Ann Lemons Pollack
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Knight and Day
March may come in like a lion, but summer comes in like "Knight and Day," an utterly predictable action movie that opens today, with impossible things becoming everyday events. Cameron Diaz, who may be the first Kansas-based heroine since Judy Garland, runs an auto repair shop in Wichita and is restoring her father's treasured GTO
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Wicked
When a baseball team changes a pitcher, there are conferences at the mound, and signals to the bullpen, and warmup throws, and time for several commercials and even a beer or two. When a well-run theatrical company needs to make a change, the replacement slips onto the stage between numbers, and few in the audience
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Winter’s Bone
Shot on location in the sparse woods and sullen landscape of southwest Missouri, where a car and a washing machine, neither in working order, serve as front-yard ornaments, "Winter's Bone" is an excellent movie, with fine, on-the-money performances. It's pessimistic and depressing, discusses family loyalty that has turned to stupidity and lives in the sub-culture
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Solitary Man
Michael Douglas doesn't have all the rights to playing rotten guys, but he has most of them. His Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street" set a standard, and apparently just to keep in shape for the sequel, coming out later in the year, he stars in a very good movie, "Solitary Man." He is not as
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Sweetgrass
Several years ago, a Super Bowl commercial humorously dealt with herding cats, a chaotic way to spend some time. Cats, however, have nothing on sheep, as shown in "Sweetgrass," a documentary that follows a huge herd of sheep for most of a year, from shearing and birthing in the spring to summer in the high
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Holy Rollers
Jesse Eisenberg's other prominent, well-acted role this week is in "Holy Rollers," which has no connection with in-line skating, but is a standard tale of a minority (the Hasidic Jewish community in this case) trying to speed up its climb through the ranks of American society with a slick, but illegal idea. Think of dozens
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Peppe’s Apt. 2
Peppe Profeta has been around the St. Louis restaurant scene for a very long time. He must have been only just out of his teens when he opened Gian Peppe's on The Hill in 1981, and since then he's been almost constantly welcoming and feeding hungry St. Louisans and their guests. Now he's opened his
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Now I Ask You
He almost reviewed it himself. Some time after Eugene O'Neill wrote "Now I Ask You,": in 1916, he said, "It's not my sort of stuff, but it's a damn good idea for a popular success." For the man who wrote "A Long Day's Journey Into Night," "Desire Under the Elms" and "The Iceman Cometh," among
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The Golden Ticket
Roald Dahl wrote stories about children that were not for children to read. A writer who had lots of problems and a life that wasn't always kind, Dahl was often dark and bitter, and children who misbehaved could be subjected to awful punishments. But Peter Ash and Donald Sturrock, with a fine cast of singers
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Our Town
Thornton Wilder's classic American play, "Our Town," which opened the other night as a strong, intelligent, entertaining production by Stray Dog Theatre, is a drama most people know about, but is not performed often enough on any sort of professional level. Why? Well, it has 24 characters who show up on stage and off, here