Monday, December 13, 2021
Spielberg and Company Deliver a Tumultuous Tale for Our Times
Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria in 20th Century Studios’ WEST SIDE STORY, directed by Steven Spielberg. Pho…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:54PMSaturday, November 20, 2021
One of African American playwright Inda Craig Galván’s central themes is the struggle of African American women for self-realization and respect. A Hit Dog Will Holler isn’t her mos…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:54PMFriday, August 29, 2014
A Portrait of Beauty in Flux.
Several weeks ago a colleague of mine, film critic Amy Nicholson, wrote an article in the LA Weekly about the importance of distinguishing between wort…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMMonday, March 10, 2014
Sporting a message of sisterhood and tolerance, Wendy Graf’s well-intentioned but clumsy drama builds around two half-sisters: Julia (Diarra Kilpatrick), an ambitious attorney living and w…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:23PMMonday, February 24, 2014
Firemen is one of those intense discomfiting plays that at times can have you squirming in your seat, wishing you’d opted to see something less painfully and graphically real. It’s also,…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:20PMTuesday, February 18, 2014
One would have thought (perhaps hoped is the better word) that Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind, about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial, would have lost …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:33PMMonday, February 10, 2014
Oscar Wilde is famous for his sparkling wit, but there’s not much spark to this humdrum production of An Ideal Husband, Wilde’s moral-minded comedy about a prominent public figure facing…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:17PMTuesday, February 4, 2014
In Kos Kostmayer’s On the Money, directed by Tom Ormeny, three overworked and underpaid employees with pressing financial problems debate whether or not to steal from their boss whose sole…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:34PMThursday, January 30, 2014
Plays or films about middle-aged men in midlife crisis are pretty common, which doesn’t mean there isn’t room for one more, provided the writing is sharp, the plot details fresh and the …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 11:00AMFriday, January 24, 2014
What do Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy have in common? In Scott Carter’s intellectually upscale comedy, all three are smug anthropomorphic spirits, trapped in a single c…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:44PMMonday, January 13, 2014
So What Did Happen in Dallas? Writer/director Christian Levantino Weighs In Most Americans of a certain age still bear the imprint of that day in Dallas when President Kennedy died. L…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:31PMThursday, January 9, 2014
Richard Reich Makes the Case for the Besieged Middle Class in this Articulate Documentary Former Secretary of Labor and unabashed liberal Robert Reich speaks to the decline of the Ame…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:37PMMonday, December 23, 2013
Though it unfolds in the present, writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s beautiful new film underscores how difficult it can be to elude the past. His first to be shot outside his native Iran, t…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 05:57PMThursday, October 10, 2013
A Boy’s Dark World Illuminated The title of director George Tillman Jr.’s latest effort, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete, is not to be taken literally, though you might t…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:40PMTuesday, September 24, 2013
Stagey Performances and Poor Tech Choices Sabotage a Great Play Death of a Salesman, the classic drama by Arthur Miller, is about American capitalism and the price it extracts from the every…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMThursday, August 15, 2013
Filmmaker Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours strives to be a meditation on art and life, a reflection on the interchangeability between the painting and sculpture housed in a great museum and the wa…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:19PMFriday, July 26, 2013
The Time Being (2012) is a visually arresting film, an ambitious effort undercut by a problem script and a forgettable performance by lead actor Wes Bentley. Bentley plays Daniel, a young pa…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:02PMTuesday, July 9, 2013
In her smart and funny show Suburban Showgirl, solo performer Palmer Davis portrays alter ego Wendy Walker, a talented dancer who struggles to juggle a passion for her art with motherhood an…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:30PMMonday, July 1, 2013
The Magic is Missing in This Latest Neil Jordan Film Byzantium is a name that conjures up mystery and magic, but there’s little of either in this awkward vampire film, directed by Neil Jor…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:00PMMonday, May 20, 2013
Comedies for adults come along so rarely these days, it’s a pleasure to have one to praise. Directed by Craig Zisk from a smart, perceptive script by Stacy and Dan Chariton, The English Te…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:31PMFriday, May 3, 2013
If you’re not a Woody Allen fan – and I am not – you may have trouble relating to writer/director Sophie Lellouche’s pleasant if uninspiring chick flick whose hook – the main chara…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 02:19PMThursday, April 25, 2013
In the title role Dana Delaney transforms this middling comedy into a crackling satire that makes trenchant commentary on the abuse of power. Delaney plays Chloe, the wife of an ambitious la…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:18PMFriday, April 19, 2013
For most of its running time, Violeta Went to Heaven plays out as an engaging although not quite intimate biopic – an illuminative portrait of Chilean singer and artist Violeta Parra (Fran…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 09:52PMTuesday, March 26, 2013
In Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, Charlie (Matthew Arkin) an obese gay man confronting his own mortality reaches out to the daughter he walked out on years ago. Like Hunter’s play A Brigh…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 12:23PMFriday, February 22, 2013
Adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya’s Classic Novel Looks Pretty, Lacks Depth Review by Deborah Klugman Rudolfo Anaya’s coming of age novel Bless Me, Ultima, was published in 1972 at a time when…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:00PMFriday, February 15, 2013
CHINGLISH Henry David Hwang Takes us on an Adventure in Modern China Review by Deborah Klugman When playwright Henry David Hwang traveled to China in 2005, he visited a brand new cultural ar…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 08:19PMThursday, December 27, 2012
Timely Film Keeps Some but not All of its Promise Promised Land isn’t a great film but it is a good one, with a timely narrative that deals in the immediate sense with the pros and cons of…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:20PMThursday, December 6, 2012
If you go see Hyde Park on Hudson anticipating historical perspective or an in-depth portrait of one our country’s greatest presidents, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you …
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 06:53PMTuesday, November 27, 2012
In this in-depth interview with filmmaker Drago Sumonja, the first time filmmaker explains how his ‘talking heads’ documentary zones in on the craft of acting. Interview by Debor…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:28PMSunday, November 11, 2012
Not every sociopath is an axe murderer or a conman. In The Comedy, director Rick Alverson’s painfully unfunny and self-indulgent film, the main character never carries out a violent act,…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 03:00PMFriday, November 2, 2012
Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers yet another consummate performance in A Late Quartet, a flawed film by first time feature director, Yaron Zilberman. Hoffman and Imogen Poots, riveting at tim…
SOURCE: Arts Beat LA at 04:23PM 
