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Film and the Arts
Off-Broadway Play Review—“Gene & Gilda”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 19 August 2025 21:41
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Gene & Gilda
Written by Cary Gitter
Directed by Joe Brancato
Performances through September 7, 2025
59 E 59Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, NYC
59e59.org
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| Jordan Kai Burnett and Jonathan Randell Silver in Gene & Gilda (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
The romance of actors Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner is the stuff of showbiz legend. The beloved comedians, who met on the set of the 1982 flop Hanky Panky, had a relationship (and marriage) that ended prematurely in 1989 when Radner died of ovarian cancer. Now, the couple’s time together has been dramatized by playwright Cary Gitter as an accumulation of scenes that resemble both the sketches for which Radner was famous on Saturday Night Live and the alternately silly and memorable comic films Wilder starred in during his ’70s and ’80s heyday.
Which isn't to say that Gene & Gilda is not entertaining. Gitter has done his homework, and his chronology of their passionate relationship provides moments that are genuinely amusing and, later, touching and tragic. His script also dutifully checks off allusions to—and recreations of—Radner’s beloved SNL characters Lisa Loopner, Candy Slice, Baba Wawa, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, along with bits from Wilder’s big-screen hits Young Frankenstein and The Producers. The downside is that those riffs on the couple’s greatest hits are ready made for nods and easy laughs of recognition, while the framing device of Wilder being interviewed by Dick Cavett breaks the play into bumpily sitcomish segments that are only partially resolved by director Joe Brancato.
Happily, Brancato has resourceful performers to help smooth over much of the rest. As Gene, Jonathan Randell Silver, although at times simply a superior impersonation rather than a characterization, does a good job of catching the almost offhand neuroticism in the actor’s demeanor. And Jordan Kai Burnett gives a beautifully three-dimensional portrait of Gilda, showing her comic brilliance alongside her endlessly charming innocence. Burnett also handles the various impressions of Gilda’s characters with comic aplomb, never getting hung up even during a whipsaw scene when she speeds through several of them in a crazy sort of conversation.
Silver and Burnett play off each other—and even dance together—well enough to provide an extra dimension to this fateful romance that Gitter’s play sometimes lacks.
Art Review—"Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 15 August 2025 21:20
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Vermeer’s Love Letters
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th Street, New York, NY
Through August 31, 2025
frick.org
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| The 3 Vermeer paintings at the Frick exhibit |
In 2021, when the Frick Collection began renovating the venerable mansion housing its art and put on display some of its invaluable collection at the nearby Breuer building on Madison Avenue, it seemed the opposite of the Frick’s mission to show its stunning art in its original location, Henry Clay Frick’s ornate home. What worked at the Breuer was that several items—always seen far above or away from visitors—were at eye level and easier to study and admire. However, the sense of a collector arranging his valuable artworks and furnishings where he wanted to place them was lost.
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| Mistress and Maid |
The enlarged Frick now includes access to rooms on the second floor that were previously off-limits to the public, where there are more paintings and other objects like a collection of medals. It's still satisfying to visit the city’s best small art museum, although it’s less small now.
Vermeer’s Love Letters brings together three of Vermeer’s works—the Frick’s own Mistress and Maid, The Love Letter from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid from Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland—for a detailed look at how the artist treated the subject of letter writing as well as one of his favorite subjects: women in domestic situations.
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| Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid |
As these paintings show, Vermeer often worked on a small scale, amazingly packing so much aliveness, truth and humanity into his canvases. When looking at Vermeer’s works, you get lost in their singular worlds: what are these women thinking or saying, and what do the precisely placed objects—for example, in the Amsterdam and Dublin pictures, the paintings on the walls behind the women—symbolize? Even the large dark space behind the women in Mistress and Maid speaks volumes.
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| The Love Letter |
Vermeer’s Love Letters is a small exhibit only in quantity—it’s monumental in every other sense.
August '25 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 07 August 2025 20:23
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
(Sony Classics)
For her smart, often dazzling writing-directing debut, actress Embeth Davidtz has made a poignantly personal drama, based on Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of the same name, about a white Zimbabwean family during the Rhodesian Bush War in 1980, from the point-of-view of 8-year-old Bobo who, along with her teenage sister Vanessa, lives with her parents Nicola and Tim on a sprawling family farm full of ghosts, real and imagined.
Davidtz’ deeply felt drama of people clinging to a land that’s no longer theirs has a powerfully authentic sense of time, place and stifling atmosphere, and she gives a formidable portrayal of Nicola. But stealing the show is the astonishingly young Lexi Venter, who invests Bobo with a lively and precocious authenticity as our imperfect but captivating guide.
(Kino Lorber)
A true Manhattan time capsule, this vicious 1980 crime drama follows a former cop literally chasing the maniac who kidnaped his teenage daughter mistakenly thinking she’s a millionaire’s child through the streets is set in a seedy city about to burst from all the dirt, garbage and crime. Robert Butler took over the directorial duties after Sidney J. Furie left, and he pushes the boundaries of taste and logic with every insane chase sequence and bizarrely unrealistic bit of dialogue.
The performances by James Brolin (as the dad), Dan Hedaya and Richard S. Castellano (as antagonistic cops) and especially a nutso Cliff Gorman (as the kidnaper) are dialed up to 11, which makes this simultaneously silly and must-see viewing.
Rebel With a Clause
(Syntaxis Productions)
Only someone who loves language as much as Ellen Jovin would make—with her husband, Brandt Johnson—a documentary recording her visits to all 50 states, where she sits at a grammar desk to interact with curious people who discuss and ask questions about such things as past participles, the use of who/whom, ending a sentence with a preposition and, of course, the ubiquitous Oxford comma.
Jovin puts everyone at ease with her easygoing manner; director Johnson’s camera catches the nuances of these interactions, even showing without commentary the state of homelessness in this country in a couple of heartrending scenes. But the emphasis is on community in an anything but communal society.
Black Tea
(Cohen Media)
Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako comes a cropper with this contrived tale of young African woman Aya (a delightful Nina Mélo) who leaves her cheating fiancée at the altar to flee to the Chinese city of Guangzhou, which has a heavily African population and where she learns the subtleties of tea-making from Cai (the charming Chang Han), with whom she slowly falls in love.
It’s certainly painless to watch, and Sissako’s eye is as ever precise in his observations, but there’s little here that hasn’t been done better by Sissako in films like Bamako and Timbuktu. The Blu-ray image looks luminous; lone extra is the Berlin Film Festival press conference featuring Sissako, Mélo and Han.
MacMillan Celebrated
(Opus Arte)
Kenneth MacMillan was a legendary British choreographer whose dances dominated ballet stages for decades; this disc celebrates his exuberant and innovative work with stagings of his Danses concertantes (to the music of Stravinsky), Different Drum (to Webern and Schoenberg) and Requiem (to Fauré).
These terrific 2024 performances were staged by the Royal Ballet at its Covent Garden home in London with a cast of exceptional dancers. The hi-def images and audio underline the onstage brilliance; extras include interviews with Benesh choreologists Gregory Mislin and Daniel Kraus as well as Macmillan’s widow Deborah.
(Cult Epics)
This pair of Dutch films from the 1970s features the estimable pairing of Sylvia Kristel (best known for the Emmanuelle films) and Rudger Hauer (who became a star as an early ’80s villain in Nighthawks and Blade Runner) but are of varying quality— Paul de Lussanet’s Mysteries, in which they play the leads, is a slog of a drama from a Knut Hamsun novel that’s lensed by the great Robby Muller. Krisel and Hauer are excellent, at least.
Wim Verstappen’s Pastorale 1943, by contrast, is a hard-hitting drama about Dutch resistance during World War II, with Kristel and Hauer in small supporting roles. In the lead as a Dutchman whose loyalties are murky is the excellent Frederik de Groot. Both films look good and grainy on Blu; extras include commentaries and vintage interviews with Kristel, Hauer, de Laussanet and actor Derek de Lint.
CD Release of the Week
Tamar Sagiv—Shades of Mourning
(Sono Luminus)
Israeli cellist Tamar Sagiv’s debut recording is an intensely personal disc that takes the artist—and the listener—through various stages of grief and mourning as well as love and acceptance; the nine short pieces (all original compositions) were inspired by losses in Sagiv’s life along with the precarious state of today’s world.
Her playing on solo pieces Shades of Mourning, Roots, Intermezzo and Prelude is starkly expressive and nakedly emotional, while her cluster of works for trio (violin, viola, cello) explores sound worlds both familiar and new. The last piece, In My Blue, is a cello quintet in which Sagiv layers all the parts into a lovely and, finally, moving whole.
July '25 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 23 July 2025 22:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Final Destination—Bloodlines
(Warner Bros)
The first Final Destination—has it really been a quarter-century?—competently executed a clever idea: after a group of high school students gets off a plane before takeoff and it explodes, killing everyone aboard, death gruesomely takes each survivor. The original was a fun popcorn flick, but the sixth go-round is running on fumes—it’s more of the same, directed with a sledgehammer by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky from Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor’s sloppy script.
The most memorable scene is also the most imbecile: no hospital would have an industrial-grade MRI machine in an unattended, unlocked room—be that as it may, the horrible MRI deaths uncannily resemble what fatally happened to someone on Long Island. The film looks fine in 4K; extras are a directors’ commentary, two making-of featurettes and a tribute to actor Tony Todd.
Shari & Lamb Chop
(Kino Lorber)
Ventriloquist Shari Lewis—whom I remember watching as a kid on various TV shows with her unique hand puppets, including the beloved Lambchop—was a trailblazer who has been nearly forgotten, and whom director Lisa D’Apolito resurrects in this entertaining but not entirely sycophantic documentary.
Lewis’ fascinating career and complicated personal life are honestly chronicled, with interjections from her daughter, friends, family and associates, and the result humanizes a genuine artist.
Sovereign
(Briarcliff Entertainment)
Nick Offerman’s performance as Jerry Kane—an angry, widowed father who subscribes to the lunatic notion that he and his teenage son Joseph (Jacob Tremblay) are sovereign citizens and not subject to the laws of the United States, an attitude that ends badly for all involved—is authentically scary and commanding.
The film, which director-writer Christian Swegal based on a real incident in Arkansas in 2010, is unsettling to its core, and if it succumbs to clichés like dogs and babies at the end, there’s a lot of difficult but necessary questions about our country’s direction.
Mr. Blake at Your Service
(Sunrise Films)
In this predictably cheesy but cute comedy, John Malkovich plays the title character, a stuffy Englishman who returns to the house where he and his dead French wife met and causes havoc among those living there: Nathalie de Beauvillier and her house servants. Blake becomes de Beauvillier’s butler and by the time the movie ends, all has been put right in everyone’s world.
Malkovich is crusty but charming—and speaks French as a stumbling non-native would—as is Fanny Ardant as de Beauvillier. Sadly, Émilie Dequenne, who plays the cook Odile in such a memorably no-nonsense style, died soon after finishing the film of cancer at age 43—a wonderful performer taken far too soon.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Shadow Force
(Lionsgate)
Kerry Washington and Omar Sy play an estranged couple whose past as paid assassins catches up to them when a vengeful former boss pays a half-dozen killers to go after them—and their young son. In director/co-writer Joe Carnahan’s hands, it all plays out as one improbably violent and explosive sequence after another.
Washington and Sy do what they can, although their characters are faceless ciphers. The film looks good on Blu; extras are Carnahan and editor Kevin Hale’s commentary and three making-of featurettes.
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(Accentus Music)
Richard Wagner’s colossal tetralogy about dwarfs and nymphs and gods and mortals and dragons and gold and incest and murder and Armageddon is, at 15 hours of music, punishing for singers, musicians and—sometimes—audiences. Whenever a new Ring staging premieres, Wagner fans worldwide converge, as they did for this staging at the Zurich Opera House last year. Director Andreas Homoki’s concept is minimalist, based on a unit set that has some interesting visual aspects, but the dragon’s appearance is laughably inadequate.
Still, at least Homoki’s staging never buries the story and music, which—as conducted by Gianandrea Noseda and performed by the Zurich Philharmonia—sounds as glorious as Wagner intended. The acting and singing by such stalwarts as Tomasz Konieczny (Wotan), Camilla Nylund (Brünnhilde), Christopher Purves (Alberich), Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (Mime) and Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegfried) moves the huge plot forward until those final, indescribably beautiful notes. There’s first-rate audio and video; too bad there are no interviews with the conductor, director or singers.
Blu-ray/CD Release of the Week
Walkin’ After Midnight—The Music of Patsy Cline
(Mercury Studios)
Country legend Patsy Cline was an inspiration to so many female singers, which this special concert—recorded live at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last year—showcases with a baker’s dozen of performers ranging from country stalwarts like Wynonna and Pam Tillis to newer voices like Mickey Guyton and Sheya Shepard to Broadway stars like Kristin Chenoweth and rock stars like Pat Benatar.
Among these superb performances, highlights are Guyton’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Shepard’s “I’ve Loved and Lost Again,” Benatar’s “Imagine That” and Wynonna’s “Crazy.” Hi-def video and audio are impeccable; the accompanying CD includes the same songs.
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