Arts

The Arts

Elvis

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Elvis

Baz Luhrmann has always had a flair for the operatic, sometimes literally so. The Australian writer-director-designer loves to tell stories on a grand scale. The bigger the emotions, the flashier the production values. Romeo and Juliet, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Great Gatsby have all made appearances in his films. Now his spotlight turns to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. Well, partially, anyway.

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Jurassic World Dominion

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Jurassic World Dominion

According to the real-life paleontologists, dinosaurs disappeared from Earth 66 million years ago. To judge by the sixth entry in the Jurassic Park franchise, its fresh story ideas have been exhausted as well. The original wonder has waned.

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Top Gun: Maverick

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Top Gun: Maverick

For the longest time, it just wouldn’t fly. A sequel to Top Gun {1986), one of the highest-grossing movies of its decade. The movie that made the charismatic Tom Cruise box office gold. Even when the sequel finally came to fruition, the pandemic delayed its release by two years.

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Downton Abbey: A New Era

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Downton Abbey: A New Era

If you’re a devoted fan of Downton Abbey, the global television phenomenon now back on the big screen, that line certainly rings true. Creator and writer Julian Fellowes, director Simon Curtis (the real-life husband of Elizabeth McGovern/Cora Grantham), a superb ensemble cast and composer John Lunn have crafted another period piece drama brimming with intelligence, emotion, wit and humanity. As with the first feature film incarnation, A New Era preaches eloquently to the choir. Even with a prologue offered by Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) in which he recounts the plot of the 2019 movie, you can’t begin to appreciate the resonance of this storytelling without having your own history with these characters going back a dozen years now.

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Men

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Men

Sometimes a filmmaker tells a story so dense, so deliberately ambiguous, so deeply rooted in symbolic imagery that you realize you’re either intrigued by and invested in the narrative or you’re utterly defeated by the process. The memory of Men, a hallucinatory study in toxic masculinity, will linger long after the closing credits.

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Semyon Bychkov, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Vienna, Austria in 2017.

As Performing Artists Denounce Or Stay Allied With Putin, History Offers Some Lessons

Russia reveres its high arts heritage of classical music and ballet. But Western European and American arts organizations are canceling appearances by performers who have financial or personal ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, including some of Russia’s biggest stars. At the same time, some Russian and Russian-born artists have been speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine.

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