‘The Great Lillian Hall’ Review: Jessica Lange Is Grand as a Legendary Stage Actress Confronting Dementia

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It may now be hard to imagine, but in 1970, Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, was the coolest movie star on the planet. The moment I saw him in “MASH,” I knew he was the person I wanted to be, the same way that I wanted to be Mick Jagger or Steve McQueen. In 1970, Pacino and De Niro hadn’t happened yet.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic On November 16, 1964, when she was 18, Liza Minnelli stepped onto the stage of the London Palladium to join in a concert given by her mother, Judy Garland — the first time the two of them appeared onstage together. Liza, the year before, had done an Off Broadway musical, but this performance was her entrée into the world spotlight.

The Munich International Film Festival will screen 152 films from 53 countries during its 41st edition, which runs from June 28 to July 6. 

Emmy, SAG and Golden Globe winner Sarah Paulson is now the proud new owner of a Tony, too. The actress best known for her work in the American Horror Story franchise took home the gold Sunday for Best Actress in a Play for her work in Appropriate.“As a young actress I remember seeing Janet McTeer burst on the stage in A Doll’s House in the very theater I am currently living in,” said Paulson about doing Appropriate at the Belasco Theatre in NYC. “And some nights when I’m backstage I think about the indelible impact of her. I think about the walls of theaters all over this magical town holding the impact of each and every one of you in this room, and all of those who came before and I think how lucky those walls are to bear witness to the relentless interrogation of human experience that we endeavor to explore nightly for each other, to give back to one another with the hope of finding some shared path towards the truth about being alive. This is the heart and soul of what we do, and I am so honored to be amongst you.”

The best of Broadway was celebrated at the 2024 Tony Awards!

Broadway‘s busy, busy 2023-24 season has been building to Sunday night for months, with new show after new show crowding the spring and making for what promises to be — in some categories anyway — a race tighter than the rock band of Stereophonic. Ok, maybe not that tight, but what is?

reported last June that Tony-winning “Shucked” actor Alex Newell strolled in at 6 a.m.“It was already ‘Last call.’ The hotel venue was officially shutting. And in flounces Alex,” Cindy wrote.Unhinged glamor is the vibe of the gathering, hosted by PR man Rick Miramontez and his husband, Jamie DuMont, since 2009, when it was a more intimate (and secret) affair in the Royal Suite with the ragtag hippies of “Hair.” Their 15-year-old soiree, which is also co-hosted by John Gore, was inspired by the wild dinners Joan Didion and her husband would throw in Malibu, Calif., during the 1960s and ’70s, when they’d make 2 a.m.

It’s a rainy and blustery Friday morning at the UK’s largest retail park, but Middlebrook remains busy with shoppers stocking up for the weekend. The shopping outlet, alongside Bolton Wanderers Toughsheet Stadium, is in the heart of the Bolton West constituency with incumbent MP Chris Green winning by a margin of 8,855 at the last election in 2019.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Overflowing with insight; stuffed with bracing interviews and anecdotes and archival footage; as bursting with flavor as a baked ziti; and as immersive, in its way, as the show itself, “Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos” is Alex Gibney’s sensationally artful and engrossing two-hour-and-40-minute documentary about the greatest show in the history of television. If you’re a fanatic for “The Sopranos” (and who isn’t?), you probably already know a fair amount about how the show came to be, and “Wise Guy,” for a while, treads familiar ground.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Inside Out 2,” Riley, the displaced tween from “Inside Out,” is now 13 years old (the voice role is taken over, with vivid nuance, by Kensington Tallman), which means that she’s on the verge of a whole new set of emotions. In the Headquarters of her brain, a siren flashes (it’s the one we saw in the earlier film marked Puberty), which means it’s time for renovation workers to bust into the place, tear down the walls, and install a new console that can accommodate Riley’s budding adolescent feelings. The original quintet of Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and the beloved Joy (Amy Poehler) are still around, but they’re now “suppressed emotions,” shoved to the back of her mind.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Freshly Cut Grass,” there’s a scene that captures how people who’ve been married for a while, and are in the thick of raising children, can snipe at each other in dog-whistle ways that mean nothing and everything. Pablo (Joaquín Furriel), a professor at an agronomy college (he basically instructs his students about dirt), says that he thinks his teaching job is “shitty.” But his wife, Carla (Romina Peluffo), has no job at all (and is up for an interview), so she takes his comment as an insult. She snaps at him, then apologizes and lays her head on his shoulder; we think their snit is over.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “McVeigh,” a drama about Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, is a movie rooted in the forlorn underbelly of small-town American rage. A car snakes its way along an empty road in the desolate dusk.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of all the heady-cool, matrix-of-reality, the-digital-future-is-now movies released in 1999, “Run Lola Run” may have been the 1999iest. Sure, “The Matrix” was the sci-fi landmark that bullet-timed audiences into the 21st century. But science-fiction movies have always looked ahead.

Finding a Conservative voter in the safe Labour seat of Stretford and Urmston is not too difficult. But on our visit to speak to voters, finding one who thinks the Tories have got a chance of winning the General Election on July 4 was more like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If there are five ages of man, maybe there are four ages of “Bad Boys.” There’s the early age — the original “Bad Boys” came out in 1995 — of youthful effrontery: zappy, flashy, mouthy, decadent. There’s the age when the heroes start to say, “We’re too old for this shit!” There’s the age when they’re too old to even be saying that.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you want to know how the definition of “scandal” has changed with the decades, you couldn’t do much better than to see “Taking Venice,” Amei Wallach’s highly enjoyable and revealing documentary about a legendary uproar in the art world. The film chronicles what happened at the 1964 Venice Biennale — the exhibition of contemporary art, held every two years, that culminates in the awarding of an esteemed grand prize. At the time, the Biennale was considered to be a kind of art-world equivalent of the Olympic Games.

Towards the end of Paula Vogel’s hit Broadway drama Mother Play, all dialogue comes to a halt for 12 long, mesmerizing minutes, and Jessica Lange is on stage, alone, for every second of them. Her character Phyllis – the mother of the title, based on the mother of the playwright – has alienated her two adult children, Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Carl (Jim Parsons), after a lifetime of pretty odious behavior, most damningly her abandonment of the son she seemingly loved as he’s dying of AIDS. Set in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Mother Play, directed by Tina Landau, is based on Vogel’s real-life family events, including the death of her beloved brother, and knowing the source only makes the tragedy onstage more affecting.

I am a sucker for movies about Broadway and those who spend their lives in the theatre. Of course the crown jewel of the genre is the Oscar-winning All About Eve, but there are so many others including 1933’s Morning Glory which won a young Katherine Hepburn her first Academy Award, as well as its rarely seen remake, 1958’s underrated Stage Struck. Ginger Rogers did a good one, too: Forever Female. The list goes on and on and now includes a stellar new entry, The Great Lillian Hall which gives the great Jessica Lange a challenging role worth her talents.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, one of the shrewdest things a movie can do is to have its hero act in a way that’s not heroic or admirable or even very likable. In “Ezra,” Max Bernal (Bobby Cannavale), a stand-up comedian with a chip on his shoulder (he used to write for late night; now he performs edgy sets in places like the Comedy Cellar), is in a state of confused fury over what to do about his son, Ezra (William A. Fitzgerald), an owlish 11-year-old who’s autistic.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic If Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer on most Americans’ calendars, then it makes sense that the real tentpole kicking off tent season for a lot of people is not “Furiosa” or “Garfield” but “The Beach Boys,” a streaming documentary devoted to the least wintery group of all time. The Disney+ film, co-directed by music-doc stalwarts Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, focuses on the first decade and a half, in the 1960s and ’70s, of the career of the rock band that still might rightfully be considered America’s greatest all-time group.