Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron

A thorough delight. Starring two of my favorite actors, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, the film provides a lovely afternoon's entertainment...plus enough inspiration to make me try anew recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Recommend.

American Buffalo, David Mamet

Very good production of one of Mamet's less dark (though still very shadowy) play.

Two cons and one junkie play how to steal of valuable coin. The play ends up presenting honor among thieves rather than any successful robbery of a nickel.

Recommend.

The Wall Street Chamber Players

The first performance of the season provided an amiable evening of all Mozart in the comfortable confines of a neighborhood home.
Piano trio in C major (K 548), Flute Quartet in D major (K 285), and Piano Quartet No 2 in E-flat major (K 493).

High recommend.

The Informant! Steven Soderbergh

I like capers enough that I would have gone to see this sooner or later. I ended up going early in its release because I heard an NPR interview with Marvin Hamlisch (not one of my favorites) about the ways the peppy soundtrack works against the corporate espionage of the narrative.

Recommend.

Brandenburg Concerto 5, J. S. Bach

A small ensemble from Orchestra New England performed the concerto on original instruments for SCSU students. Wonderful, intimate experience.

Recommend.

In I, Juliet Binoche and Akram Khan

We made extraordinary efforts to see this production. In addition to purchasing the tickets months in advance, we cut short our work days to drive to Brooklyn during afternoon rush hour. We knew to expect something out of the ordinary: a performance piece that asked an actor to dance and a dancer to act. And that erasure of boundaries was certainly daring. Moreover many visual elements, especially the moving wall that gradually creeped on the audience and created a sense of cramped foreboding, were engaging.

But the dancer and the actor forgot to engage a playwright. Where the narrative wasn't trite, it was disjointed.

After all the efforts we'd made to see it, I wished the producers had made the effort to create a more compelling narrative structure.

Recommend, with caveats

Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel

Two and half hours long, and in German with English subtitles: recipe for a tedious evening. Instead, this movie completely mezmerized me with its story of 1970s young West German radicals determined not to repeat the complacency of their parents. The film traces how some moved beyond protests and verbal denunciations of the West German regime to terrorism.

Highly recommend.