Film: How Gays and Straights Interact in Different Time Periods Is Explored in “The History of Sound,” “Twinless” and “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” (Just One of Many, Many Plots)

The History of Sound (c) MUBI

Film: The History of Sound 
In Cinemas on Friday 

Ever since the premise and cast of The History of Sound was announced, the inevitable comparison to Brokeback Mountain was soon made. Two respected young (and as far as we know, straight) actors are are playing two men at the start of the 20th century find love as they traverse the rural and unforgiving landscape of America. The two meet as students at the New England Conservatory of Music: Lionel (Paul Mescal), a simple and reserved man raised on a farm in Kentucky (shades of Ennis del Mar), and David (Josh O’Connor), a well-off, more gregarious man from Newport, Rhode Island (the more Jack Twist of the pair). As their love starts to bloom (in secret, of course), war breaks out in Europe and David is drafted, giving us the moment Lionel, at his most demonstrative, tells David: “Write. Send chocolates. Don’t die.” When David comes back and takes a job at a small college in Maine, he convinces Lionel to join him on a project where he goes around the country recording songs and stories on wax cylinders in danger of going extinct with the current generation. They take three months backpacking and travelling the backroads of America, giving the pair, like Ennis and Jack on Brokeback Mountain, the smallest moments of happiness that real life would never afford them. 

Best Film Performances of 2025 (So Far)

Mickey 17 (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

With the dull and hot days of summer, you may want to find your way into a nice, air-conditioned multiplex or your own living room’s fan to catch up on some good films before the deluge from fall festivals and possible Oscar baits. 

Here are the top ten performances of the first eight months of the year and where to watch them (in theater or streaming): 

Theater Reviews: Three Summer Shows (“Joy,” “Rolling Thunder,” “Ginger Twinses”) Rely Too Heavily on Nostalgia as Their Selling Points

Joy (c) Joan Marcus

Theater: Joy 
At the Laura Pels Theater 

Joy, the musicalized version of a Joy Mangano’s true life journey from struggling Long Island single mother to a QVC multimillionaire, rarely achieves the elated emotion synonymous with her name. It was also the tonal problem with David O’Russell’s 2015 movie version with the same title. Joy’s trial and tribulations before the admittingly happy ending of entrepreneurial success makes for a curious tale, but joy? No. However, like the movie version, there is a secret ingredient that makes the story engaging, and that is the actress playing Joy. Jennifer Lawrence received a surprise lone Oscar nomination for the film, providing a sympathetic portrayal of Mangano, which is the same quality the always engaging Betsy Wolfe (Mrs. Shakespeare in & Juliet) provides here. Ken Davenport and AnnMarie Milazzo, the show’s writers, do provide a musical comedy sheen over the story as Joy, always the problem solver, can’t figure out how to make her 1990’s life tenable when she loses her airline job and still has to run a household that includes her teenage daughter Christie (Honor Blue Savage), her ex-husband Tony (Brandon Espinoza), who lives in the basement, and her divorced parents (Adam Grupper and Jill Abramovitz). Only when she comes up with the idea of the Miracle Mop does any hope enter her life—but a woman with barely a savings account predictably runs into a lot of roadblocks, from the Connecticut men who run QVC to the company that manufactures the mops (Texan men, naturally) with barely any emotional support from her needy family, who has experienced too many of Joy’s crazy ideas. 

Reviews: No, Heather, It’s “Heathers The Musical’s” Turn (Again) Off-Broadway, and It’s a Hoot; While the Film “Unicorns” Tells a Sympathetic Love Story Between a Sexually Conflicted British Guy and a Gaysian Drag Queen

Heathers The Musical (c) Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Theater: Heathers The Musical 
At New World Stages 

The deafening cheers at the newly revived Heathers The Musical tell me an important characteristic about young audience members: They love their nostalgia, regardless of how pessimistic the original source material is. Heathers The Musical, which premiered at New World Stages in 2014 for a five-month stint, was adapted by Laurence O'Keefe and Kevin Murphy from the 1989 film that starred Winona Ryder as ordinary high school senior Veronica Sawyer, whose life changes when she is accepted into the most popular clique in school, the Heathers. This new production of the musical (back at New World Stages) originated in the UK, directed by Andy Fickman, hews close to the film’s plot, which has Veronica, now played with humor and ferocity by Lorna Courtney (who originated the titled character in & Juliet), also flirting with the outsider new kid, JD (Casey Likes, of Back to the Future), whose dark energy soon brings chaos to Westerberg High School, including, like, murder. Unlike the musical adaptation of Mean Girls, which also includes a plot of an outsider being adopted by the popular girls and would arrive on Broadway a few years later, Heathers The Musical goes down darker roads O'Keefe and Murphy don’t shy away from, making it closer in feels to the recent musicalize version of the film, Teeth. 

Film Review: Which Blockbuster Should You Watch This Holiday Weekend? The Best Is “Jurassic World Rebirth” —Fun in a Surprise-Free Way—Plus, Thoughts on Other Summer Films

Jurassic World Rebirth (c) Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

Film: Jurassic World Rebirth 
In Cinemas 

The seventh film in the Jurassic Park series, Jurassic World Rebirth retains the World rebranding of the second trilogy, but essentially ignores everything about those movies (including stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, and there’s just one mention of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant) and ties up the whole “we live with dinosaurs now” thread in the first fifteen minutes. After that, it’s just a countdown before we follow a different eclectic group of dino food, I mean, thrill seekers, on their way to another island filled with rejected mutant dinosaurs after a horrific accident many years ago that involves the first of many hysterical product placements, with Snickers playing a major role here. The corporate baddie of Rebirth (there’s always one) is Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a pharmaceutical exec who is funding a covert operation to extract dino DNA in order to cure all sorts of human diseases, a theory put forth by paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). Along for a huge payday are their ex-military escorts, led by Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), but unexpectedly, there is also a family who gets stranded in the middle of the ocean on their capsized boat after being attacked by an angry mosasaurus. These films always have children in danger (remember Jeff Goldblum’s daughter stowing away in Jurassic Park: The Lost World?) and this time it’s young Isabella Delgado (Audrina Miranda) who, along with her father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), her older sister Theresa (Luna Blaise) and Theresa’s lazy boyfriend (David Iacono), are thrown into the mix. The two groups get separated once they land on the island and each group has run-ins with various dinosaur species, some veggie eaters, but mostly violent predators who appear when the plot needs them to be there.