Tom Wopat
The Metropolitan Room
Until July 31

You’ll have more fun on the cabaret scene, where two seasoned pros have cooled off the month of July like a frozen mojito. Every Thursday night, when the curtain falls on the Broadway musical A Catered Affair, Tom Wopat shakes it down to the great new Metropolitan Room at 34 West 22 Street to knock the crowds right out of their sandals. This shaggy dog looks better at 56 than he did as a pup, cutting his baby teeth on the old TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, and you gotta laugh when he tells the audience, “If you like me, I’m Tom Wopat; if you don’t, I’m John Schneider.  read more »

Lucie Arnaz
Birdland

I once wrote that Lucie Arnaz was a chip off the old blockhead. I was talking about genes, of course, but at Birdland—where she’s been knocking them wall-eyed and packing them in tight as ACE bandages—the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is very much her own star. With power, passion, a dynamic vibrato for emphasis on the swing tunes and a lemon twist for tartness on the torch songs, she’s pretty much a one-woman phenomenon. The looks? Eat your hearts out, ladies. I’ve seen her eat, so I know she doesn’t live on Bibb lettuce, but I guess she walks 18 miles a day because she’s got the same sylphlike body and the same swanlike neck she had on her mom’s old comedy shows.  read more »

TAKE
RUNNING TIME 99 minute
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Charles Oliver
STARRING Minnie Driver, Jeremy Renner

Take is another in a meaningless parade of time-wasting marquee cloggers that have been coming at us this summer in sections. Directed and written by Charles Oliver, this bargain-basement crime melodrama about anguish, violence and redemption among the socially marginalized is a kind of Dick and Jane primer of how not to make a movie that will appeal to anyone with an attention span of more than 30 minutes.

Telling parallel stories simultaneously, it starts with Ana (Minnie Driver), a poor housewife with a small son who suffers from learning disabilities.  read more »

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Hayley Atwell

Here it is at last: the intelligent movie filmgoers have waited for all year. The film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008. The 11-part 1981 miniseries was such a milestone in TV history that purists who watch the four-volume DVD set might squabble about the merits of reducing so much artistry into an almost two-and-a-half-hour film.  read more »

FELON
RUNNING TIME 104 minutes
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Ric Roman Waugh
STARRING Stephen Dorff, Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Harold Perrineau

Prison movies may not be everyone’s idea of escapist entertainment, but with nearly two million people overcrowding the U.S. penal system already and the numbers growing daily, it’s a problem worth addressing. Audiences are gruesomely fascinated by horror stories behind bars, and like the phenomenal TV series Oz, the stuff that happens in a tense, taut new movie called Felon is nothing less than electrifying.

The versatility and charisma of the dynamic, always surprising actor Stephen Dorff is the catalytic converter in this harrowing story of an innocent man caught up in America’s flawed legal system.  read more »

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree.  read more »

MAMMA MIA!
RUNNING TIME 108 minutes
WRITTEN BY Catherine Johnson
DIRECTED BY Phyllida Lloyd
STARRING Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters

Amid the summer junk-movies that are already going down in history as artifacts, some folks will welcome, I suppose, the nauseating cornball music of the Swedish pop group ABBA which pounds its way through the monumentally inconsequential Mamma Mia! To me, the popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq. And the movie they’ve made of the bafflingly popular tourist attraction still playing on Broadway is only slightly more unbearable than finding myself the real-life star of all the Saw movies rolled into one.  read more »

DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

August
Running time 88 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Austin Chick
Starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rip Torn, Robin Tunney, David Bowie

Worse still, there’s a deadly, amateurish infection going around called August, with yet another novocained performance by zombified Josh Hartnett as a dot-com Internet star named Tom Sterling, who invents a company called Landshark with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Nobody knows what Landshark does, but when Tom explains it, he says: “That’s so third quarter ’99. You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is E. Pure E. Not E commerce.  read more »

TheWackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest.  read more »