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Arts

Il Doofy

by John Rodat May 24, 2012

I found the latest Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, The Dictator, tedious and predictable; though I’m not really a fan of Cohen’s work, I am surprised to have to use those adjectives. Cohen’s appeal is largely ...

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Passages To India

by Ann Morrow May 24, 2012

Most movies start with a concept, but rarely from a concept that could be found in real life. Yet The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is such a movie: Adapted from These Foolish Things, a novel ...

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Gentle Enough for Baby

by Laura Leon May 24, 2012

The enormous success of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and its, er, literary offspring was in large part due to the timing of its debut, which paralleled the beginning of mommy-baby chic. Not only ...

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Art Beat

by Shawn Stone May 24, 2012

UNFORGETTABLE Last year’s passing of artist-impresario Nadia Trinkala is still deeply felt in the local arts community. Beginning Friday night (May 25) at Troy Night Out, the Fulton Street Gallery (408 Fulton St., Troy) is ...

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The Secret Lives of Birds

by Darryl McGrath May 24, 2012

Nature typically grants a species a couple million years on earth, but when you consider all that humans have done to birds in just the last couple of centuries, you wish you could push a ...

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An American Triumph

by B.A. Nilsson May 24, 2012

Music is the only unmediated real-time cultural experience, which makes it potentially the most emotionally powerful. But emotional reactions can be mysterious, and therefore frightening, which is why we tend to mediate music with pictures ...

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Long In the Fangs

by Ann Morrow May 16, 2012

Long before there was True Blood, or Twilight, or even The Vampire Lestat, there was Barnabas Collins—the first of the sympathetic mainstream vampires, a bloodsucker with a flair for human-style melodrama and a devotion to ...

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Digging In the Dirt

by rwydro May 16, 2012

Director John Sowle’s set design at Stageworks/Hudson makes it easy to see why The Mound Builders was the late Lanford Wilson’s favorite play. While the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly or Hot L Baltimore or Burn ...

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The Gang’s All Here

by Shawn Stone May 10, 2012

This flick is pretty darn good. Millions have seen it. If you’re going to the movies this weekend, it’s statistically likely you’ll buy a ticket for The Avengers. Why not let’s give it three and ...

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Twits

by Laura Leon May 10, 2012

Judging from the popularity of Michelle Obama’s J Crew cardigans, ballet shoes and dirndl skirts, “prep,” as style and visual conceit, might have made a minor comeback in the last few years. But it’s a ...

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Savagely Funny

by John Rodat May 10, 2012

For a play with such an apocalyptic title, the setting and stakes of God of Carnage are mundane: Two couples, the Raleighs and the Novaks, meet in the Cobble Hill apartment of the latter, to ...

0 comments Capital Repertory Theatre

Remain In Light

by Ann Morrow May 10, 2012

It was gray and drizzly on the afternoon of May 8, yet the interior of the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany glowed with a supernal radiance. It emanated from the gallery walls, which were ...

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Punchy

by Shawn Stone May 2, 2012

When is the fighting going to start? That’s the question that pops into one’s head when settling in to watch a Jason Statham movie. Statham is the preeminent action star of our day, with a cinematic ...

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Dumb Love

by Laura Leon May 2, 2012

The Five Year Engagement starts out cute—in fact, really cute, although not in a way that makes you cringe (that comes later). Tom (Jason Segal) proposes to Violet (Emily Blunt) on a romantic San Fran ...

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Hack Work

by Ann Morrow May 2, 2012

A tale more grotesque than arabesque, The Raven replaces Edgar Allan Poe’s “opulent imagination” with a standard-issue horror story. Though it stars Poe himself (John Cusack), the plot is merely an excuse to fill in ...

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Real People

by Shawn Stone April 26, 2012

If action is character, then young Cyril (Thomas Doret) can’t run away from himself fast enough. The titular “kid with a bike” in the Dardenne brothers’ latest chamber drama is angry and hurt for good ...

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Game Changer

by Laura Leon April 26, 2012

A few years ago, comedian Steve Harvey came out with a book called Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man, which outlined a new—or rather, an old—playbook for women to follow if they wanted ...

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Still Unnamable

by Josh Potter April 26, 2012

The Flame Alphabet By Ben Marcus Knopf, 289 pages, $25.95 In the world that Ben Marcus renders, the writing of a novel would be a fatal act of violence—to the reader and author alike. It’s an irony that ...

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Art Beat

by Shawn Stone April 26, 2012

DON’T TRY THE COBBLER The big news this week is the opening of the regional premiere of Yasmina Reza’s hit comedy God of Carnage at Capital Repertory Theatre (111 N. Peal St., Albany). It’s been ...

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Out of the Ruins

by Shawn Stone April 18, 2012

The title of Terence Davies’ soulful film based on Terence Rattigan’s play has nothing to do with the ocean. It refers to the idiom (and Tin Pan Alley standard) in which someone laments being caught ...

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A Kick in the Head

by Laura Leon April 18, 2012

When I was a little girl, watching the Three Stooges, like The Andy Griffith Show, seemed completely a guy thing. Truly, other than my mother, I didn’t know any females who regularly watched, or enjoyed, ...

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Art Beat

by Shawn Stone April 18, 2012

RETURN ENGAGEMENT Choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey first performed TOOL IS LOOT in EMPAC’s Studio 2 as a work-in-progress in June 2011. This weekend, with Jonathan Bepler, they return to perform the finished work ...

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The Human Dimension

by Laura Leon April 11, 2012

The transformation of the 1997 sensation, Titanic, into 3D may seem like a mere gimmick, designed to propel millions of kids who never saw the original back to the multiplex for a first gander. OK, ...

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A Royal Pain

by Ann Morrow April 11, 2012

The Material Girl directs a movie about material culture in W.E., Madonna’s utterly meaningless biopic about “the romance of the century” between Wallis Simpson, an American social climber, and Edward, Prince of Wales, who abdicated ...

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Where Were You?

by B.A. Nilsson April 11, 2012

The concert was phenomenal. Where were the people? It would be depressing if it weren’t so absurd. The night before The Knights appeared at Troy Music Hall, they performed in Manhattan at WQXR’s Greene Space ...

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