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A wonderful and intimate look at the 15-hour vocal recording, Original Cast Album: Company shows you what the actors, orchestra, and creators of the show faced behind-the-scenes. Having been raised on musicals and later becoming a Chicago theatre critic, I have long been a Broadway nerd. I have favorite musicals that I listen to on…
A film that centers on three different stories spanning thousands of years, In The Blink Of An Eye makes you think about existence and community, but is lacking in the emotional depth department. I have seen a LOT of bad movies, so when I first glanced at the reviews for this (which are not great),…
A painfully awkward film about selfish humans who keep androids of themselves to do everything they don’t want to do, Robots purports to be a romantic comedy, but it’s just not funny. Every once in a while, you come across a movie that could be cute. You have a gut feeling that it might not…
A fantastic musical film about a bloodthirsty plant that gets its owner to keep feeding it, Little Shop Of Horrors features a great cast and is packed with earworms. When Little Shop Of Horrors was first released on VHS tape, my friends and I were obsessed with it. We planned a performance of our own,…
A quiet film about an older man who decides to walk across England to save his friend in hospice, The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry encourages you to think about the small things. It is always fun for me when I start a movie and realize that I’m with friends. Jim Broadbent, who I have…
A stylistic Tarantino film about an actor and his stunt double in the 1960s, Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood will make you look at Tinseltown in a whole new way. The first Quentin Tarantino film I ever saw was Pulp Fiction. I watched it in the movie theater and promptly returned for a second…
A brooding period drama about a man who believes his cousin’s wife committed murder, but meets and falls in love with her, My Cousin Rachel feels muted and flat. I have mentioned this before, but not every book should be turned into a film. The mediums are very different, and while you can describe every…
A fictionalized retelling of a famous historical life, Henry VIII and His Six Wives does an excellent job of covering each of Henry’s relationships while giving you a little bit of insight into each wife. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. If you are at all familiar with the Broadway show SIX, the television show…
Filled with theatricality, Blue Moon, about lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night former partner Richard Rodgers opens Oklahoma! with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, is like watching a play in three acts. I was raised on the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein. If The King And I wasn’t playing, Carousel was on. If it was too silent…
A subtle and emotionally layered film about an absent film director father and his estranged daughters, Sentimental Value is extraordinarily styled and deeply personal. When I notice that Stellan Skarsgård is in a film, I am immediately interested. Whether it’s Good Will Hunting, Mamma Mia!, or Angels & Demons, he is an actor who leaves…
A modern Cyrano story where a sweet but inarticulate teen asks a quiet nerd to help him write letters to the girl he loves, The Half Of It is a cute YA watch. Whether you’ve read the 1897 play of Cyrano de Bergerac or not, the story is a familiar one. A man is in…
A dystopian sci-fi thriller about a facility in which members live to avoid outside contamination and hope to win the coveted lottery, The Island is a story that gets better the longer you watch. There are some really entertaining movies about a dystopian future. The Hunger Games series, The Matrix series, The Long Walk, Snowpiercer…
