Theater/Film Reviews
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Margin Call
I think that Kevin Spacey is a great actor, but even great actors can't do much with a poor script, and that's why he's such a disappointment in "Margin Call," a movie that was supposed to be this year's "Wall Street," but ended up somewhere on Skid Row. Spacey is Sam Roberts, way up in
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Toast
Nigel Slater is an English chef and writer who had an unhappy childhood for many reasons — his beloved Mum died after a lingering illness when he was young; he and Dad didn't get along very well; he hated his step-Mum and he was concerned about his sexuality. That's enough to write a book about
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Blackthorn
Maybe it's true that only the good die young. Remember when we saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meet their deaths in a hail of bullets? Well, the magic of movies strikes again. We just thought that he died — because here's "Blackthorn," set some years later in 1927 in Bolivia, and here's Butch,
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Restless
Almost all of us can accept the fact that people have strange hobbies, but "Restless," which opens today, displays one of the strangest. Enoch Brae (a charming Henry Hopper) goes to funerals. He doesn't know the person who died, nor any of the deceased friends or relatives. He likes to hang out in funeral parlors.
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Hairspray
The happily checkered history of “Hairspray” began with a 1988 movie written and directed by John Waters. Fourteen years later, it was re-created as a musical and opened on Broadway, where it won eight Tonys and ran more than six years. The musical became its own movie in 2007. A bright, funny, well-acted and -directed
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God of Carnage
When helicopter parents turn their vehicles into gunships, all hell will break loose pretty soon. That's what happens in "God of Carnage," Yazmina Reza's Tony-winning play which opened at the Rep last night, to run through Nov. 6. The strong, talented cast came out of the gate at full speed, partly because the same group
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The Mill and the Cross
Time was when the very idea of a moving picture was mind-boggling. To see people walking on a movie screen created awe, or fright. But the visual artistry and technical progress of movies has reached heights that early filmmakers could not have imagined. Lech Majewski's "The Mill and the Cross," which opens here today, shows
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My Afternoons With Margueritte
Okay. It’s sentimental, and it posits an absurd premise or two. But “My Afternoons With Magueritte” has an innocent charm that won me over. It also has the magical Gerard Depardieu, the 97-year-old Gisele Casadesus as the title character and the cutest bus driver I’ve ever seen in Annette (Sophie Guillemin), a little round girl
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Mysteries of Lisbon
Somewhere between soap opera and costume epic, “Mysteries of Lisbon” is a long, lush movie of love and passion, jealousy, royalty, criminality and other good things, playing this weekend as part of the Webster University Film Series. And the moviegoer can take all weekend to see this 4-hour, 17-minute movie, too. James Harrison, director of
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Nuts
Courtroom dramas provide good entertainment; maybe lawyers can see many legal flaws that audiences or drama critics miss, but they allow for exciting stories that often deal with taboo or rarely explored subject matter. "Nuts," which opened the 2011-12 season of the St. Louis Actors' Studio last night at the Gaslight Theater, looks at some