Film Review: “The Life of Chuck” Wants to be Profound (by Way of Stephen King) About the Meaning of Life, and It Mostly Succeeds, While “How to Train Your Dragon” Is a Live-Action Remake of the 2010 Original, but the Best Parts Are Still Animated

Life of Chuck (c) NEON

Film: Life of Chuck 
In Cinemas 

Horror film director Mike Flanagan has directed movie adaptations of Stephen King novels before (Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game), and considering Flanagan’s pedigree (Ouija: Origin of Evil, Oculus) and King’s reputation, actual horror is surprisingly kept to a minimum in both. Now, despite the apocalypse and deathly premonitions woven into the plot, Life of Chuck, based on a Stephen King novella, has both men dealing with a more philosophical approach to death. And while a lot of it feels like new-age hooey, the film mostly gives us an interesting thesis to make the experience quite emotional. In a quiet town, English high school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) notices new billboards that thank a guy named Chuck for his 39 years of service. At the same time, the world seems to be at its endgame with news of California falling into the ocean after a devastating earthquake, as well as other catastrophes hitting around the world. All this makes Marty want to reunite with his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse, and try to make sense of what’s happening, and how Chuck is a part of all this. The film then goes back nine years to focus on the aforementioned Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), who we hear from an omnipresent narrator is soon to find out some devastating new. But on this day, he seems depressed until he runs into a street busker (Taylor Gordon) on the drums, which gets him dancing solo then with stranger (and equally sad) Janice (Annalise Basso) as they find joy in life again. The movie’s last time shift is back to when Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) was a young kid, who after the death of his parents, moves in with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). Chuck realizes that life is going to be a series of heartbreak and tragedy, but as he learns in English class reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, both Chuck and life contain multitudes. 

The Interested Bystander’s 2025 Theater Awards Round-up

Maybe Happy Ending (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Here are some of the major awards given in theater in 2025.

The Interested Bystander: Final 2024-25 Tony Award Predictions

Maybe Happy Ending (c) Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Now that all the pre-award announcements have been made, it’s time for my final predictions for the Tony Awards, which will air Sunday on CBS from Radio City Music Hall with Cynthia Erivo as the host.

Enjoy.

Reviews: Off-Broadway Provides an Enjoyable and Well-Cast Revival of the Rarely Produced “Bus Stop” as Well as an Experimental, Fascinating but Head-Scratching “Bowl EP,” While Wes Anderson Returns to Full-Length Films With the Endlessly Clever “The Phoenician Scheme”

Bus Stop (c) Carol Rosegg

Theater: Bus Stop 
At Classic Stage Company (closing this weekend)

The plays of Pulitzer Prize-winning William Inge are rarely produced these days, even though he was seen, when he was most popular, as talented and important as his contemporaries: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. One reason is that his plays are most assuredly realistic and don’t tackle political or controversial issues of the day. But they are well-made plays, which was clear in the last Broadway revival of Picnic in 2013, which introduced Sebastian Stan to the world. And now you see it in the Classic Stage Company/NAATCO/Transport Group co-production of 1956’s Bus Stop, which is now only remembered for the Joshua Logan film starring Marilyn Monroe. The titular stop is a diner on a remote but heavily populated bus route in Missouri, run by Grace (a no-nonsense Cindy Cheung), with an assist by bright high school student Elma (Delphi Borich). On this particular night, there’s a big windy snowstorm, so the next bus is stranded there until it passes. On the bus is Cherie (the Marilyn Monroe part, played humorously by Midori Francis), a nightclub singer who has been abducted by a young cowboy named Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen, playing up the cluelessness rather than the brutishness), who asked Cherie to marry him, but never bothered to hear her answer (which is no). 

GALECA Theater Critics Honor "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" and "John Proctor is the Villain" for 2025 Dorian Theater Awards

 

John Proctor is the Villain (c) Julieta Cervantes

GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics’ kicked off Pride Month by giving John Proctor is the Villain and Cats: The Jellicle Ball top honors in the group’s third annual Dorian Theater Awards. Both productions won three awards each, making them the most awarded shows of the year. The Dorian Theater Awards, decided on by GALECA’s theater wing, honor the best of Broadway and Off-Broadway, mainstream to LGBTQ+, for the 2024-2025 season. 

Kimberly Bellflower’s new play John Proctor is the Villain earned three Dorian Theater Awards, more than any other Broadway production. The drama, in which contemporary high schoolers recontextualize Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, was awarded prizes for Outstanding Broadway Play, Outstanding Featured Performance in a Broadway Play for Fina Strazza, and Outstanding Broadway Ensemble. 

Cats: The Jellicle Ball dominated the Off-Broadway categories. This radical reinvention of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical set the story in the world of ballroom. It won three Dorian Theater Awards, including Outstanding Off-Broadway production, Outstanding LGBTQ Off-Broadway Production, and Outstanding Featured Performance in an Off-Broadway production for André De Shields. De Shields was also awarded GALECA’s LGBTQ Theater Trailblazer Award, a distinction which celebrates an individual’s lifelong commitment to creating art that inspires empathy, truth and equity. 

The group’s other special prize, the LGBTQ Theater Artist of the Season award, was bestowed to two people due to a tie in voting: Jonathan Groff and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Groff currently stars as Bobby Darin in the hit bio-musical Just in Time (for which he received a Dorian Award nomination). Jacobs-Jenkins is the playwright of the Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play Purpose.