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Reviews
Orchestre National de France Performs Ravel & More at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 05 December 2025 14:58
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Stefan Cohen
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the afternoon of Sunday, November 9th, I had the privilege to attend an excellent concert—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the superb musicians of the Orchestre National de France, led with great distinction by its Music Director and Conductor, Cristian Măcelaru.
The event started admirably with a fine account of Elsa Barraine’s seldom heard but striking Symphony No. 2, “Voina,” from 1938. After a brief, Adagio introduction for winds, the main body of the Allegro moderato movement swiftly intensifies and is frequently turbulent but with sometimes haunting, more reflective passages—it finishes forcefully. The ensuing Marche funèbre is somewhat lugubrious and moody while the Allegretto Finale is spirited and quirky, with charming elements but also moments of mystery, ending emphatically.
The renowned soloist Daniil Trifonov then entered the stage for an impressive version of Maurice Ravel’s popular Piano Concerto in G Major, completed in 1931. The initial, Allegramente movement opens playfully but a more jazzy, introspective interlude influenced by George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue follows—it becomes much livelier and concludes dynamically. The succeeding Adagio assai is more interior and lyrical—the most exquisite of the movements, it has some of the Romantic emotionalism encountered in the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff and it closes softly. The Presto finale is ebullient and dazzling and the most virtuosic of the movements—it builds in suspense and excitement, ending suddenly, if wittily.
Trifonov returned at the beginning of the event’s second half for a superb rendition of Camille Saint-Saëns’s pleasurable Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22, composed in 1868. The Andante sostenuto first movement starts passionately—with a cadenza—but in its main body, it is at first inward and song-like but it becomes more “purple” and opulent as it develops—there are some lovely episodes and it finishes with a powerful statement. The subsequent Allegro scherzando is vivacious, fittingly ludic, and often delightful, concluding gently. The Presto finale is ultimately exhilarating in its forward momentum, closing triumphantly. Enthusiastic applause elicited an extraordinary encore from the pianist: Claude Debussy’s "Reflets dans l'eau" from his collection, Images.
The highlight of the program, however, was its here brilliantly realized final work: Ravel’s glorious Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2–the ballet score from which this is excerpted was described by Igor Stravinsky as “Not only Ravel’s best work, but also one of the most beautiful products of French music.” The initial selection, Lever du jour, is splendorous and mystical while the Pantomime that it precedes is less abstract and sumptuous; lastly, the mesmerizing Danse générale ends arrestingly. A standing ovation was rewarded with another outstanding encore: the same composer’s entrancing Boléro.
Off-Broadway Play Review—Martyna Majok’s “Queens”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 04 December 2025 16:10
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Queens
Written by Martyna Majok; directed by Trip Cullman
Performances through December 7, 2025
Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 West 55th St, New York, NY
manhattantheaterclub.com
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| Marin Ireland and Anna Chlumsky in Queens (photo: Valerie Terranova) |
In her sprawling, messy play Queens, Martyna Majok shows real sympathy for and insight into the women—mostly immigrants, living at one time or another in a basement apartment in the eponymous borough—whose relationships, hopes and fears ring even truer now during the second Trump administration than when the play premiered, during the first Trump administration.
Renia, from Poland, runs things, first helping out the (unseen) landlord after arriving then eventually taking over the place herself. Other women drift in and out over the years the play covers (from the months after the terrorist attacks in 2001 to the early summer of 2017), including Pelagiya, from Belarus; Aamani, from Afghanistan; and Isabela, from Honduras. Later, Isabela’s daughter Glenys shows up as well as Inna, a young Ukrainian woman looking for her mother, who left Inna back home for a new life in America, and another woman from Poland, Agata, who gives Renia a surprising update about her family.
Queens opens with a bang—literally, as the newly-arrived Inna confronts Renia on the street and punches her in anger—and soon settles into a realistically belligerent tone, as these women remain on edge even during good times. Personal difficulties, biases, disagreements and misunderstandings rear their heads, and alternating events 16 years apart show that these women are always dealing with external political forces beyond their control.
Majok smartly concentrates on the women as individuals and not as symbols, although the charged atmosphere makes it almost inevitable that soapbox speechifying is included. But the strength and solidarity of the play’s eight women are never in doubt, even as pettiness or insecurity makes them antagonists.
One of those eight appears only in a flashback to Ukraine, just prior to Inna leaving for the U.S. Inna babysits for Lera, who returns home from an evening out trying to impress young American men in the hopes that she can join them in America. Instead, Inna hijacks Lera’s would-be sugar daddy in an implausible scene and ends up being the one to leave Ukraine, although she quickly realizes she’s been conned.
Happily, Majok otherwise keeps contrivance to a minimum and, even if some of what the women face is melodramatic, it often rings true. The production couldn’t be bettered. Trip Cullman directs resourcefully on Marsha Ginsberg’s realistically bedraggled set of the women’s apartment, lit magisterially by Ben Stanton. And the eight performers are splendid, led by Marin Ireland’s stoic Renia; this is a cast so authentic individually and collectively as to bring out the humanity of the play more subtly than Majok.
Kudos to them for not only mastering difficult Eastern European accents, for the most part, but also learning to speak Polish (Ireland and Anna Chlumsky, as Agata) and Ukrainian (Julia Lester, as Inna, and Andrea Syglowski, as Lera). Despite its faults, Queens is a memorable theatrical melting pot.
December '25 Digital Week I
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 04 December 2025 04:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
CD Release of the Week
Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas
(Fearless)
Sure, it’s a calculated move, but why not? Taylor Momsen—lead singer of one of the best rock bands around right now, the Pretty Reckless—played, at age 7, Cindy Lou Who in the annoying movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with Jim Carrey in green prosthetics as the dastardly villain. A quarter-century later, Momsen returns to full-throatedly sing “Where Are You Christmas,” which she warbled in the movie (and which Faith Hill made into a holiday perennial).
The new version, backed by her band, rocks nicely but would have been even better if they really cranked it up. It returns at the end, slightly changed, as “Christmas, Why Can’t I Find You,” which allows the adult Momsen to cede her EP’s opening and closing voices to her younger self.
The other songs are fun holiday originals: the finger-snapping “I Wanna Be Your Christmas Tree,” with its hilarious double entendres like “Stuff that turkey with your Pepperidge Farm/Cover it in gravy and all your charm”; the irresistible power pop of “Christmas Is Killing Me,” with its immortal couplet “Christmas is killing me/Someone stop Mariah Carey”; and the, well, very bluesy “Blues for Christmas,” all of which let Momsen show off her incredibly versatile voice. But now that she’s gotten Cindy Lou out of her system, here’s hoping the new year brings a new Pretty Reckless album on the order of the group’s killer recent single, “For I Am Death.”
A Private Life
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Jodie Foster gives an impressive performance, primarily in French, in Rebecca Zlotowski’s typically genre-bending study of a divorced analyst dealing with professional and personal crises: she has a strained relationship with her son, his wife and their young baby, while she follows up on her suspicions of a longtime patient’s supposed suicide.
Always good with actors, Zlotowski follows suit here: supporting Foster’s accomplished turn are Daniel Auteil as her frisky ex, Vincent Lacoste as their chip-on-his-shoulder son, Virginie Efira as the dead patient and Mathieu Almaric as her grieving widower. But the script by Zlotowski, Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé has characterization problems and plot holes that prevent the movie from really taking flight.
Streaming Releases of the Week
The Best You Can
(Sony)
Pairing real-life husband-and-wife Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick as Stan (a single father with a musician daughter, Sammi) and Cynthia (married to the much older Warren—who’s beginning to show signs of dementia) has its charms, especially in the easy rapport of the couple’s scenes together in what may or may not become an affair.
Yet writer-director Michael J. Weithorn doesn’t know what to do with the rest of his sitcomish comedy-drama, so good actors like Judd Hirsch (Warren) and Brittany O’Grady (Sammi) are left adrift.
(Shudder)
The latest contraption from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani—French husband and wife writers-directors based in Belgium—blends James Bond spoofing with bloody revenge melodrama: a retired spy, John D (played by Fabio Testi and Yannick Renier as his older and younger incarnations), remembers his youthful exploits when his fascinating new neighbor disappears.
Cattet and Forzani always bring their A game to their often dazzling visuals, although they inevitably overdose on gorgeously composed shots at the expense of their tale.
WTO/99
(Foghorn Features)
In 1999, Seattle was the location for a meeting of the nascent World Trade Organization, which looked to negotiate new trade deals to link the world economy and generate prosperity, but strange bedfellows like unions, chambers of commerce and liberal activists declared the WTO antithetical to human rights, the environment and labor and came to protest in the tens of thousands.
Director Ian Bell has painstakingly assembled a compelling and eye-opening look back at living history: that volatile moment presaging the unholy mess we find ourselves in, told exclusively through archival footage from TV news reports and amateur home videos.
The Long Walk
(Lionsgate)
Stephen King’s short novel about a dystopian U.S. where the eponymous event takes place, with the lone survivor winning a jackpot—an unoriginal but workable premise on the page—has been turned into an enervating film by director Francis Lawrence and writer JT Mollner, who do little with the anti-dramatic storyline of young men walking alongside soldiers who shoot anyone who falls off the pace.
Flashbacks to our main protagonist Garraty’s home life with mom and dad (Judy Greer and Josh Hamilton, both wasted) and occasional closeups of blown-off heads don’t alleviate the tedium. Cooper Hoffman (Garraty) and a cast including Charlie Plummer and David Jonsson try to bring individuality to this faceless crew, but Mark Hamill’s cartoonish antagonist makes that nearly impossible. The film looks great on Blu; lone extra is a 75-minute making-of documentary.
November '25 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 27 November 2025 16:29
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Streaming Releases of the Week
Anniversary
(Lionsgate)
A political film that demands to be treated seriously is a rarity nowadays, but this apocalyptic drama, slickly directed by Jan Komasa from a hamfisted script by Lori Rosene-Gambino, pretends to be a daring cautionary tale when it’s only a pedestrian treatment of how a sea change in American politics (called, blandly, “the change”) takes its toll on an affluent family.
The country is turned upside down along with the Taylors, but despite politically motivated killings and a suicide bombing, little of it rings true or plausible, mainly because it fails at being clinical and probing. Convincing performances by Diane Lane (mom), Kyle Chandler (dad), Zoey Deutsch, McKenna Grace and Madeline Brewer (daughters), Dylan O’Brien (son), and Phoebe Dynevor (son’s wife and main catalyst) can only do so much.
(Netflix)
Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic thriller remains unnerving and relevant, with movie adaptations as far flung as James Whale’s 1931 talkie that made a star of monster Boris Karloff and Mel Brooks’ explosively funny but faithful parody-cum-homage, 1974’s Young Frankenstein.
Now Guillermo del Toro lumbers into view with a typically overwrought, stuffed-to-the-gills adaptation whose elaborate visuals makes it seem as if we’re watching a video game. Bluntly directed with a sledgehammer, the film evaporates from memory as soon as it’s over, stranding good performers as Jacob Elordi (monster), Oscar Isaac (doctor) and Mia Goth (love interest).
Vindication Swim
(Brilliant Pictures)
The story of Mercedes Gleitze—a young Englishwoman who was the first female to swim the English Channel in 1927, then tried to do it again when her achievement was questioned—is certainly inspiring, and director/writer Elliott Hasler milks it for all its worth in this entertaining if conventional biopic.
As Mercedes, Kirsten Callaghan is highly impressive both in and out of the water, and the era’s anti-woman, pro-white male politics makes for a good antagonist, yet this could have been so much more memorable than it turns out to be.
The Conjuring—Last Rites
(Warner Bros)
This latest (and last?) dramatization of the pioneering paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren’s exploits with malevolent hauntings uses the same blueprint as the series’ three earlier entries, but Michael Chaves’ overly fussy direction makes this all too familiar as its 2 hours and 15 minutes drag unnecessarily.
On the plus side, there’s solid acting by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as the Warrens and well-cast support from Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy and others as the affected Smurl family. There’s a superior UHD transfer; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews.
Howards End
(Cohen Film Collection)
The peak of the uneven James Ivory-Ismail Merchant-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala team’s career was this absorbing 1992 adaptation of E.M. Forster’ classic novel about the shifting relations and attitudes among the different classes in Edwardian England: it’s old-fashioned filmmaking done so well that it’s transfixing to watch.
Ivory’s directing and Jhabvala’s writing were never equaled by them before or after, while the cast—Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave, for starters—is flawless. The film has a spectacular film-like sheen in 4K; extras include a new audio commentary, vintage Ivory and Merchant interviews, and on-set interviews and featurettes.
Strauss—Intermezzo
(Naxos)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) wrote 15 operas—among them classics Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella and Capriccio—but this talky drama based on his personal life has never really caught on, despite lovely music and a wonderful lead role for the soprano playing a famous conductor’s wife, whose complicated relationship with her husband makes her seek out an affair.
Tobias Kratzer’s 2024 Berlin State Opera staging is set in the present day, which neither harms nor helps the storytelling—happily, the orchestra and conductor Donald Runnicles are in fine form, and, as Christine, Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson gives the towering portrayal the opera needs to succeed. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
The Island Closest to Heaven
(Cult Epics)
Morimura Katsura’s story about Mari, a Japanese teenager visiting the ravishingly beautiful islands of New Catalonia, becomes, in director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s capable hands, a tender character study that is the opposite of his earlier, often delirious films House and School in the Crosshairs.
Buoyed by an accomplished, understated performance by Tomoyo Harada as Mari, this is a modest, satisfying drama. There’s a good hi-def transfer; extras include an audio commentary and making-of featurette.
Rachmaninoff/Elgar—The Bells/Falstaff
(Harmonia Mundi)
Two works inspired by two great American and English writers make up this terrific disc, starting with The Bells, a choral symphony by Sergei Rachmaninoff whose texts have been freely adapted from poems of Edgar Allan Poe—the creative fusion of the Russian composer’s rich melodies and American author’s unsettling imagery results in a truly unique work.
Edward Elgar and William Shakespeare are a less surprising combo, and Elgar’s symphonic study about the Bard’s wondrous comic creation Sir John Falstaff is rollicking and contemplative by turns. Vasily Petrenko leads the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in an outstanding Falstaff, and the Philharmonia Chorus and three fine soloists contribute to a superb version of The Bells.
Grace Williams—Works for Orchestra
(Lyrita)
Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-77)—barely known on this side of the Atlantic, at least—wrote attractive music in various genres, and this disc is a worthwhile primer to anyone (like me) heretofore unfamiliar with her music.
Williams’ shimmering violin concerto has a persuasive soloist in Geneva Lewis; her supple Sinfonia concertante for piano and orchestra sounds exquisite in soloist Clare Hammond’s hands. On the concerti and brooding Elegy for string orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales sounds remarkably cohesive, considering there’s a different conductor for each work.
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