Theater/Film Reviews
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127 Hours
The all-time, absolutely perfect, first-date movie opens here today. I can hear the dialogue now: Boy: Hi, would you like to go to the movies tonight? Girl: Sure. Where shall we go? Boy: It's a new movie. It's called "127 Hours." Girl: Sounds awfully long. What's it about? Boy: It's about a guy who cuts
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Elise LaBarge
There was a most auspicious debut in St. Louis last night. Soprano Elise LaBarge, showing more of a feel for the world of cabaret than singers twice her age, offered her first program, about 75 minutes of Kurt Weill music delivered in an unassuming manner, but with great promise for the future. Young and attractive,
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
They're getting a little old to remain as the Magical Three Mouseketeers, but Harry, Hermione and Ron are back again, continuing the transformation of the magical series from light, optimistic and beautiful fantasy to just another horror story, with almost-continual explosions to serve as punctuation. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I," opens today,
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A Film Unfinished
The more that long-hidden evidence is revealed, the more horror is found. "A Film Unfinished," which opens today, is true to its title. It never was finished. But what there is shows scenes of unspeakable cruelty that took place in Warsaw, in May, 1942. It's a German film, shot in the Ghetto, whose purpose was
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Fair Game
While spies always are exactly what the title of "Fair Game" implies, they are entitled to better treatment by their employers than Valerie Plame got from the George W. Bush White House, which leaked her name to a newspaper columnist after her husband, Joe Wilson, found no evidence to support the Bush Administration's rush to
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The Good Doctor
The charm of the short story is in its brevity. There is no time for unnecessary characters, overdrawn exposition. Things happen. An action. a reaction. Bada-bing. Michael Frayn described it best in “Noises Off.” “Get the sardines on. Get the sardines off. That’s life, that’s theater, that’s art,” he wrote A lot of Neil Simon
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Fat City
Once upon a time, in 1972, when I was a young(er) film critic at the Post-Dispatch, one of the first movies I wrote about was John Huston's "Fat City." A boxing story set in seedy Stockton, Calif., it resonated with me for its stark honesty, and I remember it often as a comparison with sloppy,
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My Dog Tulip
A man and his dog. The subject of hundreds of stories of loyalty and friendship and love, from Albert Payson Terhune’s “Lad, a Dog,” and John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley,” to the Welsh legend of Gelert, Prince Llewelyn’s hound, killed in a tragic error and memorialized in the little Welsh town of Beddgelert. “My Dog
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Rock ‘n’ Roll
By the time Tom Stoppard was nine years old, he had lived in four countries and survived a war. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, he and his family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When a Japanese invasion was imminent, in 1941, he and his mother fled to Darjeeling,
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Valerie Lemon
Valerie Lemon has a lovely voice with an embracing tone, and she looks good in an outfit that took its inspiration from a tuxedo, with a black cravat over a flowing white collar and outsized white cuffs. She opened a four-night cabaret run at the Kranzberg Arts Center last night, and the 75-minute set allowed