Review

Poetry Review: Imagine — Yoko Ono Plants an “Acorn”

August 21, 2013
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Yoko Ono has always been the kind of artist more interested in getting into your head than convincing you to occupy hers.

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Film Review: “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” — Powerful But Ambitious to a Fault

August 20, 2013
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There are plenty of intensely moving moments in this expansive biopic, based very loosely on a real White House butler named Eugene Allen, who was profiled by Wil Haygood in a 2008 Washington Post feature.

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CD Review: Hip Hop Phenom Earl Sweatshirt Delivers a Divine “Doris”

August 20, 2013
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There was a great deal of obfuscatory hype about this LP, but the time to listen to the music has finally come. And Earl Sweatshirt has delivered what sounds like a hip hop classic.

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Theater Review: A Superb Staging of “This Is Our Youth” — A Perceptive Vision of American Muddle

August 20, 2013
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In this brilliantly written play, Kenneth Lonergan finds both the humor and angst in the moral muddle generated by the Reagan Revolution.

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Visual Arts: HarborArts “OccupyING the Present” Brings Boston Harbor to Life

August 19, 2013
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The Boston Harbor Shipyard is a nifty setting for public art, redolent of old-school fisherman and maritime work. Its fading grandeur of weatherbeaten brick buildings, crumbling facades and stern signage sometimes rivaled the formal artwork.

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Book Review: “The Infatuations” — Funereal Ruminations on a Murder

August 18, 2013
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Perhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.

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Visual Arts Review: Heigh-Ho — Walt Disney’s “Snow White” at the Rockwell Museum

August 18, 2013
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In four jam-packed rooms, in paper, acetate, and select video sequences, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic deconstructs the film’s artistic and technical achievement.

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Film Review: “Jobs” — A Diverting But Superficial Look At the Life and Career of Steve Jobs

August 16, 2013
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Jobs is not an awful movie so much as an awkward one — it falls short of its intent, which I assume is to dramatize the tenacity of genius.

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Short Fuse Book Review: “Zealot” — Jesus as Jewish Peasant and Revolutionary

August 14, 2013
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I am a secular Jew who can’t but welcome Zealot‘s conclusion that Christianity pulled a role reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power.

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Theater Review: “Valentine Trilogy” Has a Lot of Passion but Could Use More Smarts

August 13, 2013
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So what’s a hero to do but throw punches and kicks in the name of love and forgiveness?

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