Aladdin *1/2
Disney’s current chore of mounting l ive-action remakes of all of its animated films continues to prove mostly an exercise in pointlessness and frustration with this second of its redos of the 1990s Disney Renaissance musicals. This new Aladdin lacks the charm of the original animated version, and—worse than 2017’s Beauty and the Beast—it cannot even seem to decide if it’s a musical or not, with characters awkwardly breaking into stilted snippets of song at random intervals in a way seemingly designed to ensure that there’s no melodic flow, no tripping the light fantastic.
Pro-choice advocates rally against legislative restrictions.
Nystrom noted the ACLU's history of successfully challenging legislative attacks on abortion rights—including Utah's own restrictions passed in the 2019 legislative session.
The best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere on complicated women, adapting her books and necessary disruptive change.
In anticipation of Celeste Ng’s visit to Salt Lake City on Friday, May 17, in support of the paperback release of Little Fires Everywhere, we reached the author to ask her a few questions about her books—which include Little Fires Everywhere, released in 2017, and her debut novel Everything I Never Told You—and her evolution as an author, as she sees both novels go from page to screen in upcoming film and TV adaptations. City Weekly: How has your relationship with Little Fires Everywhere changed since you finished and first released it in 2017?
Ash Is Purest White ***1/2
Director Jia Zhangke (Still Life) returns to one of his favored themes—the rapid pace of change in contemporary China—with a story that at first seems to have a much more conventional genre hook.
One of the advantages of staging a world-premiere play is the ability to treat the material as a blank canvas for creative staging ideas. Pygmalion Productions and director Mark Fossen take that notion quite literally for Melissa Leilani Larson’s Sweetheart Come—and the result is one of the most fascinating pieces of small-scale physical stagecraft on a local stage in recent years.
Avengers: Endgame might continue to dominate at the box office, but new entries this week offer a diverse slate of subjects, from UglyDolls to one particularly ugly human.
