The citizens of Woodstock really love their Town Hall Theatre. In 1928, they ponied up to repair it after a fire; in the 1980s, they undertook an extensive restoration. And this past year, when it became clear that THT’s cinema would have to go digital or go dark, like others around the nation, a new generation of townspeople reached into their wallets.... Read more

It’s never boring to see a new take on an old story, even when the results go off the rails. Director Zack Snyder, writer David S. Goyer and cowriter-producer Christopher Nolan appear to have approached their revamping of the DC Comics hero with genuine excitement. This is a Superman movie with no bespectacled Clark Kent or inexplicably deceived Lois Lane, no Lex Luthor and no Kryptonite, and watching how the filmmakers replace those stock elements is absorbing.... Read more

When a movie provokes a ton of earnest online discussion and pisses off the talking heads at FOX News, it can’t be all bad, can it? It can.

The Purge is a huge teaser of a daringly absurd premise without a story to match. It’s a routine home-invasion thriller dressed up as a chilling dystopian vision of antigovernment ideologies run amok.... Read more

Earth’s climate is screwed, folks like Bill McKibben tell us. If we flatlined our carbon emissions this instant, we’d still have a dark and uncertain future. But Hollywood doesn’t do dark and uncertain. This sci-fi adventure from the minds of mega-star Will Smith and writer-director M. Night Shyamalan proposes a simple, elegant alternative: So we screwed our planet. Let’s find another one!... Read more

Chances are, if you live in the Burlington area, you’ve seen Ben Aleshire doing stuff around town: typing up poems to order at the farmers market, showing his art at the BCA Center, playing trumpet with Vermont Joy Parade, perhaps even wearing a smoking jacket. But have you ever seen him interviewing Jared Leto?... Read more

Fast & Furious 6 ends with a title card that advises viewers not to try the stunts they’ve just seen at home. This disclaimer set off giggles and guffaws at the Majestic 10, and no wonder. The street racing from long-ago series opener The Fast and the Furious (2001) might inspire copycats. But who’s going to attempt to leap from a highway bridge and catch someone else in midair, or drive a military tank down a highway, or hook a car to a taxiing plane?... Read more

When you review books in Vermont, you receive a lot of volumes with “northern,” “north country,” “life” and “seasons” in their titles. You read a lot of essay collections in which authors in their seventh or eighth decades contemplate the shifting natural world in tandem with human change, aging and loss. ... Read more

In my seventh summer as a movie critic, I’ve reached the conclusion that tent-pole films are best taken in small doses — one or two CGI-paloozas per season, say. If your job requires you to see one every single weekend, you are bound to develop blockbuster fatigue.

Here’s what blockbuster fatigue sounds like:... Read more

Give it a couple more years, and Burlington’s 12-year-old Spielpalast Cabaret will have lasted as long as the Weimar Republic (1919-33) whose popular theater inspired it. After myriad changes of performers and venues, are these saucy annual burlesque-tinged extravaganzas showing their age? A bit, perhaps, but for the most part the dancing ladies (and gentleman) are keeping it fresh.... Read more

“A universe of ineffable gaudiness” — that’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald described the dreamworld inside the head of the young Jay Gatsby. He might just as well have been describing the aesthetic of Baz Luhrmann. There’s not an ungaudy scene in the Australian filmmaker’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, whether he’s depicting a bash in Gatsby’s enormous CGI mansion (it looks like Barbie’s Dream Castle) or a more modest gathering in a downscale apartment.... Read more