We’ll Always Have Casablanca: Allied, reviewed.

Here’s my review of Robert Zemeckis’ high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. In my NPR review I note it’s meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious or Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

Pop Culture Happy Hour No. 322: Arrival and Seratonin-Boosting Pop Culture

I was delighted as always to join my friends Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Jessica Reedy for this week’s badly-needed Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein no one mentions politics at all because that’s not how we do on this show. Here’s the episode.

Halo, Goodbye: Bleed for This, reviewed.

Here’s my NPR review of Bleed for This, writer-director Ben Younger’s new biopic about super middleweight champion Vinny Paz’s unlikely-but-true comeback from a massive injury. Not essential, but not bad.

Desert Heat: Lazy Eye, reviewed.

I wrote this review of writer-director Tim Kirkman’s romantic drama Lazy Eye the day after the election. It’s not a pan, but I think I owe Kirkman that disclaimer anyway. It was difficult to focus on a movie that day, especially one about gay people made by a gay person. The world just got a lot more frightening—a little more for LGBT folk than for straight folk like me, but only a little.

Doctor Strange, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Review Movies on the Radio

Something new for me: Reviewing movies on the radio. Here’s my Weekend Edition Sunday assessment of Doctor Strange, wherein Marvel hands the role of brilliant, arrogant, goateed rich-guy Avenger from Robert Downey, Jr., the most recent movie Sherlock Holmes, to Benedict Cumberbatch to the most recent TV Sherlock Holmes.

The Passion of the Christlike: Hacksaw Ridge, reviewed.

My NPR review of Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson’s new movie about World War II conscientious objector and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond T. Doss, is here.

Fight Call: On the Welders’ new MMA play The Girl in the Red Corner

Today’s Washington City Paper has a feature from me about a new play from the DC theatre collective The Welders set in the milieu of mixed martial arts. It’s by Stephen Spotswood, a prolific dramatist whose work I have followed with interest for the last five years or so, and it’s the first play about a bloodsport here in DC since Studio Theatre did Sucker Punch in early 2012. (I did a feature on that one, too.) You can use the link above, or pick up a dead-tree copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Audrey Bertaux and Jennifer J. Hopkins grapple in rehearsal for The Girl in the Red Corner. (Photo: Darrow Montgomery)