On David Sedaris, Mike Leigh, Tracy Jordan, and being a little out of touch — A couple of friends and I found ourselves drifting around the Upper West Side after a movie at Lincoln Center, recounting our observations as a warmish breeze ran between the negative space between us. We had seen Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, the English director’s film about the creative partnership between Gilbert…

Lloyd Suh’s play has a shrewd gaze that looks back at the audience — Early in The Chinese Lady, Afong Moy (Shannon Tyo) acknowledges the preposterous artificiality of the endeavor: the dissonance between the character’s time and place and ours, the discrepancy in power between subject and object, the presentational nature of her movements and the infantilized lilt of her voice and the sonorousness…

John Doyle’s new revival is a stripped-down political striptease with little to show — In Classic Stage Company’s revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins, director and designer John Doyle has chosen to give our Lee Harvey Oswald (and erstwhile Balladeer) a dump truck ass. Even before he becomes the legend, actor Ethan Slater’s body is pit against the deeply unflattering, potentially oppressive…

Some thoughts on Marvel’s newest film and, ugh, representation — There is one savvy, striking shot early in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a brief zap of personality and style. It’s sandwiched between a bland, bordering on incoherent sequence of shots of kicks, punches, dodges, and the like, their choreography impactless, like it was still in a…

On Pablo Larraín’s latest feature — All but in the literal, the family is torched asunder, household happiness an ashy mess from which something new, more selfish, more polymorphously pragmatic can arise. Like a demented dramedy of familial reconstruction, the demon seed of a threesome between The Philadelphia Story, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Frances Ha, Chilean…

On Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris’ “Zola” and critical impulses — There’s no comparing Zola to anything else. As the opening show slowly dollies around A’Ziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige) and Stefani (Riley Keough) doing their makeup, making up their identities, in a mirror-filled void, whatever cinematic reference points one might be tempted to project onto the film are dashed away…

Pings, whistles, and the sound of limbo — If you put your lips together, even the worst whistlers among us can conjure the recent past. A little warble to pull you back half a decade ago, before Twitter phased out its little toot of a notification sound. On its own, the little sonic signal is cute, albeit flat…

On estrangement and time and cookies for closers — There is, packaged cheekily in its subtitle, an obvious double meaning in The Boss Baby: Family Business. There is the “family business” as it concerns work (and often ownership) passed down generationally, and there is “family business”, as in matters and topics and relationships within the context of the nuclear…