Folie a trois: Challengers Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts, But What Parts!
Nonlinear storytelling can be a clever method of making us care about movie characters more than we ought. We’re enthralled by the sociopathic killers, crooks, pushers, and palookas who populate Pulp Fiction, The Limey, and Memento. We empathize with the amoral, oblivious coders of The Social Network. And in Challengers, an all’s-fair-in-love-and-tennis melodrama from Call…
Code Breaker: 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder Was Designed to Push Boundaries
You need only get a few seconds into Anatomy of a Murder (1959) before you realize it’s not the film you thought it would be. When you hear the words “Jimmy Stewart” and “courtroom drama” in short succession in the description, you expect a Capraesque affirmation of the American justice system. You assume the opening…
Unknown Soldier: A Valiant Quest With an Underwhelming Conclusion
It’s easy to sit in a dark theater, listen to a tuneful new musical, and thoroughly enjoy yourself. All it takes is pleasant piano, decent voices, and interesting visual elements. Yet upon leaving, you can still turn to your companion and say, “Wow, that show has some issues.” Such is the case with Unknown Soldier,…
Forget Sticks and Stones, Words Hurt in Webster’s Bitch
Words matter. And in Jacqueline Bircher’s Webster’s Bitch, they truly cut deep. From Disney evoking its First Amendment right to fire actor Gina Carano over hateful social media posts to J.K. Rowling’s damaging and backward stance against trans lives, is it even worth it to ask if words have no impact on the world around…
What Happens After the Paint Dries? The Thought and Upkeep Behind Outdoor Public Art
On a cloudy, dewy morning at the Congressional Cemetery, unleashed dogs and their human companions roam freely as a man crouches between gravestones and inspects one of his 150 mirror sculptures. In March, D.C.-based artist Tommy Bobo installed the first commissioned public art for the cemetery, featuring mirrors staked into the ground at about shin…
Anna Deavere Smith and a Chocolate Festival: City Lights for April 25 to May 1
Thursday: Oneohtrix Point Never at Howard Theatre Don’t forget this show highlighted in last week’s City Lights: “Daniel Lopatin, who performs and creates under the moniker Oneohtrix Point Never, constructs sample-heavy, synthesizer-forward compositions that conjure a sense of tuneful existential dread.” Friday: Mariah Stovall at Lost City Books As a literary agent, Mariah Stovall is…
Undesign the Redline Explores the Racist Housing Policies that Shaped Upper Northwest
Do you know the story of how the land for Fort Reno Park and Alice Deal Junior High School (now Deal Middle School) was allocated? The land originally housed the Reno community, a majority-Black section of Ward 3. But in the 1930s, D.C. used eminent domain to forcibly remove almost 400 families living in the…
A Jumping-Off Point Only Scratches the Surface of Race and Gender Dynamics in Hollywood
“It’s all fiction,” says Leslie (Nikkole Salter), a Black writer leading her own HBO (MAX) show in playwright Inda Craig-Galván’s world premiere play A Jumping-Off Point. The line is delivered as a bit of wry wisdom, but the flippancy of it undercuts the compromises and mistakes Leslie has made to get this point. In this…
Olney’s Pitch-Perfect Islander Plays on Loop
It begins with a pitched sigh from the depths of the belly, lingering for a moment before the button gets pushed. Originating millimeters from the microphone’s waffled cap, the forced air grows tighter and fuller, morphing into a pulsating, gentle “shhhh.” Another push. Like a descant above a meditative symphony, the kinetic crackle of a…
Brothers, Vibrant Colors, and a Shared Abstraction: Two Reasons to Visit Touchstone Gallery
Making artful aerial photographs of despoiled landscapes is hardly a pathbreaking artistic genre, but damned if Tom McMurray’s color-saturated images of scarred mining landscapes in the sprawling Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia aren’t gorgeous—guiltily so. McMurray is based in Boulder, Colorado, but he was part of a team of photographers and filmmakers who…
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