Art

"Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906" (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The artist's "Wonder Bread years"--age 11 to 25--ending in his cubist period. The question is whether the world needs another Picasso show less than a year after the Museum of Modern Art's grand exhibition of his portraiture. Most critics are happy to reconsider the maligned "blue period," which is now deemed "Picasso at his most accessible" by the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Solomon ("you don't need to know the first thing about line or form to be deeply moved by them"). The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, on the other hand, says the curators confuse "precociousness with originality" and quantity with quality: These "endless shows ... numb people to Picasso's art, making obeisance routine, like genuflecting in church." (The National Gallery plugs the show at its site.)

Movies

Anaconda (Sony Pictures). A classic example of the high-low two-step, Anaconda is both No. 1 at the box office and earning a qualified critical approbation for its self-referentially campy chic. Playing an obsessive dedicated to trapping a 40-foot-long snake in the middle of the Amazon, Jon Voight leads a group of unsuspecting documentary filmmakers (Jennifer Lopez, Eric Stoltz, and Ice Cube) to their deaths. The movie "has, like the killing-machine beast itself, the brutal efficiency of single-mindedness" (Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker). Voight's overwrought performance has a "kitschy glory" (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal). It all harks back to the "kind of retro, eek! eek! production that studios don't often make anymore, now that movies about tornadoes and invasions by aliens have become too expensive to be taken humorously." (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly). (The Anaconda site serves up stills and clips.)

Grosse Pointe Blank (Buena Vista Pictures). Heaps of praise for the movie's preposterous premise: An introspective hit man returns home for a high-school reunion. The film itself "doesn't always make a whole lot of sense," says the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, "but seeing a vehicle this outlandish is reward enough by itself." Credit goes to co-writer/star John Cusack, who "brings his droll intelligence to bear on a worthy comic invention, ... turning every dialogue scene into a colloquy for ardent obsessives" (Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal). But Cusack can't sustain the freshness of the original idea: The film "isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is" (Rafferty, The New Yorker).

Theater

An American Daughter (Cort Theatre). Mixed reviews for Wendy Wasserstein's comedy based on the Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood incidents, with recognizable caricatures of Hillary Clinton, Naomi Wolf, and Andrew Sullivan. Newsday's Linda Winer says Wasserstein has matured into "her own bright, eloquent and great-hearted version of George Bernard Shaw." The New York Times' Ben Brantley says Wasserstein "may be saying something about a world that reduces people to sound bites ... [but] is also working principally in bite-size slices of sound, sentiment and humor." The Washington Post's Lloyd Rose says that "[t]he play is antic as all get-out, but it doesn't go anywhere--it just hops frantically up and down in one place."

Books

Naked, by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Co.). Commercial and critical success for the gay housecleaner-turned-humorist's collection of essays--seventh on this week's New York Times best-seller list. Critics applaud Sedaris' tendency to mock both himself (the title essay is about his stint at a nudist camp) and others (he titles a piece about people who picked him up hitchhiking "Planet of the Apes"). The book is a "wedding of funny and mean, and Mr. Sedaris does have a way with venom" (Craig Seligman, the New York Times Book Review).

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald (Houghton Mifflin). Adulation for the Booker Prize-winning British author's historical novel about the romantic life of the German Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801). "It is quite an astonishing book, a masterpiece," says the New York Times Book Review's Michael Hofmann. "I can think of no better introduction to the Romantic era." "She is the finest British writer alive," says the Los Angeles Times' Richard Eder. Praise also goes to Fitzgerald's command of dialogue: "The conversations are many-voiced, sharp-witted and finely tuned enough to allow the reader to hear plangent undernotes and to feel the intoxicating buzz that good talk emits" (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the SundayTimes).