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Book Review: An Invaluable Testament to When Movies and Criticism Mattered

September 8, 2011
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What drives serious writing about film? “When Movies Mattered” suggests an answer: it helps for a critic to take a side, not as consumer advocate, hipster crank, or box office predictor, but as a passionate advocate for standards, often taking on the role of separating overpraised films from the unfairly neglected.

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Short Fuse Book Review: “The Eichmann Trial” — Monster & Nonentity

September 7, 2011
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Author Deborah Lipstadt’s decision to confront a Holocaust denier in court prepared her, as little else might have, to appreciate and convey the vastly greater complexity and historical import of the Eichmann trial.

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Movie Review: Daytime in Paris — A Far Better Movie

September 7, 2011
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The 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.…

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Film Review: Brainstorming the Sweet Potato — El Bulli, The Movie

September 4, 2011
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The film is many things. It is a testament to the restaurant, immortalizing it on celluloid. It’s also a requiem for the restaurant, which you see as it is closing. It’s a manifesto for culinary invention. It’s a tribute to chef Ferran Adrià and what he has wrought, how he has transformed thinking about food. Screens at the MFA tonight through December 30.

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Theater Review: A “Porgy and Bess” Made For Broadway

September 3, 2011
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The American Repertory Theater’s juggling/removal of the operatic elements in “Porgy and Bess” is clumsy, but the goal is to create a compelling entertainment for contemporary audiences, smoothing out the melodramatic story’s edges and cutting its length.

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Theater Review: A Bright and Literate Version of the Darkly Comic “Measure for Measure”

September 1, 2011
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Director Gus Kikkonen and cast come up with a bright, literate presentation of William Shakespeare’s play “Measure for Measure,” a potentially dark comedy pregnant with power.

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Theater Review: “Ten Cents a Dance” not Worth a Plugged Nickel

August 20, 2011
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Trapped 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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Film Review: Should We Fear Miranda July’s “Future”?

August 12, 2011
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THE FUTURE, director/actor Miranda July’s followup to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is brave, unexpectedly poignant and devastatingly sad.

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Book Review: “Deliver Us” — A Memoir of a Boy’s Life in a Small Italian Town

August 9, 2011
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Originally published in 1963, and today considered by some critics a landmark in twentieth century Italian literature, in English Luigi Meneghello’s memoir feels more like a duty than a delight to read.

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Short Fuse: Eternal Recurrence — Freud, Marx, Mao Zedong Thought

August 8, 2011
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What I do suspect though, and find evidence for in BLOODLUST is that Freud is immune to any final dispatch or disproof, and will likely, through one portal or another, go on reinserting himself into our culture.

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