J Todd Harris

Wine may be sunlight held together by water, as Galileo said, but " Bottle Shock" is held together only by Alan Rickman. It's interesting, given how the actor has built so many exquisite characterizations on the foundation of a certain look, that of a...

3½ stars (out of four) The sometimes magical people who populate the movie "Disappearances"--primarily a feisty Vermont clan on a raid to steal illegal Canadian whiskey from a notorious whiskey pirate during Prohibition--obviously don't know their own...

Vroom. Vroom vroom. Vrrroooooomvrrrroooooommm. VRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOM. Hey, keep it down, willya? I can't hear the heavy-metal music. Imagine a motorcycle movie scored by Vivaldi. Now erase it from your mind. The motorcycle movie, needless to say, is a...

"The Burial Society" is a crafty little crime film that mixes Old Testament wisdom with an O. Henry plot. Written and directed by Canadian Nicholas Racz, the film features fine performances by a cast of veteran actors but is marred by its unconvincing...

C. Jay Cox's "Latter Days" is a love story involving two people from such radically different worlds that it is inevitable their lives will be turned upside-down, never to be the same. Yet Cox expresses a profound belief in the transforming power of love,...

Friday May 11, 2001      Playwright Del Shores has long been an acclaimed mainstay of local theater--and a veteran TV writer as well. With their crowd-pleasing blend of wisdom and laughter, his plays--"Daddy's Dyin' . . . Who's Got the Will?," for...

What's it all about, alky? For Tulley (Anthony LaPaglia), the failed writer and self-loathing lush at the center of Mike Bencivenga's depressing drama of co-dependence, "Happy Hour," it's about Dad, mostly. Tulley published some stories years ago and...

Friday April 12, 1996      Meet Frank, Barbara, Martin, Gale, Jerry, Linda and, of course, Denise. Please. Because even though they're all great friends, they won't meet one another. Not in person. Not ever.      "Denise Calls Up," one of the surprise...

Friday September 11, 1998      "Digging to China," actor Timothy Hutton's directorial debut, has managed modest theatrical distribution, but it's a decidedly small-screen endeavor. The film benefits from a strong performance from newcomer Evan Rachel...

Friday August 27, 1999      Who better, or so you might think, to play the lead in "Dudley Do-Right" than Brendan Fraser, an actor whose persona contains so much of the straight-arrow Canadian Mountie that you could run a retrospective of his career...