Ned Beatty

"Prelude to a Kiss," named for the Duke Ellington song of the same title, is a total anomaly in contemporary American drama. And in Dan Sullivan's Broadway revival, it is also a total delight. Forsaking realism for elements of the supernatural is not...

Framed for an assassination attempt on the president, out-of-service sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg, hot off his Oscar nomination for "The Departed") flees the law and tries to expose the corrupt officials who set him up. Danny Glover, Michael Pena...

2 stars (out of four) "Shooter" feeds on a global audience's cynicism regarding the evil that men do in the name of freedom and for a good price on crude oil. Mainly, though, it's about finding different, audience-stoking ways to shoot people in the...

Think of "Sweet Land" as a gift, the kind of delicate but deeply emotional love story, both sincere and restrained, that, like love itself, is more sought after than found. Directed by Ali Selim in the Minnesota farmland where its story takes place,...

Tennessee Williams has not been treated kindly in recent New York revivals. First came a flat "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which gained buzz only when Ned Beatty publicly humiliated his co-stars Ashley Judd and Jason Patric. Then came the regrettable David...

3 stars (out of four) "Sweet Land" is a sometimes elegiac, sometimes joyous movie about an immigrant couple in the Midwestern farm belt in the 1920s and what happens to them during a time of national conservatism and clannishness. Based on Will Weaver'...

"Sweet Land" seems on the surface to be one of those movies we've all seen before and don't necessarily need to see again. But this debut feature from veteran advertisement director Ali Selim turns out to be the kind of humane, absorbing, subtly...

Of the wave of paranoid thrillers that hit theaters in the 1970s -- like "The Conversation" or "Three Days of the Condor" or "The Parallax View" -- "All the President's Men" was among the best. Every bit as breathless, pulse-pounding and twisted as its...

The cast of Stephen Sondheim's "The Frogs" has assembled at the edge of a Lincoln Center stage. They are preparing to rehearse a new song for the show's finale that Sondheim has just faxed over. The master himself is not in the theater, but his near-...

Here's an advance look at most of the movie releases through the end of the year. Due to last-minute juggling by the studios, some opening dates may change. Dec. 20 - "Thirteen Days" Drama, New Line With: Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp....

Friday December 29, 2000      Tom Gilroy's debut feature, "Spring Forward," is so fully realized and so moving that you wish you could get away with merely saying: "Go see it for yourself."      Every frame attests to the power of simplicity. It affords...

Friday April 2, 1999      Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune" is a gem among the fabled director's ensemble movies, a Southern charmer--full of good humor and mature wisdom--that views human foibles with the bemused compassion of a Jean Renoir. This...