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Reviews
Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra at Lincoln Center
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 02 September 2026 13:45
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Keri-Lynn Wilson leading the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra on August 25, 2026, at David Geffen Hall in New York City. Photo: Richard Termine / Met Opera
At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall, on the night of Tuesday, August 25th, I had the exceptional pleasure of attending a superb concert—the first of two on consecutive days—performed by the outstanding Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, under the impeccable direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson.
The event started splendidly with a sterling realization of the marvelous, one-movement Suite from the new opera by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, The Mothers of Kherson. (I predict that this Suite will enter the orchestral repertory.) The extraordinary, Norwegian soprano, Lise Davidsen—whose terrific, debut recital at Carnegie Hall this June I have already reviewed here—then entered the stage for an unforgettable rendition of Richard Strauss’s magnificent Four Last Songs, from 1948, written for the legendary Kirsten Flagstad. The initial three lyrics in the sequence are exquisite poems by the major novelist, Hermann Hesse. The first of these, “Fruhling,” is the most optimistic of the set, while the remaining songs express a more fatalistic outlook, beginning with “September” and followed by “Going to Sleep.” The final song, “At Sunset,” is a setting of a poem by the great Romantic lyricist, Joseph, baron von Eichendorff. The singer and the ensemble were enthusiastically applauded.
The second half of the evening was comparably memorable, consisting of an enchanting version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s amazing Symphony No. 7. The first movement opens suspensefully with a Poco sostenuto introduction, at length anticipating its joyous, recurringly propulsive main body which at times reflects an almost pastoral ethos, although it finishes emphatically. The ensuing Allegretto is much more solemn in mood, but it too has an insistent—if much slower—rhythm; a central section has a sunnier, more lyrical quality, but the darker, more elegiac music soon returns, elaborated in a fugue-like episode—the movement closes somewhat abruptly, if satisfyingly.
The succeeding, energetic scherzo, is cheerful, even playful at moments, displaying the composer’s boundless capacity for surprise, but the second half of the movement becomes more serious in tone before the dance-like, initial music is recapitulated, although the second, statelier theme is soon forcefully restated—it too ends unexpectedly. The Allegro con brio finale is jubilant, dynamic and breathless, with lilting passages, and it builds to a rousing, triumphant conclusion.
A standing ovation elicited a fabulous encore: a beautiful arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem.
August '26 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 20 August 2026 21:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
If These Walls Could Rock
(Bungalow Media & Entertainment)
The Sunset Marquis, a hotel in Hollywood that’s become a haven and hangout for musicians, takes center stage in Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams’ documentary in which diverting stories about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are entertainingly told for 90 minutes.
Billy Bob Thornton—who moonlights in a rock band in addition to being an award-winning actor and filmmaker—is our guide of sorts, while we hear priceless anecdotes from legendary music figures Ringo Starr, Bruce Springsteen, Slash, Dave Grohl and Gene Simmons, among others, along with those in and outside the family that’s been keeping the beloved Marquis going for decades.
(Film Movement Classics)
Director Stanley Kwan’s restored 1991 epic about Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu—who starred in silent films before killing herself at age 24 in 1935—provides a thoughtful portrait of a long-gone era of cinema history that comprises recreations of her film sets, clips from her final two films and meta-interviews with Kwan, his actors and people who knew Ruan.
As the fated actress known as the “Chinese Garbo,” Maggie Cheung gives a colossally charismatic performance, and she’s nearly matched by Tony Leung as Cai Chusheng, one of Ruan’s most notable directors.
Dead Souls
(Kino Lorber)
For his first feature in nine years—since his Eastern/Western mashup, 2017’s Tombstone Rashomon—English filmmaker Alex Cox has made a madly offbeat adaptation of Russian Nikolai Gogol’s novel, transposed to the American West circa 1890, with Cox playing Strindler, a man compiling a list of dead Mexican laborers in Arizona.
Cox has never been the most subtle director—his best-known films, Repo-Man and Sid & Nancy, are cult items—and Dead Souls follows suit, especially with an in-joke about Strindler’s list (ahem). Otherwise, Cox throws shade at U.S. politics and culture, something that’s surely needed but not, at least in his hands, on target.
Miroirs No. 3
(1-2 Special)
In the latest from German director Christian Petzold, his muse Paula Beer is Laura, a depressed music student taken in and cared for by a nearby rural woman, Betty, after Laura’s in a car accident that claims her fiancé. As Petzold films go, this one is pretty slight: Laura’s presence makes things uncomfortable for Betty’s husband Richard and son Max, especially when it’s revealed that Laura reminds Betty of her daughter, who recently committed suicide.
Beer is riveting, as always, but the familiar plot machinations trip up her writer-director, who only finds his footing at the very end, when Maurice Ravel’s piano piece that’s also the film’s title is heard.
Silent Friend
(1-2 Special)
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi has been making narratively fractured, visually dazzling, thought-provoking films since her stunning 1989 debut, My 20th Century. At the center of her latest is a large ginkgo tree, around which revolve three narrative threads that take place more than a century apart, between 1908 and the COVID year of 2020, all in the college town of Marburg, Germany.
Enyedi, together with her magnificent cinematographer Gergely Pálos and editor Károly Szalai, have created indelible visuals to illustrate a meditative exploration of the connection of humans to the natural world, even though we might be unaware of it. The excellent cast, led by Léa Seydoux and Tony Leung, makes this at times inscrutable drama emotionally accessible.
Shakespeare in the Park Review—“The Winter’s Tale” at the Delacorte Theater with Raúl Esparza
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 19 August 2026 16:57
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Winter’s Tale
Written by William Shakespeare
Choreography by Mimi Lieber; directed by Daniel Sullivan
Performances through August 23, 2026
Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York City
publictheater.org
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| The cast of The Winter's Tale (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The lasting effects of jealousy have rarely been so searingly explored as in The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s most complex and inscrutable plays, one which asks a lot from any cast and director. Admittedly it’s a very bumpy ride even in the most capable hands, as when director Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project came to BAM in 2009 with a production illuminated by the magisterial Rebecca Hall as the wronged queen Hermione.
Set in the neighboring kingdoms of Sicilia—where Shakespeare brilliantly sets up the dramatic conflict of King Leontes’ unhinged accusations against his faithful (and pregnant) Hermione of infidelity—and Bohemia, The Winter’s Tale is filled with betrayals and deaths, humor and heartbreak, reunions and even a resurrection of sorts, along with what might be the most famous—or infamous—stage direction in all of theater.
At the Delacorte, director Daniel Sullivan lingers over too many scenes, making it an exceedingly slow-going evening (this staging lasts 3 hours and 20 minutes), especially in the ponderous Sicilia scenes. Even a first-rate actor like Raúl Esparza intoning Leontes’ lengthy and self-justifying monologues about why he wants his pregnant wife put to death for treason can’t move things along. Conversely, the boisterousness of rustic Bohemia—personified by the rogue Autolycus (an amusing but overdone Steven Skybell)—is underscored with a wearying bluntness; a little of this sort of “fun” goes a long way.
On the plus side, Sullivan has Matthew Eby, who plays Leontes and Hermione’s tragic child Mamillius, also play Time, which gives the play’s crucial jump of 16 years a new twist. Sullivan pulls off the inevitable “exit, pursued by a bear” moment so cleverly that some members of the audience missed it completely, and he adroitly stages the final coup de theatre that, for better or worse, is what most audiences remember about The Winter’s Tale.
The acting, aside from Esparza, is a mixed bag. Marsha Stephanie Blake makes a forceful and funny Paulina, the queen’s most honest defender, but Hermione herself is played by Lily Rabe, who gives a one-dimensional and shouty performance, robbing this viewer at least of the necessary sympathy for her fate. Rabe does, however, memorably freeze into a statue-like pose of surpassing stillness, a not unimportant aspect of her characterization.
Chuck Cooper is an unalloyed delight as the Old Shepherd, and if Gilbert Owuor is a bit too stiff as Bohemia’s king Polixenes, two able young performers—Daniel Kyri and Isabela Ferrer—are full of effervescence as Polixenes’ son Florizel and Leontes and Hermione’s daughter Perdita, respectively.
Maruti Evans’ scenery, Linda Cho’s costumes, Bradley King’s lighting, Brian Ronan’s sound design and Tom Kitt’s music all handsomely contribute to this bumpy but entertaining night of theater in Central Park.
August '26 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 12 August 2026 23:58
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Paul McCartney—The Boys of Dungeon Lane
(Capitol Records)
Now 84, Paul McCartney has released his first album since 2020’s lively McCartney III, which he recorded during the COVID lockdown. The Boys of Dungeon Lane has gotten some of the best reviews of McCartney’s storied career, although to these ears it’s an unsurprisingly tuneful but often familiar-sounding attempt that doesn’t approach his best work, from Ram and Band on the Run to Tug of War and Electric Arguments. But it sits comfortably ahead of lesser efforts like Wild Life, Pipes of Peace and Off the Ground.
The album’s title is a line from “Days We Left Behind,” the most nakedly autobiographical of Paul’s compositions here, a beautifully realized reminiscence of earlier times that uses his aged, cracked but still formidable voice to great advantage. Not far behind in the nostalgia sweepstakes is “Home to Us,” a charming if slight duet with Ringo Starr (who also drums on the track, and whose jam with producer Andrew Watt was the genesis of this song) about growing up in a run-down part of Liverpool, with cute backing vocals from, of all people, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri. “Down South,” describing a bus trip out of Liverpool, revisits the observations of two songs from McCartney’s 2013 album New: “On My Way to Work” and “Early Days.”
It all goes down very smoothly and often indelibly in the mostly one-man-band approach McCartney and Watt employ; the jam on the opening “As You Lie There” is a good example of Paul’s genius at arranging—although, as usual, it’s his effortlessly melodic bass playing on songs as disparate as “Ripples in a Pond,” “We Two” and the insanely catchy “Never Know” that makes The Boys of Dungeon Lane a cut above other legacy artists’ new music.
When we get to the quartet of melancholic but powerful ballads that ends the album—“Life Can Be Hard,” “First Star of the Night,” “Salesman Saint” and “Momma Gets By”—we realize that, if these are the final songs Paul has recorded in an unparalleled six-decade-plus career, it’s quite an unabashedly emotional statement to go out on.
Late Fame
(Magnolia Pictures)
Based, of all things, on a posthumously published novella by the great Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler (who also wrote Traumnovelle, which Stanley Kubrick adapted as his last film Eyes Wide Shut), this low-key character study stars a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, who wrote a forgotten book of poems decades earlier and who’s been an anonymous post office employee since then—until he is recognized by a group of pretentious young artists that want to give him the long-awaited notoriety they think he deserves.
Kent Jones directs economically, Samy Burch’s script has finely-etched characterizations and dialogue, and the rest of the cast—especially a dazzling Greta Lee—superbly backs Dafoe. But there’s simply not enough here for a 95-minute feature, which spreads everything—and everyone—thin.
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Mars Attacks!
(Warner Bros)
Director Tim Burton could never be accused of coddling the masses, as his cheerfully cheesy 1996 spoof of sci-fi movies—which was released several months after the insipidly self-serious alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day—delightfully demonstrates. In a large and jokey cast, Jack Nicholson shows off his unique ability to be hilariously over the top in the dual roles of the harried U.S. president and a shady Vegas casino owner, while there are also delicious turns by Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Pierce Brosnan and Michael J. Fox.
Even the goofily gory special effects help make this a dopey but hip satire. The film’s bright colors explode in 4K; extras are two new featurettes with screenwriter Jonathan Gems and some of the film’s technical crew.
The Drama
(A24)
Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s darkly comic look at Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple navigating pre-wedding jitters, has some insightful and funny moments, but when Emma confesses to the worst thing she’s ever done, contrivance precariously hangs over the rest of the film.
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson make this couple charming, vindictive, self-pitying and impassioned, but they fight an uphill battle as Borgli directs with a sledgehammer, making what happens during the preparations and reception more obvious and less pointed as the film goes along. When their photographer keeps saying she’ll “shoot” them or when Emma’s dad gives a reception speech that makes clear he doesn’t know how she became deaf in one ear, you know you’re dealing with a director who stacks the deck, which for a film like this, is fatal.
Blu-ray Release of the Week
Good Manners
(Distrib Films US)
In Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s disturbing modern 2018 fairy tale, nanny and housekeeper Clara becomes quite close to her boss, single mom-to-be Ana, and as their relationship grows more intimate, she discovers that Ana might have been impregnated by a werewolf. That revelation is the jumping-off point for a film that, after switching gears halfway through, turns out to be startling, unsettling and risible simultaneously.
Even though it outstays its welcome—and could be shorn of 20 minutes, particularly scenes like a young boy being stalked as prey—it’s brilliantly done. The film’s colorfully unnerving look shines on Blu-ray; extras are a two-minute making-of featurette; the shorts A Stem (2007), directed by Rojas and Dutras, and Doppelganger (2012), directed by Rojas; and commentary by critics Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Carolyn Mauricette.
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