when all it takes is one snow-covered backyard in New Jersey.

Remakes are odious, even when they’re nothing more than harmless television takeoffs on successful feature films, but The Roses is an especially egregious waste of time and talent because it takes itself so seriously. With the abbreviated title of the popular 1989 smash The War of the Roses for starters, it not only tries to both approximate and duplicate a proven hit but foolishly improve it, too.

The original starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, two glamorous stars with no superiors in the field of caustic satire, in a black parody on yuppie materialism that also benefited greatly from the witty cynicism of Danny DeVito’s direction. Nobody was better at understated derision than Michael Douglas when he concentrated on what he was doing, and Kathleen Turner was a gorgeous cross between Betty Crocker and the Spider Woman as a tour guide through domestic hell. In the new, unnecessary remake, two fine but miscast Brits, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, grapple with more stoic versions of the material and none of the humor and charisma demanded of the leading roles. Based on Warren Adler’s novel, it’s the old familiar story of the man, motivated by the pursuit of career and power, and the woman, who stays home to mind the kids and clean the house.

Moving to America for reasons uexplained, things look good until, after 17 years of marriage and two kids ready for athletic boarding school, the tables turn when the man, a talented architect, loses his job and gets reduced to self-doubt after designing the most beautiful house in Southern California, and it’s the woman who reaps the profits after opening a seafood restaurant—“We’ve Got Crabs”—that takes off like gangbusters. War is declared, embodying everything from physical violence to sexual sadism, and they spend their lives trying to destroy a marriage that was a hopeless mistake. The wife works her way up to nine restaurants and a James Beard award. Her crabs triumph, while the fabulous house he designed becomes an irreconcilable difference. When the anatomy of this disastrous relationship finally ends, the Roses discover it’s not the misery of their awful marriage they destroy, but the greatness of their perfect house. What they learn is nothing, and compromise begins all over again.

Yes, it’s a yawn, but when the Roses eventually leave their battle stations, it’s long after the viewer has given up on both of them already. The two stars have a few moments of failed splendor, but Olivia Colman is better playing neurotic queens in costume epics, and the most hilarious performance in the whole film is by Allison Janney, who is especially on target as Mrs. Rose’s savage divorce lawyer. Director Jay Roach works so hard trying to squeeze in a few gags that do not come naturally from the overwrought yet tedious script by Tony McNamara that almost every line seems painfully over-written. Thus, you get “The dream you’ve always wanted to be shouldn’t die on the crucifix of family life.”  Which is another way of saying “Be yourself.”  Trust me when I say the only thing you’ll miss is that remarkable beach house. The movie is under two hours, but it seems much longer.

After a dismal debut one year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival and a universal refusal of commercial release by every major film company, Ron Howard finally decided to open his dreadful, independently produced and directed film Eden with his own money. Curiosity centers on one word: “Why?”

It’s a strange, creepy departure for Howard, who grew up in the movie business, from a cute kid on Andy Griffith’s TV sitcom and family-fit movies like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father to a mature, Oscar-winning director of box office hits such as Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. Like Steven Spielberg, his films are usually polished, coherent, and suitable for all ages. His obsession with Eden delivers none of those things, and it’s so vile, pretentious and confusing in style over substance that a lot of it is downright unwatchable. 

Set in the years after World War I when fascism was growing in fear and chaos, it centers on a small group of obnoxious German dissidents who denounce Hitler’s allegedly civilized society and withdraw to an ugly, barren volcanic island in the Galapagos called Floriana, led by an eccentric Teutonic doctor-philosopher named Friedrich Ritter (played to the neurotic hilt by Jude Law), who spends his days glued to a broken-down typewriter writing a book about the New Order. Ritter believes the only way to save the world is to destroy the old one and create a new one. He drags along his companion-bedmate Dora (Vanessa Kirby), who writhes and jerks her way through the agony of multiple sclerosis before eventually going stark raving insane.

Any warped would-be Nietzsche like Ritter is bound to attract supporters, so it’s just a matter of counting sheep before other followers and fans show up. Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Bruhl) and his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney) bring along a son with tuberculosis, thinking Ritter will welcome them, but he is hostile and hateful, warning them that life on Floreana is unsurvivable. (That doesn’t begin to cover it. There’s no fresh water, and food consists of muddy roots, dead animals and wild pigs.)

Next comes the loopy Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner Basquat (Ana de Armas) with her sexual threesome, phony accent and vicious dog Marquis de Sade. She eats only canned food, and plans to build a luxury resort hotel with whatever she can beg, borrow and steal. In what seems like an eternity, they all argue, vomit and resort to violent blows. While we watch them fall apart, Howard lays on the horror. Jude Law contributes nothing more than an abundance of full-frontal nudity because that’s what he does best in almost all of his films. There’s plenty of sex, disease and animal cruelty, while most of the cast dies from food poisoning after eating rotten chickens. But it’s really Sydney Sweeney who wins the top prize for unspeakable suffering in a long, unbearable sequence of natural childbirth without anesthesia while a pack of hungry, snarling dogs watch and wait, hoping to make a meal of the newborn placenta.

The deadly screenplay by Noah Pink brings to the assignment zero knowledge of form, craft or discipline. No character is developed seriously or deeply enough to reach more than the most superficial surface identity. Eden is supposed to be an adventurous examination of what happens when civilization breaks down and man’s true nature is revealed, but it comes off more like one of those boring, incomprehensible Wes Anderson films that they make up, scene by scene, as they go along.

I once spent a whole afternoon with the supremely scintillating, lushly gorgeous and endlessly fascinating Ava Gardner, interviewing her for a profile in Esquire. I never recovered. The result was like a short story—one about a salty, opinionated, faultlessly candid movie star with the haunting appeal of a Technicolor vampire. Once bit, you stayed bitten. Elizabeth McGovern is no Ava, but like the Hollywood icon she seems to emulate, she’s still beautiful at 65, with a similar hairstyle, a waistline her peers would kill for, and, just like Ava’s, a Hollywood film career she abandoned decades ago for a life in London. As a fan with an eye for beauty who was transformed by the MGM glamour girl from the tobacco fields of North Carolina, with her warm, melodic Southern accent and a no-nonsense way of living life her own unique way that created headlines every time she stepped out of a limousine in Paris, Madrid or Beverly Hills, I was mad about Ava Gardner in great films like Mogambo, The Night of the Iguana and The Barefoot Contessa.

Elizabeth McGovern must have felt the same way as a lovely, ambitious, aspiring newcomer eager to make her own mark on the screen. After years of awe, she has now written a play called AVA: The Secret Conversations, in which she also stars. Based on a series of interviews with Ava at the end of a rich, troubled life, following a stroke that left her paralyzed and needing money to support what was left of a fading but still dazzling lifestyle, two years before she died. Reluctantly, after years of saying no, she finally decided the key to survival was to give in and publish her long-awaited memoirs, and she asked British journalist Peter Evans to be her ghost-writer. It was an uncomfortable experience from the first day, compiled from vignettes, rumors and half-hearted responses that comprise the contents of Ms. McGovern’s play, now on view for a limited run at New York City Center. If you love her films and all of the controversial stories about one of the most celebrated stars in movie history, you won’t want to miss it. Just don’t go expecting the truest and final word on the subject. Ms. McGovern didn’t know Ava personally, so I don’t know how accurate it is.

Sipping wine throughout the play, Ava complains her film career was ruined by age, not booze and chain-smoking, but on the afternoon I spent with her, she was guzzling brandy and washing it down with Dom Pérignon. Gregory Peck, one of her most loyal friends and devoted co-stars, claims the drinking is exaggerated, but Charlton Heston insists she was so drunk on 55 Days at Peking that she was often absent, always unprepared, and cost the film millions in delays and retakes. I believe her devastation when MGM dubbed her singing voice in Show Boat, and she was so depressed she gave up singing forever. She had a surprisingly alluring voice, and this play includes an excerpt of her singing “How Are We to Know” from Pandora and the Flying Dutchman to prove it. Her memories of her three marriages—to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra—are each treated with lurid sex details and maximum profanity, which may be true, but there must have been some fun in there somewhere that could have added some badly needed balance to the flat narrative.

From experience, I can attest to the humor this play ignores. Take her marriage to legendary jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, for example. He drove Ava crazy with his relentless attempts to improve her mind, forcing her to read books of sophistication. Their life together ended when he came home one day, found her reading Forever Amber, accused her of loving literary garbage, threw the heavy novel at her head, and narrowly missed giving her a concussion. She dumped and divorced him, then who was his next wife? Novelist Kathleen Windsor, author of Forever Amber. These are items Ms. McGovern either didn’t know or left out on purpose.

Ace New Yorker magazine journalist Lillian Ross once opined that the way to become a great interviewer of famous people is knowing when to leave. It’s a lesson Peter Evans never learned. In the material he collected to create the posthumous book the play is based on, he seemed more interested in himself than his subject. The episodic scenes the play is peppered with reveal more of the interviewer than his subject, often shifting the focus to make him the star, as well as the most important influence on her life of anyone. Rooney, Artie Shaw and even Sinatra—as well as Ava’s numerous affairs, including Howard Hughes and George C. Scott, who threw her out of a hotel window in Nice—become minor infractions in a life of major mistakes.

It must be noted that Aaron Costa Ganis, who plays all of the men in the play, is colorful and versatile, even when he sings a hip version of  “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” that sounds astoundingly similar to Sinatra’s. But Evans is not an appealing character. He’s also not much of a writer, and he even broke all of the rules by hanging around after she killed the interview and asked her to marry him, which she refused to do on moral grounds because he was already a married man (a distinction that never bothered her before). The interview was never finished, as Sinatra threatened to sue him. You won’t learn anything you didn’t know going in, and the small, sometimes hilarious details that would make this a better play remain the only secrets in The Secret Conversations. It’s not a disaster, but any play about Ava Gardner that is this dull is definitely a disappointment.

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A competently conceived, professionally made movie about real people that holds your interest and makes you think about something besides vampires, zombies and idiot jokes is as hard to find in the middle of summer as free ice cream. A friendly, heartfelt little movie called My Mother’s Wedding is a pleasant exception. It’s about three sisters who reluctantly return to their childhood home in the British countryside to be bridesmaids in their widowed mother’s third wedding. The sisters, with their own problems and agendas, are Georgina (Emily Beecham), the youngest and a hard-working hospital nurse; Victoria (gorgeous Sienna Miller), who has made quite a name for herself as an actress in America; and Katherine (Scarlett Johansson), the eldest, who played a strong role in the upbringing of her two sisters, who resent her for it. Their mother is glamorous Diana, played by still-beautiful Kristin Scott Thomas, who is continually baffled by her assorted children, grandchildren and female family friends, not to mention their various fathers and lovers, all of whom have disappointed her in different ways through the years. (Ms. Thomas is also the film’s director, and co-wrote the screenplay with John Micklethwait.) 

That’s a lot of characters to get used to, but the performances are so clearly delineated they become familiar fast. (Nice, by the way, to see Ms. Thomas in a contemporary role with a modern hairstyle and hip, recognizable boutique clothes. She’s so much prettier than in the period costumes in the formal roles she usually plays.)

At the garden party dinner following the ceremony, everyone seems compatible, but the tensions don’t take long to surface. Two of the sisters have children who are deeply disturbed and unable to cope. Scarlett Johansson’s Katherine, it turns out, is a lesbian whose girlfriend confesses she’s pregnant and wants her lover to give their unborn child her family name. This puts the decorated military hero in a stressed-out dilemma because her ultimatum comes on the day Katherine is named and celebrated as the first woman to command a ship in the Royal British Navy and the entire family is arriving to watch her do it.

As much as I enjoyed the film, I found it missing a beat. (Several beats, in fact.) The actors are all very good, but I didn’t always find the narrative credulous, and when the mother finally reduces her daughters to shock by summing up all of their faults in one final analysis by announcing “Let go of the children you were and pay attention to the children you have” I groaned at the one-sentence burst of sudden wisdom. Still, considering the rest of the summer’s flotsam, My Mother’s Wedding is hardly a waste of time. In an otherwise grim summer, it goes well with air-conditioning.

In a wasteful summer of castoff sci-fi epics, stupid comedies and idiotic horror films, I actually had some hope for a love story from Ireland with a superb cast, but Four Letters of Love is a dismal misfire that struggles to keep its audience awake through nearly two hours of titanic tedium. The meandering screenplay adapted by Niall Williams from his own novel, which has been described as a best-seller—although I can’t figure out why—is about two young people searching for identity in the name of love, told in parallel stories of unfathomable melodrama. The director is Polly Steele, a lady with an unquenchable passion for long, lingering shots of wet beaches and dry emotions.

Nicholas Coughlan, played by newcomer Fionn O’Shea, is the son of a bored, wasted civil servant in Dublin, played by hopelessly miscast Pierce Brosnan. Every day, he witnesses his father’s misery while his mother lies in her bed, slowly dying for undisclosed reasons. One day, Dad is suddenly hit by a ray of light accompanied by the voice of God, instructing him to change his life and become a painter. Mr. Coughlan obeys, abandons his job, leaves his family bereft and penniless, and heads for a remote island off the coast of western Ireland where he devotes his life to scribbling ugly, vile and worthless paintings nobody ever buys. His wife, muddled, depressed and cynical, promptly drops dead. Nicholas runs away from home, joins his father on the island, and settles in for a life of despair, denying the existence of God.

The island is the home of another family of misfortune, the Gores. The Gores are kinder than the Coughlans but equally clueless as parents. Mother Margaret Gore (Helena Bonham Carter) bakes cookies while irresponsible father Muiris Gore (Gabriel Byrne) ignores his family’s needs and nonexistent income and spends his time writing. Their daughter Isabel (Ann Skelly) worships her handsome brother Sean (Dónal Finn), but he has a mysterious stroke playing his penny whistle while she dances recklessly on the edge of a cliff, and he ends up paralyzed in a wheelchair while Isabel is sent away to a convent, and Isabel and Nicholas….well, it goes on and on but enough is enough.  

Oh, yes. Isabel and Nicholas finally fall in love after the love letters in the title drag their way to a small part at the end of the plot, but it’s a gimmick too contrived to waste time explaining now. The point of so much turgid melodrama, I guess, is that when older people live the wrong life, they can still inspire children from the same empty, hopeless backgrounds to reach for a higher level of achievement with patience and understanding. Yawn. The actors are fine, but the roles they are forced to play are so deadly they might as well have stayed home reading screenplays for better films. There isn’t a line of dialogue worth repeating and, like goat stew, a little of Four Letters of Love goes a long way.

Sovereign is an ambitious, above-average action thriller with the extra bonus of being a thought-provoking civics lesson. It’s full of information about how we live now in a country where crime thrives, criminals are as common as the people sitting next to you in church, and the underground is no longer what it used to be, but worse. A commendable first film by newcomer Christian Swegal, it’s too nasty, violent and relentlessly bloody for my taste, it still has plenty to say and does it with the impact of a fire alarm.

At the center of the unsettling true story are two sets of widowed fathers with sons to raise in a rural community in Arkansas. One is 45-year-old  Jerry Kane, played by rising middle-aged star Nick Offerman, a dangerous, gun-toting redneck who feels so cheated and betrayed by life that he has become a chief spokesman for the growing “sovereign citizens” movement—an anti-government, anti-establishment system of right-wing radicals whose actions are motivated by a relentless distrust of authority—and his teenage son Joe, played with a troubling mixture of devotion and fear by Jacob Tremblay, the dynamic young Canadian actor who made a smashing debut as the kidnapped child in the devastating 2015 film Room. Both men are widowed, lonely and forced to raise their sons alone, but the similarities end there. Jerry taught his son to be an isolated loner, depend on nothing but his assault weapon, treat women with cruelty and indifference, and despise the law.  

The other father, in the parallel story, is John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid, in a subtle performance that gives the film balance and logic as the town’s chief of police). Jerry’s total opposite, he’s a respectable citizen whose own son Adam (Thomas Mann) is a family man with a new baby and a responsible job as one of his Dad’s deputies. When Jerry loses his house in a foreclosure, and the bank tries to force Jerry and Joe out, they stand up for their alleged “Constitutional rights,” and the plot turns to compliance, control and the assertion that justice can survive only through the use of overwhelming force because in a corrupt society there’s no time to negotiate, no time to stop and consider the other person’s perspective. 

“Listen to your Dad, he’s got a lot to teach you,” the sovereigns advise Joe, who is smart enough, even through his home schooling, to know his father’s crazy rhetoric is unhinged, but his tragedy is that he remains loyal to his father anyway. The movie is about how the boy learns that the twisted things he’s being taught are both illegal and wrong, but their beliefs lead to a tragedy that wrecks all of their lives, the conflicting elements collide, and even the police chief’s compassion can’t save them. The camera passes the local church, where the day’s logo is “All you need is love—and a new gun.” That seems to be the central theme of the whole movie. 

Despite the political overtones that contribute to the current status of a divided America, the film is more interested in telling a gripping story and showing compassion for the elements that make up a polarized society than it is in condoning the life styles of either the police or the sovereigns who live in the margins of a flawed social system. The actors are uniformly real as characters negotiating a changing landscape (Martha Plimpton, in a small but important role as Jerry’s blowsy girlfriend, is especially riveting), and writer-director Swegal creates the backdrop of a poverty-stricken, emotionally barren and constantly struggling America consisting of strip malls, cheap roadside motels, greasy diners and escapist whitewashed churches that evoke total authenticity. I salute them all, but Mr. Swegal is the main artist responsible for Sovereign, worth keeping an eye on.

Here they are again: 32 years after the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park hit the ground running, stomping, screeching and munching everyone in sight like spare ribs, they’re back, searching for a plot that provides a logical reason for their existence. In their seventh slog around the forbidden tropical island that author Michael Crichton originally created, the prehistoric monsters are noisier, the people they terrorize are prettier, and the screams are louder than ever. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

Sadly, the efforts to blend the world of scaly monsters with the daily activities of their human captors have resulted in an ambience of dinosaur tedium. Movies and TV shows have now turned once-horrifying creatures into a domesticated species as familiar, ferocious (and feared) as cocker spaniels. Big mistake. As a newly formed group of doctors, researchers and scientists is about to find out, the old Jurassic Park neighborhood 400 miles north of the equator, though abandoned and forbidden by the government for years, still exists and serves as home to the most savage horrors of the past. The motto of Jurassic World: Rebirth is “Can You Survive the T-Rex?”  Why not? Six times before, we’ve already survived a franchise that has become a cinematic cottage industry.

This time, the humans in peril consist of mathematicians, greedy scientists, evil geneticists and mercenary pharmaceutical executives, on a mission to collect the DNA of the world’s most dangerous dinosaurs, which have, in their blood and tissue samples, 65 million years of power to cure heart disease. Equally divided between villains and heroes, this motley group includes gorgeous Scarlett Johansson as the fearless group leader and uber-handsome Jonathan Bailey (the prince in Wicked) as a humanitarian medical researcher looking for a scientific breakthrough to save the world. 

In a parallel subplot, they accidentally rescue a stranded family of vacationing tourists. One of the survivors is a little girl who risks all of their lives while adopting a baby dinosaur in the shape of a puppy dog with fangs that turns out to be as strange and loving as E.T. Utterly preposterous, but just one of the many contrived attempts to preserve the family-oriented concepts in Spielberg films. Gareth Edwards, the director, hasn’t really thought up anything new, but he has an active imagination. The mixture of horror and humor Spielberg had in mind originally is always lurking around the edges of every scene, often surrendering to the brand of hair-raising horror that appeals to teenagers who look for nothing more memorable than the anticipation of whatever mutation crawls its way out of the jungle next. I’ve already forgotten most of it, but I was especially impressed by the assault of flying raptors the size of F-16s, and before the cast even reaches the island, they are attacked by an army of carnivorous fish that look like killer sharks the size of Rhode Island.

The remarkable and accomplished Kathleen Chalfant (Wit) strikes senior-citizen gold again in Familiar Touch. It’s another film about geriatric challenges faced by a woman at the end of a long, productive life as a loving, devoted wife and mother and a respected career as a successful chef, now adjusting to a new, unexpected chapter as an octogenarian in an assisted living facility. This is a problem that impacts the lives of so many people that it’s a shame it isn’t explored more often in the movies, but the subject of growing old gracefully has proved to be box office poison, and movies about people who do it with dignity and grace win awards but play to empty houses. Paying audiences just don’t flock in droves to films that focus on liver spots and wheelchairs.

I hope Familiar Touch is an exception, because to miss it would be to overlook a rare and compassionate work of art, not to mention one of the most honest, heartfelt performances of this or any other year in motion picture history. At first, we don’t know or even suspect there is anything wrong with Ruth (Chalfant), a woman who hums while she prepares a signature lunch of cold salmon for a date she hardly knows. She meticulously prepares her sauce, then gingerly selects a conservative black dress with a romantic wistfulness. When she places her hand on her guest’s thigh, he writhes uncomfortably. Gradually, the uneasy scene takes shape. Ruth’s guest is not the link to a romantic interlude. He’s her middle-aged son, not a luncheon companion, and he’s come to her sparsely furnished apartment to see her—not to eat her cold salmon, but to drive her and her packed bags to an old folks home where he plans to check her into a new life and a new place to live it in. 

Ruth seems normal, decisive, capable of taking care of herself, while holding onto every last vestige of sanity and independence in her mind. Pragmatic in spite of her confusion, she accepts her new circumstances without voicing resistance or causing a disturbance. In the dining room, where fellow residents stare at their scrambled eggs with awe, she plays around with her unappetizing food with a fork of indifference. When the friendly staff feeds her pills to fight cholesterol, improve memory loss, encourage energy and treat a dozen other aging conditions of age she doesn’t understand, Ruth recites a recipe for borscht to a bored attendant to prove she still has a functioning brain and the capacity for memory. Scene by scene, the vicissitudes of old age are wisely, sensitively observed and related, in a screenplay by Sarah Friedland (who also directed) that exemplifies clemency without pity, and acted by an elderly ensemble cast that is amazing to watch. To ensure authenticity, Familiar Touch was filmed with the collaboration of the actual residents and staff of Bella Vista, a real retirement community, giving it a moment-to-moment reality that is touching but never deliberately, depressingly so. Special significance should be awarded to H. Jon Benjamin, as the tortured son, Carolyn Michelle as Vanessa and Andy McQueen as Brian, as staff members who give Ruth affection above and beyond the call of duty.  

And through the rooms and activities, at the center of everything, is the overwhelming tenderness and humanity of Kathleen Chalfant, who unlocks the mysterious keys of Alzheimer’s for us all to understand, with no histrionics and no bursts of emotional self-indulgence. She belies all those warnings about the inevitable results of illness and physical failure. We hear about the eventual, unavoidable danger of living too long, when the teeth grow soft and the apple no longer bites. Some of us might even experience it someday. But she is fearless, exposing every line and wrinkle, but beautiful in the process. Clearly, she could use some Plexiderm. But she makes you see and feel the virtues of age without fear or anxiety. What a performance, and what a movie.

As much as I like Jean Smart—for five seasons, I was glued to her sophisticated brand of humor in the TV sitcom Designing Women—I recoiled with disappointment while suffering through her misguided verbal marathon with an incomprehensible Southern accent in the new one-woman Broadway show Call Me Izzy at Studio 54. As a rule, I consider Smart stylish, impeccable and flawless. In this labored yawn, playing what Southern Gothic writers like to call “trailer trash,” she not only seems hopelessly miscast but shockingly clueless. A renowned comedy icon, she’s been equally at home in everything from Eugene O’Neill to Anton Chekhov. But for a dedicated product of the Pacific Northwest who has never been any closer to New Orleans than a Mardi Gras float, I wouldn’t say the role of an ignorant Louisiana cracker with no education beyond high school, living in a trailer camp with an abusive redneck husband who beats her black and blue, hiding from the world in the bathroom writing poems on the toilet paper, is exactly a dream come true.

Jamie Wax, the author, lives in the South, so he probably has more experience in real life with deprived, unsettled women like protagonist Isabelle Scutley, née Fontenot—the titular Izzy—than Jean Smart. A genius like Kim Stanley would undoubtedly have turned Isabelle into a character as memorable as anyone in a play by Tennessee Williams, but the role as written lacks the depth and insight of a Kim Stanley to give her a deeper life beyond the words on a scripted page from a Xerox machine.

However, there is, it must be noted, enough of an outline here to make Izzy worthy of a rewrite. She grew up confined within the restrictive parameters of Mansfield, a hick town that never expanded past a depot on the Union Pacific railroad. There used to be a Fruit of the Loom underwear factory, but it shut down. (Things are looking up—Mansfield now has a Walmart.) At 17, instead of pursuing a scholarship at LSU, she married a lazy racist pipe fitter named Ferd, who gave her a cemetery plot for a wedding present, and she’s been with him for more than 20 years, her only escape being the poems she hides in a Tampax box. She’s allergic to any expression of genuine affection; “I can fake an orgasm, but I can’t fake a hug worth shit,” she confides, like everything else in the wordy play, in a relentless drone of babble that sounds like a mouth full of grits and sawmill gravy. “What is this?” becomes “Wuz’is?” “That’s what I’m going to do” comes out “Ats whut I’m-o do.”

Mumbling incoherently in a gloomy old bathrobe with long, fuzzy, uncombed hair and clumsily directed by Sarna Lapine, Jean Smart worked hard to create a pathetic character, but I was able to decipher no more than 20 percent of the talk in Call Me Izzy. All I wanted to do was call it gone.

To pad out the running time, more drawling descriptions ensue—of her dumb sister-in-law’s aborted suicide attempt, throwing a radio into her bathtub filled with water, not realizing it ran on batteries; of her various escapes from reality, sleeping around with a bald midget and a guy she meets in a honky tonk across the road who looks like James Dean in East of Eden “if James Dean had a cowboy hat and acne.” Her baby is born prematurely and dies. Ferd burns her poems in a 50-gallon oil drum and stomps on her writing hand. “Everything,” Thelma Ritter famously said about Anne Baxter’s life story as Eve Harrington in All About Eve, “but the bloodhounds snapping at her heels.” The audience finally applauds when Izzy calls Ferd an “imbecilic lobotomite,” packs up her last two surviving poems in a duffel bag and heads for the bus station. It’s too late for everything but a vague and confusing finale that fails to rescue Izzy from an uncertain future.

I appreciate an actor who wants to stretch, and I’ll never forget the powerful job Jean Smart did as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the made-for-TV drama Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story in 1992. She tries but fails to do it again in Call Me Izzy, a vehicle that is totally wrong for her skills. It’s an exercise in self-indulgence about an empty life without a genuine sense of humor or adventure. Jean Smart deserves roles that deserve her. Izzy is not one of them.

“Broadway is Back!” echoed through the star-studded theater season that just ended—and the 78th Tony Awards that reflected the excitement, proof that the 40-carat names once filling Hollywood sound stages are now lighting up New York marquees. Denzel Washington, Mia Farrow, Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney and Hugh Jackman are just a few of the in-person box-office lures who sold tickets this year. Now it’s time to add another name to the welcome mat.

I’m talking John Krasinski, the handsome, agreeable writer-director and star of such films as A Quiet Place and It, plus scores of hit series, including Jack Ryan and The Office. He appeared once onstage, years ago, with Claire Danes in a small, short-lived role, but now he’s apparently decided on the need for more prestigious credits in the get-famous business, so he’s back in a long-winded one-man vehicle called Angry Alan, not in a mainstream Broadway theatre, but in a small off-Broadway house called the Studio Seaview. Fans who have never heard of this postage-stamp venue are packing it nightly to see something unusual—not really a play at all, but an 85-minute talkathon without intermission in which the movie actor seizes the rare opportunity to explore a gamut of moods, expressions, feelings, attitudes and opinions about the vulnerabilities, role reversals and gender confusions men face. That’s a lot to chew, and Krasinski does it without ketchup.

SEE ALSO: Jennifer Simard On Her ‘Death Becomes Her’ Onstage Partnership

The show, directed by Sam Gold, says a lot of toxic things about women with mixed success, which is pretty amazing since it is written by a woman, Penelope Skinner, whose feminist observations are witty enough to entertain (but not always catalogued well enough to convince). Mr. Krasinski, as the target of enough feminist agendas to require orthopedic surgery, plays a man named Roger—once a skirt chaser but now, approaching middle age, just a frustrated shadow of the man he used to be—depressed, disillusioned, deflated, demoted from an important corporate job that used to define him, divorced from an ex-wife, Suzanne, who understood him and also elevated him to the status of parent to a 14-year-old son so alienated from his father that the two of them haven’t spoken to each other for eight months. Roger also has a new girlfriend-companion, Courtenay, who seemed to be the perfect, understanding and compatible center of his troubled existence, until she fell under the influence of a pack of gal pals and became…(here comes Roger’s most hated word)…liberated. Watching ball games, sharing a beer and enjoying quiet dinners at home turned into self-indulgences like eating kimchi, wasting hours on social media, drinking oat milk and building a career attending art classes to draw naked male models while wearing a T-shirt that reads “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” None of these characters appear anywhere except blow-up images on a wall. For the rest of the show, I twitched nervously while Roger sinks deeper into the growing rage and misery of the confusing hypocrisy of modern women (according to the author, not me). They want equality with an emphasis on dominance, but they also love Fifty Shades of Grey.

Nobody with the titular name ever appears in Angry Alan. He’s a cynical gender defender with a website and YouTube channel, dedicated to dispersing advice, information and negativity about the decline of modern men emasculated by women who have reduced them to paranoid neurotics in a new world order of internet politics. Roger is his obsessed pupil and follower, wolfing down every warning about exaggerated rape statistics, unemployment ratios, the injustice of the family court system and the frustrations men face when they are forced to play the roles of marital scapegoats and financial providers but not allowed to feel or show vulnerability about it. Roger finally makes his peace with the hurt and humiliation of being a man in a society of gender chaos where nobody is sure what a man is supposed to be in the first place, and it looks like he’ll find contentment at last. But then, as the play nears the final curtain, the ultimate shattering of his principles knocks him out of his preppy Florsheim loafers. In an awkward finale, they throw in a scene in which Roger’s monosyllabic son arrives for a surprise visit and confides his secret desire for a sex change. Just when Roger thinks he’s finally figured out how the strategy works in the war between the sexes, his whole world crashes again.

The father struggles to make sense to the son by convincing him a man with a penis does not wear a dress, but the son, whose strange new habits include a reluctance to limit himself by using specific pronouns, thinks Roger is hopelessly antidiluvian. Roger tones down the horror of the realization that he will never have the perfect son, but everyone walks out, and he’s alone again, ready to give in and let Angry Alan be his guide through what’s left of his life. Happy at last. Or is he?

Tragically, his wit is not sharp, sardonic or wry enough to keep up with the times. But neither is the play. Hundreds of awareness-raising issues faced by women are constantly explored on stage and screen, but too few offer insights into the contrasting impact of what men go through in a social environment defined by women. For that reason alone, I join the enthusiastic audience applauding wildly at the end of Angry Alan—not exclusively for the myriad issues left dangling and unresolved in the writing, but especially for the amazing power and nuance in John Krasinski’s colorful, always surprising performance. Movies don’t show how energetic, versatile and introspective he can be. I’m happy to report he’s every bit as forceful and funny—often at the same time—on the stage as he is on the screen. This play is not raw and revealing enough to touch the heart, but it’s fascinating to watch him go through the motions, giving it all he’s got, and time pleasantly well spent.

Closing out the Broadway season, get ready for spectacular! That’s the word, in my opinion, that best describes Just in Time, the endlessly show-stopping new musical about the late singer-dancer-songwriter-actor Bobby Darin, who lived fast and died at a ridiculously young 37 in 1973—and especially the sensational centerpiece performance by Jonathan Groff in the leading role. Groff won last year’s Tony award for the revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, so he’s already a star, but not one to rest on old laurels. Easily the handsomest, most versatile and engaging multi-talent to light up a stage since Hugh Jackman, there doesn’t appear to be anything he can’t do, and in Just in Time he pretty much does it all—frontwards, backwards and upside down. Joyous and exciting, he combines the awesome athletic prowess of Gene Kelly with the libidinous body language of Bob Fosse. Staged like a rocket launching by Alex Timbers, the show gives him more to do than the real Bobby Darin ever did, and he rarely ever pauses long enough to inhale. Sparring, jumping, leaping, flirting with no particular gender preference, and breaking the sound barrier, he hits the stage running, singing Steve Allen’s famous swing tune “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” and you better believe it.

To provide him the space he needs to fill New York’s Circle in the Square, the theatre has been restructured, revised and re-designed, with a full night-club stage on one end big enough to hold a full jazz band, and a smaller, cabaret-size stage on the other end for solos and intimate talks with the audience. The center of what used to be the orchestra is now a dance floor with cabaret tables that seat 22 audience members, advised to wear raincoats because they’ll be wet by the end of the show from the wholesale spitting and sweating Groff is so fond of. When he sings “Splish Splash,” reach for the Kleenex. If you’re lucky (or rich) enough to secure a seat at one of the tables, you will also find yourself part of the show. Slinging his gym-ready torso through the room and across the table tops with undulating thighs, drawing gasps and sighs, his screaming ovations begin from the downbeat. Two hours later, you leave the joint shaking. You don’t know what hit you, but you know you’ve been to the theatre.

Better yet, you’ve been bedazzled by Jonathan Groff. There are singers, dancers and scantily-clad showgirls onstage with him, but this is pretty much a one-man show, and if he ever misses a performance, they’ll undoubtedly have to cancel. Over the moon imitating Elvis Presley and Fats Domino or sensually crooning a beautiful standard such as “That’s All,” you never know what he’ll do next. One minute, a man in a Brooks Brothers suit might find himself swept up in his arms and waltzed across the dance floor. The next minute, a pretty girl might find herself kissed on the forehead (or somewhere else). He fills the stage with so much non-stop movement and music, you don’t know what to look at or listen to next. It just hits you at the same time, like July fireworks at Jones Beach.  

If I have any reservations (every critic always does), they center on the truncated biographical details compiled by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver in a jukebox musical that serve as little more than the outline for a story that never really takes shape. Sorting between the songs, one-liners appear that don’t begin to tell the real story of Bobby Darin, although a few reveals leak through. Born Walden Robert Cassotto in East Harlem, he was such a sickly child that after three bouts of rheumatic fever, doctors predicted he would die before the age of 16. Coached by his mom, a former vaudeville singer, he chose the name Darin from the last six letters of a Chinese restaurant called the Mandarin, and preferred good music by renowned songwriters like Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael to rock and roll, but found his earliest success imitating rock stars like Elvis Presley and Fats Domino, writing jukebox junk like “Splish Splash” (his first million-selling single), and ceepy love songs for his whining girlfriend, Connie Francis.  He made no secret of the fact that he preferred romantic French classics by Charles Trenet (“La Mer” and “Beyond the Sea”) and Germany’s legendary “Mack the Knife” by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht from Threepenny Opera, all of which he turned into colossal hits against the advice of his managers and agents.

At the height of his fame, after he became a movie star in Hollywood, a headliner in Vegas, and broke records at New York’s Copacabana, he was always his own boss, even spending his own money to record an album of jazz standards with Johnny Mercer. It was a short, tragic life with one shock after another, hammering him with guilt and fear: His mother turned out to be his sister, his valet on the road and backstage manager turned out to be his stepfather. Fueled by the need for love, his fairy tale marriage to Technicolor all-American film star Sandra Dee (played by a vapid Erika Henningsen), who was raped by her own stepfather from the age of 8 and her inexplicable descent into alcoholism ended in divorce after six years without much insight (he dumped her). What there’s not enough of is a convincing psychological analysis of how a second-rate jingle writer turned into a legendary icon in such a short time. What there’s too much of is Darin’s early love affair with rising (and, in my opinion, grossly overrated) teenage prom queen Connie Francis (played by grating, ratchety-voiced Gracie Lawrence). His foray into politics, a poorly advised turn as a folk singer, his final days as a bankrupt recluse living in a trailer—it’s all here, if only in the form of familiar postscripts. His second, final marriage is deleted altogether.

If anything here makes you mistakenly believe I have second thoughts about Just in Time, apologies are in order, especially in the presence of Jonathan Groff. He’s got a lot to work with and gives it all he’s got. He plays piano. He plays the drums. He sings like a one-man orchestra and dances sharp, intricate choreography with a sense of humor that captivates and enthralls. Bring your own razzle to Just in Time. Groff provides the dazzle. One piece of advice: His talent is overwhelming. The resulting screams of approval are contagious. Bring a lozenge.

Just In Time  |  2hrs 30 mins; one intermission  |  Circle in the Square Theatre  |  1633 Broadway/235 West 50th Street  |  (212) 307-0388

When Stephen Sondheim died, it was the end of a chapter, the farewell to an era, in theatre history. Who, everyone asked, will continue the tradition of the legendary Broadway musical? The gods (and ladies) who wrote the songs that defined decades we all still live by are but a memory now. No more Rodgers and Hart or Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields or Carolyn Leigh, or Jerome Kern and anybody. OK, some folks still generously call them valid, but I’m no fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Schwartz. That pretty much leaves us to sing the praises of one fellow alone. And I do mean Richard Rodgers’ grandson, Adam Guettel. 

At 61, he’s still got years of promising new musicals ahead, and I plan to be around to see as many as time and the weather will allow. Wikipedia says he’s written six shows, but I’ve only heard of three. The first was Floyd Collins, which had a brief, disappointing off-Broadway run in 1996, when he was 32 years old. Making a conscious effort to avoid any comparison to both his illustrious grandfather and his witty, talented mother Mary, who wrote Once Upon a Mattress, the show that made Carol Burnett a star, he deliberately eschewed songs with melodies in favor of writing tongue-twisting lyrics nobody could sing, but he attracted serious attention as a musician who was unafraid to tackle the most complex styles. Still, he didn’t hit his stride until Light in the Piazza, a beautiful show that won him the Tony Award and proved he could write poignant, romantic ballads as memorable as any of the great songwriters of the past. His third show, The Days of Wine and Roses, was not a success because audiences could not embrace the depressing subject of self-destructive alcoholism as a musical.

So now, while the world awaits his next project, there’s a curious New York revival of Floyd Collins, his youthful freshman effort, at Lincoln Center. It’s limited engagement until June, and audiences who never saw it the first time around are grabbing tickets like free pralines.

In case you don’t know what it’s about, Floyd Collins is a true story about a farmer’s son in rural Kentucky who, in 1925, fell into an underground cave where his foot was trapped under a rock nobody could move. First responders included his brother, who was able to reach him but unable to free his leg, his adoring sister, who was not allowed in the cave but brought him food to stay alive, and a cub reporter from Louisville who wrote a story about the incident that was syndicated in 1,200 newspapers. After five days in the cave, people came up with theories and plans for saving him, including amputation. In the ensuing songs, questions are explored musically about luck, fate, fear and life after death that grow tedious in record time. A huge cast is in remarkably good voice, including Jeremy Jordan, the charismatic singer who once stopped the Broadway show Bonnie and Clyde, and, most recently, left The Great Gatsby to play Floyd Collins. The move is questionable, in my opinion, because Floyd is not much of a role for an actor strapped to a rock in the dark, unable to move.

Things pick up in the flashbacks, showing Floyd and his younger brother Homer the way they used to swing on ropes and sing riddles as kids. Jason Gotay, who plays Homer, also has an equally powerful voice, so one of the show’s highlights is when the brothers sing together. The inevitable attempts of engineers, journalists, and assorted thrill seekers and ambulance chasers to use Floyd’s tragedy for their own fame parallel, in obvious ways, events in Billy Wilder’s classic film Ace in the Hole, which was also based on the Floyd Collins story. The play converts the events to a much smaller space, of course, but it is amazing how much director Tina Landau conveys, from he claustrophobia of a dark cave to the carnival atmosphere of a media circus, replete with balloons and clowns and concession stands. I am probably making this lengthy, uneven, often muddled endeavor sound more riveting than it is, but the bottom line is that I find 2 and ½ hours about a man in a cave trapped under a rock 2 and ½ hours too long. 

People who know nothing about Adam Guettel find it all fascinating, but to me, it’s a shame to return to his earliest style, which, in retrospect, seems downright experimental. The talent is there and the applause is deserved, but Guettel has improved so much since Floyd Collins that I find it hard to settle for second best. He’s gone on record dissing anything that smacks of old-fashioned musical comedy grandeur, and is well known as a man with no regard for melody. Not to worry. There isn’t a melody anywhere in Floyd Collins that anyone could sing, hum or remember. 

I guess a long, tedious revival of Floyd Collins will have to suffice for the time being, but hope for a fresh, original new work from the mind and talent of Adam Guettel springs eternal. I’m more interested in what he does next than what he did first.

Catherine Deneuve, at 81, might have gained a bit of the dreaded matronly demeanor that comes with maturity, but in my opinion, she’s more beautiful than ever. Her latest film, The President’s Wife, proves it. What a life. She’s worked with most of the great directors from Roman Polanski to Luis Bunuel and Francois Truffaut, had children by Marcello Mastroianni and Roger Vadim, and easily earned the reputation as France’s greatest living star. As the most coveted Gallic export since Dom Perignon, she gets better with age and shows no signs of slowing down.

In The President’s Wife, another of those cinematic adventures about the woman behind the man and the power behind the throne—this time, Bernadette Chirac, the clever, charismatic and newsworthy wife of French president Jacques Chirac—she is simply fabulous. Writer-director Léa Domenach is no Truffaut, but she has managed to embroider a witty political satire more interested in moments of whimsical charm than any patent examination of an ambitious supporting player on the sidelines of a toxic marriage. And Deneuve plays it for all it’s worth—and more. Steadfastly glued to Jacques, a dull politician in need of strong assistance and devotion throughout his tenure as the mayor of Paris without any recognition for her help, Bernadette had already endured years of scandal and abuse when her husband was elected President of France in 1995. Desperate to share his success equally, she moved into the presidential Elysee Palace, hoping to play her new role as First Lady with vigor. Instead, he all but relegated her to oblivion. 

Appeasing the press amid growing inquisitions about Chirac’s alleged affairs and indiscretions without endangering his dumb political position further, Bernadette hired a PR man to improve her image, conducting a survey at her husband’s own expense that revealed them both as austere, crabby has-beens. She swung into action, hell-bent on reinventing herself, using the late Princess Diana as a model of charm and grace under pressure, and latching onto Hillary Clinton’s trials and tribulations as examples of what an intelligent woman must endure to survive the negativity of fame. The results were astounding. Turned into a fashion muse by couturier Karl Lagerfeld and coached to say all the right things on every occasion, she became a media sensation, a glamorous cover girl, and a political powerhouse among voters—a cross between Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Eva Peron, like it or not. Chirac was forced to acknowledge his neglected wife as his strongest ally in his re-election and a major influence in the polls. It’s the story of an extraordinary woman, played by an extraordinary actress.

Standing by his side from 1995 to 2007, Bernadette nursed her husband back to health after a stroke, and even after his presidency terminated, she never gave up her grip on the power she created. In the end, to his horror, he watched her on television, standing arm in arm with her newest conquest—Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who had been his worst enemy and political rival for decades! Even if you have no knowledge of French politics in the era of the Chiracs it doesn’t matter. As a director, Domenach wisely avoids the mistake of too much interference. She gives you the facts in an outline, then sits back and leaves it up to her star to do the rest. It’s Deneuve’s movie from beginning to final frame, and she dominates every scene with a gorgeous and contagious charisma that is bewildering. As for her acting, she plays every conflicting character revelation without a hair out of place. Staring straight ahead or tilting her blonde coif slightly from right to left, she can epitomize the look of disapproval or dismay without a single spoken word. Interjecting opinions, battling two adult daughters, offering valid political suggestions, generally interfering with official government strategy, or just standing in center-screen position with hypnotic rapture, she is, in The President’s Wife, one of the year’s most compelling triumphs.

How refreshing it is when a small film with a big heart comes along unannounced and captures your affection. A surprise hit across America as well as a popular streaming link, A Nice Indian Boy is a charming, feel-good movie about Naveen, a gay Indian doctor whose conventional family wants him to make their lives complete by meeting the perfect girl and getting married. They already have a grown daughter who is unhappily married and getting a divorce. Their hopes for completing a perfect family unit depend on the devoted but desperately lonely Naveen. 

Unfortunately for them all, his perfect mate turns out to be another boy—a very attractive, appealing photographer named Jay, played by the award-winning Broadway musical comedy star Jonathan Groff, who won last year’s Tony award for the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and is currently packing them as legendary Bobby Darin in the new show Just in Time. At first, it seems like an illogical romantic duo, until the realism in Eric Randall’s ardent screenplay, winningly directed by Roshan Sethi, explains that Jay was an orphan adopted by Indian parents and has a soft spot in his heart for his Indian upbringing.  

Jay is ready after a second date to take the relationship a step further—toward commitment and marriage and being accepted again as part of a real family from India. What follows is a long, tortured journey toward compromise, tolerance and acceptance, full of speed bumps and potholes. Both actors are so natural, endearing and relentlessly honest that they meld like coffee and cream. There’s poignancy in the love they share when they are together, and in the pain they feel when they’re apart, and I seriously doubt there’s a soul in the audience who won’t root for them to make it. There’s also a lot of tenderness and humor in the courtship and the eventual wedding you won’t forget.

There’s wit as well in Naveen’s family members, who try to hold onto the traditions they respect, the children who didn’t pan out the way they hoped and planned, and the needs of everyone old and young alike to adjust to life between old values and modern emotional demands. It’s a film of both subtlety and seriousness, completely different from anything I’ve seen lately and laudably without a shred of sentimentality. Somewhere in the middle comes the reality of how the more different we all are, the more we all have in common.

Since the death, at 91, of historic songwriting genius Stephen Sondheim, dozens of concerts, cabaret shows, television specials and Broadway “revues” have honored his memory and celebrated the passion, talent and versatility of his musical heart and soul. The latest contribution to that astounding body of work is Sondheim’s Old Friends, a pleasant if uneven collection of the maestro’s sometimes hollowly directed but nearly always unforgettable repertoire. To perform 40 overwhelming, hard-to-sing songs of varying lengths, tempos, styles, range and volume is a monumental task, but with a dynamic cast headed by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, there’s no room for anxiety. You go away sated.

There’s enough drama and excitement here to elevate the production above and beyond the status of a cabaret act, but sometimes you wonder how long it will take for the show to ignite. It’s two acts divided into very different levels of accomplishment, and Act One on the night I saw it was slow as Christmas getting started. The entire exercise, devised by British producer Cameron Mackintosh, is restricted only to excerpts from the shows he personally supervised. This explains the absence of anything from such estimable Sondheim favorites as Saturday Night, Anyone Can Whistle and Pacific Overtures. Those were not important scores, you might argue, but in my opinion, great songs such as “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” Lee Remick’s tender solo ballad “Anyone Can Whistle,” as well as  “A Parade in Town” and “Me and My Town,” Angela Lansbury’s two showstoppers from Anyone Can Whistle, and the great “Someone in a A Tree” from Pacific Overtures would be far more fabulous inclusions than the minor distractions “Everybody Oughta Have a Maid” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the forgettable filler from Into the Woods.

Worse still, the group numbers suffer from the uninspired and totally predictable direction by Matthew Bourne that encourages the cast to time every lyric, and emphasize every key word down to precise movements. The three girls who sing “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” (from Company) emphasize the word “crazy” by rolling their fingers around in circles next to their temples, and on the word “gay,” they go limp-wristed. Ouch.

Smoking references are illustrated by simulated puffing and sex by actual genital grabbing. So much exaggeration in the endless grinning and eye rolling is corny and obvious, not to mention redundant and amateurish. Musically, you’re prevented the joy of discovering any semblance of surprise in your own special way, and if Sondheim was praised for constantly reaching new heights of discovery, it was always in the discovery of fresh new ways to hear and think about words. Still, in spite of its hackneyed and irritating cliches, Act One manages to fill a lot of voids with the Bernadette Peters-Lea Salonga duet “Children Will Listen,” and although nobody comes anywhere close to Angela Lansbury’s definitive characterization of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Lea Salonga’s hilarious spin convinced me she made “The Worst Pies in London.” By the end of the first act, the highlights were outnumbered by blandness, one notable exception being a tremendous spot by Joanna Riding, who owns the stage with “I’m Not Getting Married Today” and conquering the tongue-twisting lyrics with minimum hand gestures and maximum cleverness. The songs are wonderful, as always, but the delivery otherwise disappoints. Even Bernadette Peters, not the best voice when I saw the show, appears to deliberately avoid her usual perfection, singing “Send in the Clowns” with a pinched nasality and delivering “Hello Little Girl,” one of the mediocre fairytale songs from Into the Woods, with a boop-boop-a-doop squeak that sounds more Betty Boop than Little Red Riding Hood.  

Then something miraculous happened. It’s as though someone went backstage during intermission, informed the cast the show was wandering off into dull, uncharted territory, and pleaded with everyone to pick up the pace. Whatever occurred, the result was an astonishing second act, bringing down the house with one show-stopper after another. Bernadette knocked “Broadway Baby” out of the park, then knocked the audience out of its socks as one of the three strippers in Gypsy—bumping, grinding and playing the trumpet to a standing ovation. The Follies section happily resurrected the seldom-heard “Waiting Around for the Girls Upstairs.” Gavin Lee is no Alexis Smith, but he milked every complex, passionate emotion out of  her “Could I Leave You,” and although after the unsurpassed Polly Bergen in the Broadway revival nailed it for good and always, “I’m Still Here” benefitted from Bonnie Langford’s personal interpretation in a way I never unexpected. Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends—especially the second act—is a musical evening to cherish.

My advice: Give up the idea of trying to over-analyze any and every Sondheim revue (there will be more to come) and just sit back and let the songs wash over you. Best of all, pour yourself a glass of vintage port, re-visit the superb recordings that distinguish the world of theatre music and marvel at the myriad ways he intended to be interpreted. Sondheim lives forever on vinyl.

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends | 2hr 45mins. One intermission. | Samuel J. Friedman Theatre | Last Show: Sun, June 15, 2025 | 261 West 47th Street | 212-399-3000 | Buy Tickets Here 

Broadway has suddenly exploded with passion, intelligence and integrity. It’s been 20 years since Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s sensational procedural on political corruption in Washington D.C. during the right-wing assault on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution during the plague of McCarthyism and the threats to the admirable journalists who tried to cover it truthfully. Clooney was showered with praise from fans and critics alike and Oscar-nominated for directing the hit film, which starred David Straithairn as veteran broadcast journalist and icon Edward R. Murrow. Well, it’s back. This time, in the form of a gallant stage transfer. Crowds paying astronomical prices for rare, hard-to-get tickets are packing Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre to see the new stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov, and, as an extra box-office whammy, starring Clooney himself in the marathon role of the legendary Murrow. Clooney isn’t as polished as Straithairn, and he lacks the same range as an actor, but in spite of his lack of experience onstage, he does just fine, and his subtlety shows a remarkable improvement over his work in films. Timely and timeless, the play has the same astonishing impact as the film. As the chaos in today’s toxic political hell forces the world to shake with fear while brave journalists risk constant unemployment trying to sort out the confusion of a polarized country for an eager public clamoring for clarity and logic, saying the time for Good Night, and Good Luck is more relevant than ever is like saying snow falls in the month of January. 

The play opens on a night in 1958 when Murrow is being toasted for his accomplishments as a crusading broadcaster dedicated to the belief that television should live up to its potential as a reliable source for education and information instead of merely settling for entertainment value inherent in game shows, escapist sit-coms and action thrillers. To illustrate, the scene shifts to some of the controversial past topics he and his tireless producer Fred Friendly (an unflagging Glenn Fleshler) and nervous director Don Hewitt (Will Dagger) pursued on their weekly CBS newsmagazine show See It Now, focusing on such juicy subjects as the plight of an Air Force executive wrongly accused of being a “pinko” Commie, the tortured family of another victim, and the relentless career destruction of beloved friend, colleague and Murrow protege Doc Hollenbeck (wonderfully, sympathetically played by the often underestimated Clark Gregg)—driven to his death by Wisconsin’s despicable, publicity-seeking junior senator, the aforementioned Joe McCarthy, who needs no help from an edgy script to make himself the film’s most hateful character. The actors excel through their acting skills, but McCarthy steals every scene by playing himself—in scenes culled from reality, archival footage and TV news coverage. The camera doesn’t lie.

Up to a point, Murrow and his colleagues were supported, artistically and financially, by CBS president William F. Paley (a bland Paul Gross), but when McCarthy accepted an invitation to appear in person on the show in self-defense, falsely accusing Murrow of being on the Communist payroll himself in the 1930s, CBS lost Alcoa as a valuable sponsor, the tables turned, and so did Paley. Murrow’s fact-checkers uncover a barrel of lies, which the liberal press still does today, but Paley made the fear of lost ratings a bigger priority than loyalty to the reputation of a treasured newscaster. Shocking the television industry to the core, Murrow’s boss canceled See It Now and reduced his crusading star’s network airplay from a weekly prime-time slot on Tuesday nights to a handful of one-hour episodes on Sunday afternoon. Murrow lost one of the most exalted positions in TV news and, in the end, found himself demoted to the kind of demeaning “leftover” jobs he personally detested, such as interviewing Liberace on Person to Person. 

He died shortly after, not exactly disgraced but hugely diminished. The play catalogs the facts soberly, exactly as they happened, including the even sadder self-destruction of Senator McCarthy. This is a lot of content for a 90-minute play with no disruptive intermission, and for the most part, it hits the target with laser force and accuracy. The effect is a documentary-like cautionary tale that shows what happens when a Democracy dozes and how it could happen again if a new, different and more concentrated demagogue creeps in and takes over. Too late. A new political force has already arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue and although Clooney’s play never mentions him by name, the message is cloudlessly clear: Wake up and fight back, or we’ll be heading for Doomsday.

The problems inherent in translating that message to a different medium are glaring. What does not disappoint is the colossal set by the brilliant designer Scott Pask that recreates the now-defunct old CBS broadcast center in Grand Central Station, replete with offices, bullpens, control rooms, editing labs and hot hanging halogen studio lights that illuminate the action below. If all else fails, the production makes you feel you are really in the middle of the turbulence necessary to get 30 minutes of the news on the air. But in the center of it all, there is too much of the star blown up in black and white closeups on big TV screens and not much of his face, delivering the dramatic monologues with his face obscured and his delivery too subtle to register beyond the first two rows. With his boyish charm and low-key charm, I never doubted George Clooney would make the cut from supporting TV roles to movie stardom. He couldn’t act, but constant employment led to so many bigger assignments that he was granted the infrequent privilege of learning on the job. With the benefit of star status it is now fit and proper for him to crave the respect and recognition that accompany solid acceptance on the Broadway proscenium. His new position is, therefore, justified. With new wrinkles and dyed black hair, an iconic movie star chain smokes his way through the parallels between film and live theatre on firm footing. David Cromer directs with admirable self-assurance, but there’s too much going on and nothing intimate to see. Subplots disappear like smoke rings before they’re fully formed. An excellent cast has no time to establish more than a hint of characterization. Clooney’s monologues are viewed in big-screen blowups instead of staged as center-stage showstoppers. This, I suspect, is not what his fans are paying just short of $1,000 per ticket to see. 

Still, Good Night, and Good Luck (Edward R. Murrow’s old sign-offs on TV shows) and George Clooney’s new welcome to Broadway stardom are must-sees of the current season.

Good Night, and Good Luck | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Winter Garden Theatre | Last Show: Sun, June 8, 2025 | 1634 Broadway | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here 

Here’s an unexpected charmer, a true story based on a popular autobiographical memoir about a man and a penguin, with a lightness of tone that doesn’t overdo the whimsy. The excellent Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical and disillusioned British writer and scholar who accepted a job in 1976 teaching proper English, poetry and soccer in an upscale boys’ prep school in Buenos Aires at the height of Argentina’s postwar military dictatorship. Intelligently directed by Peter Cattaneo, the man best remembered for The Full Monty, the stressful anecdotes Michell endures make the job of winning over both the unruly, rebellious students and the stern, humorless headmaster (Jonathan Pryce)  a taxing challenge. 

Relief arrives at last when he escapes for some fun and games on a drunken weekend visit to Uruguay, where so many surviving Nazis settled after World War Two. His planned debauchery with a local tart fails, but things pick up when Michell accidentally rescues a penguin from a near-fatal oil slick, and the little bird repays him by following him halfway across South America. The poor English teacher, who hates birds and has no need for a pet anyway, is stuck with a feathered friend he can’t get rid of. It wins him over like a Disney duck in spite of himself, and I’m willing to bet the same thing happens to you.

The students and the professor name the wonky newcomer Juan Salvador and waste no time staging a forbidden animal adoption.  All understandable when the penguin displays real characteristics. He smells, he poops everywhere, prefers sausagy mashed potatoes and gravy to sardines and delights in hanging out with the soccer team. In the anecdotal passages adapted from Michell’s best-selling memoir by screenwriter Jeff Pope, nothing goes wrong. By contrasting the lurking horrors of political upheaval in a time when the Argentine government was ruled by fascism with the trust and courage the kids learn from Juan Salvador’s innocence and trust, there’s a valuable history lesson here beneficial to younger audiences. Despite the danger of G-rated sentimentality, which everyone involved heroically avoids, The Penguin Lessons is a work of surprising depth and subtle, irresistible impact. Lionel Barrymore famously said there are two things no actor can share the screen with and hope to survive: children and Lassie. Now amend that warning to three: children, Lassie and a penguin.