Clare Brennan directs Savannah Reich’s 2017 silly/smart comedy about the dawn of civilization—and the audience gets to decide how it works out in the end. Dandelion (Tess Galbiati) and Rocky (Jack Rodgers) are the world’s first farmers. They’ve moved indoors. They’ve even adopted a cat—albeit a talking, often aggravated tiger called Douglas (Evan Cullinan)—and are […]
Author Archives: Dmitry Samarov
Posted inTheater Review
Purgatory in a dystopian disco
Set in a place that is equal parts dystopian disco and minimal sci-fi torture dungeon (set and costumes designed by Natasha Djukic), Zeljko Djukic directs Adam Ranđelović’s adaptation from Daniel Gerould’s translation of Stanisław Witkiewicz’s tragicomic 1919 piece of existentialist hand-wringing. Plasfodor (Kevin Webb)—married to the mute Mamalia (Venice Averyheart), who dances her words rather […]
Posted inTheater Review
Dark comedy goes nuclear in Cat’s Cradle
Heather Currie directs John Hildreth’s laugh-a-minute adaptation Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire about the U.S. nuclear program and all-around ignorant hubris. The story is told in flashback by a writer, possibly named Jonah, or maybe John (Tony Bozzuto), trying to write a book about the end of the world while perhaps living through said event. […]
Posted inFilm
Review: The Unknown Country
A solitary figure in a car traversing the American West in a movie can be as iconic as it is innocuous: a placeholder for every kind of journey, be it spiritual or material; a seeking of or a fleeing from.
Posted inTheater Review
The Art of Bowing gives us too much of nothing
Ian Damont Martin directs the world premiere of Nathan Alan Davis’s post-everything meta intergalactic meditation on what it’s all about. Akwasi (David Goodloe)—on a bare stage save for a blinding, bare light bulb on a stand—tells the audience that theater’s dead and that he’s not an actor. He’s joined by Enoch (Beck Nolan), who has […]
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Review: Love, Deutschmarks and Death
When West Germany began to invite guest workers from Turkey to fill the lower echelon positions in the country’s growing economy in 1955, the newcomers brought along their own music to remind them of the home they left behind. Seamlessly blending archival footage with talking heads and pithy informational intertitles, director Cem Kaya tells the […]
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Review: The Quince Tree Sun
In the fall of 1990, the Madrid-based realist painter Antonio López García set himself the seemingly humble task of painting the quince tree in his yard that he’d planted four years before. Known for his exacting fidelity in depicting the seen world, he uses a plumb line, puts posts in the ground to make sure […]
Posted inTheater Review
Shakespearean shaggy dog
For Midsommer Flight’s tenth annual production of free Shakespeare in Chicago’s parks, the company has chosen as shaggy a dog story as the Bard had in his quiver. In ancient Britain, Princess Imogen secretly weds Posthumus to get out of marrying her stepmother’s odious son, Cloten. What follows includes (but is not limited to) alleged […]
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Revelation and celebration
The 12-film retrospective presented at the Gene Siskel Film Center, under the questionable title of “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” will introduce audiences to the work of a fiercely personal artist.
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Review: Daliland
Salvador Dalí was a pioneer of fame for its own sake; the less said about his art, the better.
Posted inArts & Culture
No grand statements here
Vincent van Gogh is to art museums what the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix are to the recording industry—times are tough or run out of ideas? Trot out tried-and-true cash cows and sit counting the receipts. To buttress their case, the Art Institute has filled out their slate of summer blockbusters with another dead-too-soon ringer, Georges […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Poetic misdirection
I’m always a little in awe of people who can collaborate on any creative project, but two people working as equals on a single canvas is well near unimaginable. For the 40 years I’ve been painting, the idea to invite anyone to so much as doodle on the margins of one of my pictures has […]
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Review: Reality
By presenting testimony without editorializing, the film becomes a searing indictment of a country that routinely punishes low-level true believers while rewarding traitors and opportunists up the food chain for their treachery.
Posted inTheater Review
Bowie in Warsaw serves up a moonage nightmare
Paweł Świątek directs the U.S. premiere of Dorota Masłowska’s arch 70s-era murder mystery/comedy of manners (translated by Soren Gauger). Rumors fly wild in the streets of Warsaw about a mythical stalker terrorizing the citizenry while the true villain pervading their society seems to be a blanketing existential despair. In the last days of Soviet hegemony, […]
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Review: You Hurt My Feelings
Definitely one to watch the way most people do with SNL: wait till the highlights hit YouTube and skip the rest.