26 ARTS Review of reviews: Stage & Film
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amel“It’s a rare pleasure to encounter
a movie so genuinely strange
you’re not sure how to define
what you’ve just seen,” said
Sara Stewart in the New York
Post. “By turns funny, sinister,
haunting, and mythical,” the
second feature from the director
of The Witch is “one of the best
films of the year.” Willem Dafoe
and Robert Pattinson co-star as
a salty lighthouse keeper and the new assistant he
torments with backbreaking labor and a string of
insults delivered in an authentic 1890s sailor’s dia-
lect. Shot on black-and-white film in a boxy aspect
ratio, The Lighthouse “has the feel of an early cin-ema reel,” said Manuela Lazic
in TheRinger.com. Its “strik-
ingly beautiful” look blurs the
line between fantasy and reality
as cabin fever sets in, and “it’s
impossible to say” which of the
two men is losing his mind when
a storm bears down and the
movie’s mythic tone gives way to
feverish visions. With each of his
first two films, director Robert
Eggers has reached into distant American history and
“injected it with wild, menacing enchantment and
terror,” said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox.com. He’s “like
a kid flipping rocks over and finding creepy-crawlies
underneath that rear their heads and bite.”Welcome back, Eddie Murphy,
said David Sims in The
Atlantic. The faded comedy
star appears revitalized in this
new movie about Rudy Ray
Moore, a performer best known
for Dolemite, a “so-bad-it’s-
good” 1975 blaxploitation film
in which he played a rhyming,
kung fu–kicking pimp who takes
on crooked cops with the help of
an army of women. That movie transformed Moore
from a fading stand-up performer to an underground
star, and while Dolemite Is My Name proves “per-
fectly charming” as a biopic, “it’s most exciting to
watch as a reminder of just how good Murphy canbe when he’s committed to the
material.” Murphy shares screen
time here with Chris Rock,
Tituss Burgess, Craig Robinson,
Keegan-Michael Key, and Wesley
Snipes, “all of them great fun
to watch,” said A.O. Scott in
The New York Times. But the
easy humor—and the movie’s
insistence on treating Moore as
essentially the same clownish
hustler he portrayed—greatly lowers the dramatic
stakes. “It’s almost alarming how breezily the film
goes down,” said David Edelstein in NYMag.com.
Still, it’s an “award-worthy” effort, one that gives
Murphy “his best material in decades.”The
Lighthouse
A pair of 19th-century
‘wickies’ battle insanity.++++
Directed by Robert Eggers
(Not rated)Dolemite Is
My Name
A has-been restyles himself
for B-movie stardom.++++
Directed by Craig Brewer
(R)Madmen Dafoe and PattinsonMurphy’s throwback hustlerMore than a fleeting
succès de scandale,
Jeremy O. Harris’ debut
drama rates as “one of
the best and most pro-
vocative new works to
show up on Broadway in
years,” said Jesse Green
in The New York Times.
Ten months after it cre-
ated a stir in a brief run
in a smaller venue, Slave
Play opens with the same
incitements: interlocked scenes of three
interracial couples engaging in sex acts that
involve whips, bondage gear, and costumes
suggesting an antebellum plantation. “But
sex is more than titillation in Slave Play; it
is the crucible in which Harris performs a
thought experiment.” His script soon will
reveal that—spoiler alert—we are in fact
watching present-day couples engaged in a
form of role-playing therapy. The real ques-
tion: Is there any place in America where a
white person can see a black American as
that person wishes to be seen?Kalukango and NolanSlave Play
Golden Theatre, New York City, (212) 947-8844 ++++“Harris’ format is
undeniably clever,” said
Johnny Oleksinski in
the New York Post. But
shortly after the big
reveal, this two-hour
show “fast dissolves
into an academic essay.”
As the couples dissect
their experiences in
therapy sessions, the
jabs aimed at white lib-
erals barely sting. Slave
Play becomes, at best, “the sort of show
you see to say you’ve seen it.” Still, it leaves
no viewer unscathed, said Tamara Best in
TheDailyBeast.com. The black characters
have emotional work they must do, too,
and when Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango)
erupts at her conversation-dominating
white partner, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan),
then calms down and thanks him for finally
listening, “I couldn’t help but think that the
‘thank you’ was not just for Jim but all of
us too—a polite and exhausted coda to a
singular Broadway experience.”On other stages...
Linda Vista
Hayes Theatre,
New York City
++++
The central
character in
Tracy Letts’
new study of
midlife crisis
is “miserable,
but entertainingly so,” said Bilge Ebiri
in NYMag.com. Newly single at 50, Dick
Wheeler, as played by Ian Barford, is self-
deprecating and “eloquently embittered.”
But when Wheeler relaunches his roman-
tic life, this “lovely, funny, and sad” play
doesn’t side with him; it reveals that
beneath, he really is an entitled jerk. In
essence, “the play is about every old
white guy’s fears of what he might, or
maybe has, become as the world moves
on,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago
Tribune. Wheeler has a touch of self-
awareness, but he still wrecks the lives
of the women he sleeps with. Will any
give him a second chance? Is redemp-
tion even possible? “The question for
anyone buying a ticket will be whether
or not you can bring yourself to care.”Barford with Caroline Neff