All posts tagged: Bernthal

Dog Day Afternoon’s Broadway adaptation starring Jon Bernthal labeled ‘disastrous’ in savage reviews

Dog Day Afternoon’s Broadway adaptation starring Jon Bernthal labeled ‘disastrous’ in savage reviews

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet’s hit 1975 film about a Brooklyn bank robbery and hostage situation, has been adapted — and seemingly reimagined — for the Broadway stage. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis penned the adaptation, which opened Monday night at the August Wilson Theatre to dismal reviews. Jon Bernthal plays Sonny, the role brought to life in the film by Al Pacino. Starring opposite Bernthal is his The Bear colleague Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal (played in the film by John Cazale). The two characters are at the center of the story, as their attempt to rob a bank (for reasons eventually revealed during the course of the show) goes awry. However, the robbery isn’t the only aspect of the production that seems to have gone amiss. Critics across the board have hammered Guirgis’s interpretation of the material, with many …

Jon Bernthal Leads Broadway Take

Jon Bernthal Leads Broadway Take

Published by Daniella Wilson

In his review for The New York Times, the critic Vincent Canby wrote of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, “If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it’s reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids speculation.” He is right, of course: Lumet’s 1975 masterpiece is, on occasion, ruefully amusing, the tics and foibles of regular life incongruously interrupting a situation most dire and extraordinary.  For the most part, though, Dog Day Afternoon is a sober thriller (Canby called it a melodrama) about a small-time Brooklyn bank heist blown up into a hostage crisis and city-wide fascination, about a man hard done by the system, who, for a few glorious and dangerous hours, almost breaks free by bending that very system to his will. There is a lot of serious stuff whirring through the film’s mind, a consideration of the fraught tempers of its fraught times. It crackles with immediacy, murmurs with furious sorrow.  But the creators behind the new …

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal on reimagining Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal on reimagining Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway

Published by Sam Flores

Dog Day Afternoon is the third rail of male love and loneliness—a primal scream from the sweltering streets of a stone broke New York City. My dad, Sidney Lumet, directed the 1975 film and his heart cracked for its antiheroes, Sonny and Sal (played by Al Pacino and John Cazale): “They’re like open wounds up there,” he once said. Ebon Moss-Bachrach can’t remember a time before he loved the movie, about a pair of bumbling crooks who try to rob a Brooklyn bank on a sweltering summer day. “There was something so adolescent about both these guys,” he tells me. “They seemed so unformed in different ways. When you’re a teenager, the world is big and mysterious. You can’t pull it into focus.” Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal will try to channel that energy on Broadway this spring, in a stage adaptation written by Pulitzer winner Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Rupert Goold. Bernthal plays doomed Sonny, who’s hoping to pay for his lover’s gender-affirming operation; his longtime pal and costar on The Bear plays …

Jon Bernthal & Tessa Thompson Netflix Mystery

Jon Bernthal & Tessa Thompson Netflix Mystery

Published by Daniella Wilson

The enticing combination of well-regarded source material, an elusive auteur tackling television for the first time, and a pair of photogenic stars prone to interesting choices yields the first disappointment of the new year with Netflix‘s His & Hers. Writer-director William Oldroyd, who found intriguing angles within the gothic romance (Lady Macbeth) and feminist prison noir (Eileen), is thoroughly thwarted by Alice Feeney’s book, fumbling the mystery’s structuring device and failing to build any momentum on the way to an inept finale with two endings — one stupid and obvious, the other merely stupid. His & Hers The Bottom Line No one’s. Airdate: Thursday, January 8 (Netflix)Cast: Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Pablo Schreiber, Crystal Fox, Sunita Mani, Rebecca RittenhouseCreator: William Oldroyd The resulting series is, at least until the actively irritating finale, more generic than overtly bad, calling to mind various forgettable Netflix limited series filmed in Southern tax havens and forgotten by all but television critics. Put a different way, if your series keeps reminding me of a less interesting version of, like, the …