Author: Max Rider

Stephen Costello and Ryan Speedo Green. Karen Almond/Met Opera After its annual winter hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera reopened with a pair of productions that chronicle their protagonists’ dangerous, intensely personal quests. The journey in Moby-Dick, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic novel in its Met premiere, ends in death and destruction, while the latest revival of Beethoven’s Fidelio concludes with the victory of good over evil. If neither production could be deemed a triumph, both proved to be bright spots in what has been, so far, a pretty lackluster Met season. Condensing Melville’s vast and discursive…

Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle in The Electric State Paul Abell/Netflix The Electric State, the 2017 graphic novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, is a haunting journey through a burned-out retrofuture. The book collects dozens of landscapes following a young woman and an android traveling across an American Southwest littered with abandoned military and commercial robots, and populated only by emaciated human drones who have lost themselves to a drug-like virtual reality that the reader never sees. Alongside the art are short vignettes written from the characters’ perspectives reflecting on the collapse of their world, the nature of consciousness and…

Joy Behar (center) onstage at opening night of My First Ex-Husband at MMAC Theater on February 06, 2025 in New York City. Rob Kim/Getty Images The stage comeback of brassy media wit Joy Behar has pretty much come and gone, but the happy remnants of it are still at the MMAC Theater, an out-of-the-way theater at 248 W 60th. Behar—one of founding voices of the long running ABC talk show The View (28 years and counting)—spent most of February polishing a play of eight monologues she crafted from interviews with a diverse group of divorcees. Then she performed it with Tovah…

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag Courtesy of Focus Features. Nobody makes a cool little movie like Steven Soderbergh. Never tied down to a single genre or style, his latest is a sexy spy thriller that forsakes shootouts and explosions in favor of mind games and incisive dinner table conversation. Black Bag is light, unpretentious entertainment for grown-ups, a solid 90 minutes of pure, mostly bloodless fun.  BLACK BAG ★★★ (3/4 stars)Directed by: Steven SoderberghWritten by: David KoeppStarring: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce BrosnanRunning time: 94 mins. Married couple George Woodhouse…

Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura star in Dope Thief. Courtesy of Apple TV+ Press After they bust a small-time drug house, stealing the cash and stash of wannabe dealers, Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) tells his partner in crime Manny (Wagner Moura) that it’s all about “authority bias.” See, the two of them pose as DEA agents, scaring the living shit out of easy targets and, essentially, taking some very illicit candy from babies. So when things go off the rails and these “feds” bust down the door, people just want someone in charge, someone who tells them what to…

The company of Deep Blue Sound Maria Baranova-Suzuki Preshow announcements typically fall outside the critic’s purview, but at Deep Blue Sound it enhanced the pleasure. Producer par excellence Maria Striar, whose company Clubbed Thumb has debuted countless wonderfully strange plays over the years, greeted the audience at the Public with a note about noise. From the floor above, Striar briskly explained, might come wrestling thuds caused by the heavyset (and talented) performers of Sumo. Also, a hundred feet below, the 6 local would be rattling to and from Astor Place. Thus sonically sandwiched, we settled in. And you know what?…

Dannhy McBride and Adam Devine in season four of The Righteous Gemstones Jake Giles Netter/Courtesy of HBO Since 2019, The Righteous Gemstones has chronicled the sordid lives of America’s most revolting yet lovable Megachurch dynasty. As it enters its fourth and final season, the bawdy comedy has essentially fulfilled the promise of its initial premise: Put-upon patriarch Eli (John Goodman) has stepped aside and allowed his children Jesse (series creator Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine) to succeed him as the leaders of his empire, and the siblings have made peace, content to mercilessly rib each other…

Chloe Sonnet Brown and Cadence Giersbach’s Terra: We have not yet touched the stars with dancers Olivia Passareli and Arimee Gambill from CounterPointe11. ©Julie Lemberger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “There is no such thing as ‘women’s dances,’” Julia K. Gleich recently told Observer. “We happen to be women. We’re not trying to convince everyone that our work is better or different or special, just that we need space and time to make it.” She’s the creator and curator of CounterPointe, an annual performance series dedicated to female-led collaborations in dance and visual art that returns to Brooklyn tomorrow (March 7). She’s…

Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Comparison is the thief of joy, an adage that aptly sums up the potential response to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. The quirky sci-fi movie marks the filmmaker’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite, a film that galvanized audiences and critics with its searing take on privilege and wealth. The South Korean director has worked in English previously, including on 2013’s Snowpiercer, but it’s impossible to watch Mickey 17 without considering his prior efforts—particularly the masterful work on Parasite. That inevitable comparison is perhaps unfair.  MICKEY 17 ★★★ (3/4…

Amanda Seyfried in Seven Veils Amanda Matlovich/Courtesy of Elevation Pictures Filmmaker Atom Egoyan is at his best when he’s mining the traumatic past of a character, interweaving their formative suffering with a present existential crisis. It’s something he did memorably in films like The Sweet Hereafter, and it’s an effective approach in his most recent feature, Seven Veils. The concept is compelling meta: Up-and-coming theater director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is asked to helm a re-staging of Salome, an opera once masterfully directed by her late mentor. As she immerses herself in the production, which Egoyan actually directed twice for the…