Love

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Mad Horse’s Becky Shaw peers behind the love curtain

The one who knew too much
Three months after her father's death, the two people closest to thirty-something Suzanna (Elizabeth Chambers) don't have a lot of patience for her grief, which has her reduced to a weeping mess watching bad TV under a blanket.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 08, 2012

‘Valentined’ showcases geek love at Craftland

Heart-felt
These missives don't have the swooning, steamy, bodice-ripping passion of romance novel covers.
By GREG COOK | February 08, 2012

Good Theater wrestles with love and sin

Heartplay
There's only one major problem in the love between Adam (Rob Cameron), a sarcastic would-be teacher working in retail, and Luke (Joe Bearor), an aspiring young actor.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 01, 2012

Review: Charlotte Rampling: The Look

Angelina Maccarone's portrait of the actress
Rampling's physical gifts, unimpeded by plastic surgery in their march through time, are matched by a keen mind and an unapologetic approach to life and work.
By BETSY SHERMAN | January 31, 2012

Review: New Year's Eve

Feast of forced fun
Lately Garry Marshall has shown a certain genius for turning miserable holidays into terrible movies.
By PETER KEOUGH | December 06, 2011

Review: All's Faire In Love

Scott Marshall's Renn Faire stinker
It seems that before actually performing in a Renaissance Faire, actors first have to appear in a movie about one.
By PETER KEOUGH | October 25, 2011

Review: Margaret

Unexpected situations
Kenneth Lonergan offers no resolutions in this complex and moving parable, unless it's the observation that the only resolutions in life are in art.
By PETER KEOUGH | October 04, 2011

Review: Love Crime

A deconstruction of the mystery genre
Love Crime deconstructs the genre by showing how to put together a mystery in order to deceive and manipulate those who would try to take it apart.
By PETER KEOUGH | October 04, 2011

Review: Machine Gun Preacher

White-savior storyline
Jesus does funny things to people: one day you're sitting on a toilet shooting heroin; the next you're building an orphanage in war-torn southern Sudan.
By ANN LEWINSON | September 27, 2011

Review: Girlfriend

Concerned only with the truth
One night Evan's mother (Amanda Plummer) asks him to make a wish. He says he wants a girlfriend, and his wish comes true, but at a cost.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 27, 2011

Their cheating hearts

Literary Lites
When Kristina Newman-Scott took over as director of programs for the Boston Center for the Arts in January, she was surprised at its lack of literary offerings.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | September 21, 2011

A hug beats a nod

Diverse-city
Maine may be the whitest state in the country, but it certainly isn't the straightest.
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | September 14, 2011

Review: Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star

Swardson just doesn't rise to the occasion
Of course there are copious gags about penis size and bodily fluids, but Bucky Larson could also have been a decent spoof of the porn industry, especially after Don Johnson enters the picture.
By BETSY SHERMAN | September 13, 2011

Review: Circumstance

Schoolgirls in hijabs
Circumstance begins like an early Kiarostami film, but with schoolgirls in hijabs instead of schoolboys in sweaters.
By ANN LEWINSON | September 06, 2011

Review: One Day

A love that spans 20 years
Following her stunning coming-of-age tale, An Education, Danish director Lone Scherfig returns to London for this adaptation of the bestselling novel about a love that spans 20 years.
By PEG ALOI | August 16, 2011

Review: The Names of Love

Softcore sex and politics
Child abuse, genocide — those French have a way with romantic comedies.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 16, 2011

Jesse Eisenberg and Nick Swardson get to work

Teen dreams
Following his star turn as a ruthless, if socially awkward, billionaire in David Fincher's The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg returns to the screen as a downtrodden pizza delivery boy-man in Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less. Nick Swardson plays Eisenberg's tormentor.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | August 12, 2011

Review: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Nicolas Roeg's enigmatic sci-fi film
Star Wars came out the year after Nicolas Roeg's enigmatic sci-fi film (re-released now in an uncut version), and after that no studio was likely to make anything similar again, nor would many audiences have the patience to watch it.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 10, 2011

Review: Love, etc.

Jill Andresevic documents a collection of real relationships
Jill Andresevic's simply photographed documentary springs from an equally simple premise: shoot a varied bunch of New Yorkers, young to aging, who are thinking hard about love or are involved in relationships, and see what happens to them over a few months.
By GERALD PEARY | July 26, 2011

Company One takes on Jason Grote's whirling 1001

American Nights
Grote uses the same framing device as the original One Thousand and One Nights , which begins with Shahriyar (Nael Nacer) discovering his wife's infidelity and deciding that the only way to prevent his future wives from cheating is to marry virgins, deflower them, and execute them the next morning.
By MADDY MYERS | July 26, 2011

Emotions run high at the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep

Love and misery
Summer brings the annual trio of productions by Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep. Love is the common theme of this year's plays — love and its soulmate misery, it goes without saying.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | July 26, 2011

Busy Monsters

Chapter 1, excerpted from the novel by William Giraldi
STUNNED BY LOVE and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down South to kill a man.
By WILLIAM GIRALDI | July 20, 2011

The Night Circus

Excerpted from the novel by Erin Morgenstern
The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.
By ERIN MORGENSTERN | September 14, 2011

Review: Happythankyoumoreplease

Trivial hipster quandaries
Sam Wexler (Josh Radnor, who also wrote and directed) is an asshole.
By MICHAEL C. WALSH | March 31, 2011

Review: Beastly

Soppy farce is neither beautiful nor bestial
The best part of this benighted version of Beauty and the Beast is the filigreed network of slashes, tattoos, and metalwork that class witch Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen as Gary Oldman in Dracula) inflicts on high-school pretty boy Kyle (Alex Pettyfer).
By PETER KEOUGH | March 02, 2011

Review: CTC's minimalist Romeo and Juliet

An amusing tragedy
Ah, young love. So sweet, so unguarded, so unwise. Parents can caution the younger of their teenagers all they want, but William Shakespeare has undermined their efforts by promoting the blissful aspect in Romeo and Juliet . Yes, it's a tragedy and they die at the end, but that's a minor annoyance next to their joy.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 23, 2011

Love's lexicographer

David Levithan defines affection
As the editorial director at Scholastic, David Levithan is surrounded by emotional stories about adolescents. Being overexposed to such hyperbolic feelings about feelings could easily turn a writer off pursuing such ventures himself — despite the secrets he may have picked up along the way.
By SHARON STEEL | February 10, 2011

Review: Gnomeo & Juliet

Inevitable movie allusions and a hideous flamingo don't do this animated flop any favors
Following the blighted example of Gulliver, Kelly Asbury's vapid adaptation takes a great classic and makes it stupid for the kids.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 09, 2011

Don't be an idiot

What we wish someone had told us about making the best of the college experience
We're all idiots when we're 18. We're all idiots for the first half of our 20s, and longer, for some. By saying so, we're not trying to insult anyone.
By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | January 27, 2011

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