Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Kenna returns to her hometown after seven years in prison hoping to reunite with her young daughter. Along the way, she starts a sensual new romance even as she is reminded of her lost love. Reminders of Him contains about as much sexual content, coarse language and drug use as you can fit into a PG-13 flick.
Jack Osbourne on Wednesday announced the addition of another Ozzy Osbourne to the late rocker’s clan.
“Introducing Ozzy Matilda Osbourne,” the father of five wrote on social media, including a brief black-and-white video showing a stuffed bat and a decent portion of a newborn baby.
“She’s arrived and she’s perfect,” he added in an Instagram story.
The new Ozzy — named after her paternal grandfather, the former Black Sabbath frontman who died of a heart attack last July — clocked in a week ago at 7 pounds, 12 ounces, and 19 inches long, according to the photo. She was born at 8:49 a.m. March 5.
In the baby department, it’s been all estrogen for the “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test” contestant. Ozzy the Younger is Jack’s kiddo No. 5 after the media personality welcomed three daughters with entrepreneur ex-wife Lisa Stelly and a fourth with current wife Aree Osbourne, née Gearhardt, an interior designer.
“our ozzy matilda osbourne has arrived earthside,” Aree wrote in an Instagram story welcoming her second child. She and Sharon Osbourne posted the same images that Jack did, though Aree slipped in an extra one showing herself and the baby in matching jammies.
Jack Osbourne and Stelly were married from October 2012, after their first child was born, until they separated in May 2018. He and Aree got engaged in 2021 and then married “secretly” at the San Ysidro Ranch in September 2023, a little more than a year after welcoming daughter Maple. Daughters Pearl, Andy and Minnie are 13, 10 and 8, respectively.
The actor and producer, who spent his teens on the small screen in the 2002-2005 reality series “The Osbournes,” announced in December that he and Aree were expecting again, after he was eliminated from “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.”
Film
Project Hail Mary
Director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Pascal Pictures, General Admission, Lord Miller Productions
In Theaters 03.20.2026
The Oscars for the films of 2025 are this Sunday, and many of the races are tight. If I’m being honest, I’m struggling to care, in part because awards are a poor way to measure art. But mostly because Project Hail Mary is the first major studio release that’s a solid contender for Best Picture of 2026, and I’m far more stoked to see it again than I am to watch a three-hour ceremony.
Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling, Drive, Barbie) awakens alone aboard a spacecraft light-years from Earth with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As fragments of his past slowly return, he realizes he’s the sole survivor of a desperate mission to the Tau Ceti system, sent to find a way to stop a mysterious organism draining energy from the sun and threatening to wipe out life on Earth. Armed only with his scientific know-how, stubborn ingenuity and a growing understanding of the stakes, Grace races to solve an interstellar puzzle that could save humanity. Along the way, he discovers he isn’t quite as alone as he thought — forming an unlikely partnership with an alien visitor he nicknames Rocky (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz), whose own world is facing the same cosmic catastrophe. Together, the two forge an extraordinary friendship while tackling a problem that neither species could solve alone.
Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, and it’s adapted by the same screenwriter for that film, Drew Goddard. As with The Martian, the script here stays remarkably faithful to the beloved source material, bringing a perfect mix of science, humor and heart. The shadow-drained cinematography by Greig Fraser (Dune, The Batman) is luminous and atmospheric. The Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were fired from their gig piloting Solo: A Star Wars Story, finally get the chance to prove that not only can they do live action just as well as animation, they belong among the stars. For a story that is so dependent on making hard science accessible and is predicated on the imminent destruction of the planet and the human race, Project Hail Mary manages to be a joyous crowd-pleaser that should find itself scoring with all audiences. It’s as if the cerebral majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey were mixed with the warmth of a road trip buddy movie, and they sync together perfectly. Daniel Pemberton’s ethereal musical score is filled with such majesty that it would be worth the price of an IMAX ticket just to hear it on a great sound system, and even at 156 minutes, the pacing never lags.
Gosling is becoming one of Hollywood’s most consistently great actors, and he balances the comic and dramatic elements with equal aplomb. The presence of a practical effect for Rocky gives Gosling a stellar performer to play off of, and I’ll be very surprised if we see a more engaging character relationship all year. Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) brings both an icy aloofness and piercing sense of humanity to the role of Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who is in charge of the project, and she continues to blow me away with the depth that she brings to each performance.
Project Hail Mary isn’t just a great movie; it’s a cosmic journey of epic proportions, and it’s nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece. These may be lofty words, and I know that I run the risk of being told “you built it up too high for me,” but when a movie comes along that causes me to lose myself in an all encompassing experience – and I look at the silver through the eyes of a kid who is filled with wonder and has traveled to edges of existence and back again – I’m willing to take that risk. —Patrick Gibbs
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