I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.
David EdelsteinIt's hard for comic actors used to pulling faces just to be on screen, but Tina Fey does a good job. I liked watching her. The part, though, isn't filled in. When Baker announces that she's gotten too used to the madness of Afghanistan, that she's worried she's thinking of it as normal, the sentiment comes out of nowhere. The dramatic arc in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is nonexistent. The movie evaporates in the mind like water in the Afghan desert.
David EdelsteinSome reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.
David EdelsteinDespite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.
David EdelsteinMy reaction to 'Sin City' is easily stated. I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. A tad hypocritical? Yes. But sometimes you think, Well, I'll just go to hell.
David EdelsteinKing Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept.. then there's Clive Owen, rising above it all. Aloof yet watchful, the actor cultivates an inner stillness that is perfect for faintly ironic brooders. He neither distances himself from this risible material nor pulls out the stops and opens himself to ridicule. His King Arthur tells us little about Arthur, but much about protecting one's flank. The mark of a box-office king?
David Edelstein