Kyle Smith

1 week ago | wsj.com | Kyle Smith

We paid to hear Denzel do Othello, not your munching. The place: New York City’s venerable Palace Theatre on a weeknight in early April. The audience is eagerly awaiting Act One, Scene One of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 landmark, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” this time starring a freshly minted Oscar winner, Kieran Culkin, as the conniving master salesman Ricky Roma. The time is 7:35. The lights go down. The play begins, and . . . Rrrrrrrip crinkle crinkle goes the bag being torn open behind me.

1 week ago | wsj.com | Kyle Smith

War: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. “Warfare” is attuned to both sensations. After a squad of Navy SEALs takes over a building in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, the men take turns serving as snipers, carefully raking their gaze across the villagers looking for warning signs. Ten minutes go by without event. Fifteen. Every second of this is riveting. Then: bedlam.

1 week ago | wsj.com | Kyle Smith

On a superspy scale from, say, 001 to 007, Charlie Heller rates about a negative 005. That’s how many floors underground his office at CIA headquarters sits. As played by Rami Malek in “The Amateur,” this desk nerd uses his knowledge of an agency coverup to try to blackmail superiors into letting him have a go at fieldwork. Sure, responds the senior officer. And maybe Charlie would like an Aston Martin and a jet pack as well?

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Kyle Smith

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck direct a four-chapter film set in 1980s California that is unabashedly trashy and Tarantino-esque. The feature-length anthology “Freaky Tales” is joyfully anchored in a specific time and place: It’s 1987 Oakland, Calif., where we’re told there’s a cosmic green glow that infuses everything with a mystical power. There is indeed a recognizable vibe to the film, but it is derived from a somewhat more mundane force: the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Kyle Smith

The videogame’s oddball spirit shines through in this Hollywood adaptation starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa“A Minecraft Movie” was always going to be weird considering the nuttiness of the videogame franchise upon which it is based: blocky pink sheep, skeletons firing flaming arrows, a cube called the Orb. But cheers to Warner Bros. for embracing the weird by choosing director Jared Hess, whose deadpan 2004 debut, “Napoleon Dynamite,” was so awkward it was sublime.