Movies

Return of the Jedi: Special Edition (Lucasfilm Ltd./20th Century Fox). Critical response to Jedi is subdued compared with the frenzy over the first two films in the restored Star Wars trilogy. Critics deem the movie less metaphysical and more theme-parkish than its predecessors. Its faults: the Ewoks, teddy-bearish-looking Rebel allies, are ubiquitous and annoying; Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are too old for their parts. "You can also feel the technological revolution in movies that Star Wars ushered in beginning to turn on itself," says the New York Times' Stephen Holden. (Click here for the re-released trilogy's official Web site.)

City of Industry (Orion Pictures). Director John Irvin's (Widows' Peak) City of Industry is praised for not being a hyperstylized Tarantinoesque crime movie. Its deadpan attitude and traditional plot--thieves heist jewelry and then double-cross one another--are said to hark back to classic film noir. "What's refreshing, and even sort of charming, about this thriller is that it's so obviously the work of diehards--of talented traditionalists who are dedicated to taking care of business" (Terrence Rafferty, TheNew Yorker). Also lauded: the cast, which features Timothy Hutton, Stephen Dorff, and Harvey Keitel; and the movie's refusal to glamorize the criminal life. (Orion serves up stills and clips on its site.)

Opera

Jackie O (Houston Opera Studio). Mixed reviews for a campy rock-opera about Jackie Onassis' ascent to iconhood. The Washington Post's Carl Cunningham says it's a "mindless 100-minute cult fantasy"--a third of the opera is set at a 1968 New York loft party where the first lady schmoozes with Maria Callas, Grace Kelly, and Andy Warhol. Newsweek extols the "poetic" libretto by Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting An Icon, as well as its "brilliantly eclectic score" and its general irreverence (Jackie is played by Nicole Heaston, who is short, stout, and African-American).

Theater

Antony and Cleopatra (Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York). The New York Times' Ben Brantley calls this production of the Shakespeare play, directed by Vanessa Redgrave, "jaw-droppingly bizarre." Redgrave's portrayal of the queen of the Nile as an aging, cigarillo-smoking ditz, obsequious to Antony, is judged daffy but charming, except by NewYork's John Simon, who wishes Redgrave would be "seductively womanly." Critics are skeptical of anachronistic touches in the production, including loud sirens, camcorders, and video projections of political speeches. Newsday's Linda Winer calls Redgrave's decision to play Antony's suicide scene as a joke "unforgivable." (The Public Theater site plugs the play.)

Books

Arkansas: Three Novellas, by David Leavitt (Houghton Mifflin Co.). Reviews of Leavitt's collection of novellas focus on the first, The Term Paper Artist, which caused a scandal when Esquire pulled it at the last minute. The fiction editor quit, claiming the editor in chief had been afraid that Leavitt's explicit gay sex scenes would alienate advertisers. The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani says that Leavitt's take on sex is "adolescent" and "does nothing to illuminate its heroes' lives." Others find the collection uneven. The Term PaperArtist does earn some praise, though, for its playful reference to another crisis in Leavitt's life: the British poet Stephen Spender's allegation that Leavitt plagiarized Spender's memoirs in an earlier novel.

Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster). A history of mad-cow disease by veteran science writer Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb). Critics praise Rhodes' lucid explication of complex virology as well as his range--the book includes digressions on political and literary themes and a section on the scandal surrounding a Nobel Prize-winning expert on the disease who recently pleaded guilty to molesting a little boy. The book is said to degenerate into a jeremiad when Rhodes anoints mad-cow disease "the new Black Death."