John Madden’s 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love” proposed a secret love affair as being the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most popular play, “Romeo and Juliet.” The film’s widespread success revealed the public’s longing to find a real human being behind the name of the iconic poet and playwright who composed at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets,…
Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini, “About Elly”) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, “The Wedlock”), a childless married couple in their early thirties, are amateur actors playing the lead roles in a local production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a play in which a good man’s virtue turns to hypocrisy and his marriage crumbles….
Dedicated to Ozu star Setsuko Hara, Argentine director Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia and Helena follows his three previous films, “Viola,” “The Princess of France”, and “Rosalinda,” with a work depicting characters loosely based on female heroines in William Shakespeare’s comedies. Shot in Buenos Aires and partly in New York, the film centers on Camila (Agustina Muñoz,…
There exists no alternative in critiquing James Steven Sadwith’s Coming Through the Rye without first discussing the novel which both its title and story derives from. Personally speaking, I never finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. Despite the national uproar that the novel stirred by its addition to school curriculums in the United States,…
If you watched the trailer for The Gallows, you probably got the impression you were going to see an intense flick in which some high school kids that are involved in some sort of drama production are viciously attacked by a supernatural entity. And while you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, you’ve nonetheless been dealt a…
Realizing that she can no longer play the roles she played when she was twenty, the now forty-year-old European actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche, “Godzilla”) faces the consequences of the passage of time. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, Olivier Assayas’ (“Something in the Air”) Clouds of Sils Maria explores the life…
“I wish.” These are the first words of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s timeless 1987 musical production, and the last. Dangerous, familiar words that, in the real world, can strain our relationships with our dreams, our loved ones, and ourselves, and set us up for situations in which we can never truly…
