A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience? These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New … Read more
Wearing a meadow-green T-shirt that proclaims her an Irish Princess, Grace dances with a white stuffed bunny that is her confidant. The music is Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” waltz, and it’s a clue to how Grace’s life plays out — not the ballet’s storybook ending, just the tragic parts. In this snippet of a scene near … Read more
The New York stage has some notable nostalgia this year: More than a half-dozen performers in significant roles made their Broadway debuts as children. Some were in hits and some were in flops; they experienced joy and (in one case) trauma. A few have appeared onstage with regularity, while others pursued music or film and … Read more
FOR MUCH OF art history, figurative sculpture was steeped in a sense of the eternal. Ancient statues of leaders, heroes and gods tended to embody what their creators believed (or hoped) would endure forever. Now figurative sculpture reflects profound anxieties over permanence. Our bodies are bombarded by stuff — for example, the microplastic particles of … Read more
In the warped new horror-comedy “The Monkey” (in theaters), Theo James plays Hal and Bill, estranged twin brothers who are besieged by a possessed music-making monkey toy they got under gruesome circumstances when they were boys. Once that little monkey starts a tinny rat-tat-tat on his drum, nobody’s safe. Based on a Stephen King short … Read more
On a January morning, attractive people in tailored attire stood in a sun-skimmed California courtroom, arguing a motion in the murder trial. “Bring the venom!” the director, Anton Cropper, said encouragingly. This was on the set of “Suits LA,” a sibling of “Suits,” the legal procedural that ran on USA for nine seasons, from 2011 … Read more
Whether documentary or fiction, the sports movie template is so well-worn — we were underdogs, then we won, and it was amazing — that it’s rare to execute a new twist on the formula. And in some ways, “We Beat the Dream Team” (streaming on Max), directed by Michael Tolajian, follows that recipe. Its title … Read more
Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality. But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is … Read more
Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure. But like a great many sonnets — most famously the 154 written by William Shakespeare … Read more
Goes bananas on the gore. ‘The Monkey’ After a cursed toy monkey from his childhood reappears, a man (Theo James) tries to stop it in this horror comedy directed by Osgood Perkins. From our review: The movie’s presumption is that the more inventive the means of death — and the more quickly those means are … Read more