Malcolm Johnson

— With John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer as two leads, David Mamet's "American Buffalo" becomes a comedy, a farce that brims with laughs as staged by Robert Falls. Leguizamo acts Walter Cole, known as Teacher or Teach, as a physically edgy,...

Horton Foote's "Dividing the Estate" unfolds in Harrison, Texas, in 1987, a time of transition. The ancient black servant dies, on stage. The matriarch expires unseen, upstairs. In the end, with her estate not yet divided, her children and grandchildren...

The key words in the title " Irving Berlin's White Christmas" are the name of the composer and lyricist. For while the book by David Ives and Paul Blake draws on the 1954 Paramount Pictures release, many of the songs come from other sources — from...

"Billy Elliot The Musical" has everything: working-class politics, a father-son split, the ghost of a lovely mother, a funny old granny, a cross-dressing best friend, a gaggle of balletic Lolitas, a dance teacher who makes a boy's future possible and a...

Driven by knockout acting by Jeremy Piven, Raúl Esparza and Elisabeth Moss, the revival of David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow" sizzles, then burns. Mamet is targeting business in America. He plays for higher stakes than in "American Buffalo," the rare coin...

Paul Newman was a stage actor who became a movie star. A sex symbol who celebrated 50 years of marriage with his second wife. A grieving father who turned to philanthropy after the death of his only son. A citizen activist who campaigned for liberal...

No one had illusions of athletic grandeur when 6-foot-4, 180-pound Joey Haynos first walked through the doors of Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., as a freshman in 1999. Growing up in Rockville, Haynos excelled in basketball, played...

What do you think of the WGA list? ++++++++++++++++++++ || 1. || CASABLANCA Screenplay by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Based on the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison || || 2. || THE GODFATHER...

2 stars (out of 4) "The Matrix Reloaded" thunders along not as a sequel but as an infinitely prolonged serial episode, complete with a "To Be Concluded" tagline followed, eons later, after the credits scroll, by a brief trailer for "The Matrix...

4 stars (out of 4) After years of sinking from its former heights, Walt Disney Pictures scored a miraculous comeback in 1989 with "The Little Mermaid." Now the great animators go under the sea again with the visually vibrant and dramatically satisfying...

With kindly and wicked monsters already on hand, and wizards young and old in the wings, fantasy rules in a holiday season shadowed by persistent mourning and pervasive fears. What better time for flying brooms and an all-powerful ring? The end-of-year...

``The Fellowship of the Ring," the first in Peter Jackson's ``The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, succeeds mightily as picture-book storytelling, with its constantly exhilarating tapestry of quaint Hobbit houses, dark town streets, Victorian elf chateaux...