Helen Epstein
Stefan Zweig’s was a dramatic, action-packed, intense epic of a life, but Oliver Matuschek’s biography, Three Lives, simply plods along.
Read MoreDirected ably by Joel Zwick, a long-time collaborator of Hershey Felder’s, the excellent Maestro: Leonard Bernstein includes the performer singing, playing the piano, and conducting as well as telling stories.
Read More“An Accident of Hope” is a fascinating read for anyone interested in writers, writing, psychotherapy, women, medical ethics and American society just before the great upheaval of the 1960s.
Read MoreThough rooted in Boston history, “The Luck of the Irish,” with its racial, class, marital and inter-generational conflicts, could be set anywhere in the world.
Read MoreClaude Lanzmann is a great raconteur who’s honed his narrative skills as a veteran journalist. His memoir is exuberant and provocative at its best; bombastic and superficial at its worst.
Read MoreThe people of Annawadi live in conditions so bleak that “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” evoked, for one Indian reviewer, Primo Levi’s depiction of life in concentration camps.
Read MoreAlthough I was disappointed in this Manhattan Theatre Club production, I am, however, very glad to have seen “Wit” — it is a contemporary classic.
Read MoreThis is shorter, no-frills Opera as Cinema than the Met HD supplies: without long intermissions, star interviews and audience preludes and postludes from Lincoln Center, it’s almost an hour shorter.
Read MoreThe Hedghog’s steady, slow pacing—so rare in any film today—captures the rhythms of haut bourgeois life in Paris and draws out the nuances of how people change and are changed by relationships everywhere. The Hedgehog (Le herisson). Directed by Mona Achache. At the Kendall Square Cinema, West Newton Cinema, and other screens throughout New England.…
Read MoreTrapped in a cluttered set meant to evoke an abandoned nightclub (with old, upside-down flowerpots? why?), the cast of TEN CENTS A DANCE do little but wander about singing strangely uninspired arrangements of some of America’s best-known songs.
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