Sedgwick, Kyra

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    ‘Bad Shabbos’ Review: Guess Who’s Kvetching About Dinner?

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    A newly engaged Jew and gentile plan to introduce their parents. But first: There’s a crisis involving a body, a ticking clock and a doorman played by Method Man.Those who have attended a Shabbat dinner — which occurs on Friday and kicks off the Jewish Sabbath — know that the traditional greeting is “good Shabbos.” The ensemble comedy “Bad Shabbos” telegraphs its silliness right from the title.Directed by Daniel Robbins, the movie takes place over a disastrous dinner on the Upper West Side, where David (Jon Bass) and Meg (Meghan Leathers) — a newly engaged Jew and gentile — plan to introduce their parents for the first time. But before they can start, a disturbing prank by David’s brother, Adam (Theo Taplitz), goes awry, causing an emergency that the family must hide from the Midwestern in-laws. The crisis involves a body and a ticking clock, as well as a zany, meddlesome doorman (Method Man, always welcome) added for good measure.“Bad Shabbos” overflows with the kvetching, nagging and nit-picking endemic to the Jewish movie canon. It also contains an overused trope: the domineering Jewish mother harboring animus toward her son’s shiksa fiancée. Despite Meg’s efforts to connect, Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick) repeatedly slights her future daughter-in-law. Ellen’s flat sitcom character finds a match in some of the movie’s aesthetic choices, like the framing and the pizzicato strings making up its score.These style elements can feel grating. But as the jokes continue to land and the wine continues to flow, you grow used to the tone. This is, after all, a situational comedy, in which the laughs spring from reaction shots and line deliveries. Luckily, the actors prove up to the task.Bad ShabbosNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      Review: A Text-to-Speech Meet-Cute in ‘All of Me’

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      Laura Winters’s romantic comedy pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities.Lucy has impeccable comic timing and a sense of humor as dry as a gin martini. Her expression deadpan but for a slightly furrowed brow, she delivers punchlines with Amazon Prime efficiency in a calm, even tone that may sound familiar to people who use Alexa or ride the New York City subway.Played with wry assurance by Madison Ferris, Lucy communicates using a text-to-speech tool built into her motorized scooter. As heroines go, she is a young Katharine Hepburn type: headstrong and outspoken but eagerly in search of tenderness. Her verve and vulnerability are the lifeblood of “All of Me,” an affecting if formulaic new romantic comedy by Laura Winters that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Lucy meets Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), who uses a motorized wheelchair and similar technology to communicate, outside a hospital while awaiting their rides. Proposing a game, Lucy asks him to pick a random key on his screen; when he chooses “B,” there’s a prolonged pause while she types. Then her device’s flat staccato sounds out the raunchy rhymes of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”Typical of Lucy, it’s a funny bit with a mordant edge, bemoaning her situation by making light of it. As we soon learn, Lucy used to love to sing but has lost the ability to pronounce consonants (the play’s title refers to the jazz standard by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons). Lucy received a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy when she was 16; now in her early 20s, she has been managing the disease long enough to laugh about it with a trace of cynicism.Where Lucy sees only limitations, Alfonso, who has been paralyzed since infancy, maintains a broader sense of life’s possibilities — largely because he has the money to. So, what follows is a classic case of opposites attract. Lucy shares a cramped, less-than-accessible home with her mother, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), who works two jobs; her older sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington); and Jackie’s fiancé, Moose (Brian Furey Morabito).Alfonso, on the other hand, is a white-collar professional with enough means to hire help and buy a tricked-out house (the furniture-swapping set is by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris); his mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), is only in town to help with the move (the story takes place in Schenectady, N.Y. in 2018).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Space Oddity’ Review: Failure to Launch

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      Men will literally contemplate traveling to Mars instead of going to therapy in “Space Oddity,” directed by Kyra Sedgwick.In “Space Oddity,” an emotionally guarded young man named Alex (Kyle Allen) gathers his sister and parents to inform them that, in 10 years, he will be traveling to Mars on a one-way ticket, and that they should spend time together before he goes into isolation for training. He claims to be participating in a private space program that is years ahead of NASA. His sister (Madeline Brewer) is skeptical, but his parents (Kevin Bacon and Carrie Preston) humor him. “After the accident, he spent months just lying in his room,” his mother says. At least Mars is outdoors.It does not take an astrophysics degree to figure out what is actually going on, or to determine that “Space Oddity,” directed by the actress Kyra Sedgwick, is not science fiction at all, but an earnest movie about grieving and guilt, with the prospect of life on Mars (and a second David Bowie song, sang here by Brandi Carlile, as a title) held out as a vaguely commercial hook.There’s also a romance: Alex meets cute with an insurance sales rep, Daisy (Alexandra Shipp), who conveniently falls for him just when he needs a personal breakthrough. Daisy exists alongside other sounding boards — a doctor played by Alfre Woodard, a Russian gardener played by Simon Helberg — that the screenwriter Rebecca Banner has contrived in place of characters.Life seldom offers such overworked metaphors. Not only does Alex want to escape Earth; his father actually works with the earth, growing and selling flowers (but not daisies!), in a business he hopes Alex will take over. Serious subject matter aside, the movie is as bogus as Alex’s prospects of being an astronaut.Space OddityRated PG-13 for, among other things, “thematic elements.” Danger, children! Themes! Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More