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LUTHER. Playwright John Osborne looks back in anger at the people and practices that outraged Martin Luther. In the surging power of Albert Finney's portrayal, the playgoer senses the force that shaped the Reformation.
Off Broadway
THE ESTABLISHMENT. The Establishment company, a hip group of anti-p.r. men, demolish sacrosanct images and egos with laughing precision, and gambol satirically on what is nearly In or almost Out.
CINEMA
HIGH AND LOW. Without a samurai in sight, Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa sets the screen crackling with excitement as his camera trails a vicious kidnaper through the Yokohama underworld.
CHARADE. This parlor prank can't decide whether to be a farce, a sophisticated comedy, or an out-and-out thriller. But Gary Grant is in top form, Audrey Hepburn is in gowns by Givenchy, and murder most foul is in full color.
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. Up in Vermont, three madcap characters are put through their paces by Director Adolfas Mekas, an East Village cinemaniac who pokes fiendish fun at every moviemaker from D. W. Griffith to Antonioni.
THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY. Walt Disney's appealing package of holiday fauna contains a bull terrier, a Labrador retriever and a Siamese cat, all letting the fur fly on a 250-mile trek through the Canadian wilds.
NIGHT TIDE. Man against myth is the theme of Writer-Director Curtis Harrington's promising first feature, an eerie tale of a young U.S. sailor who nearly succumbs to the siren song of a Venice, Calif., mermaid.
BILLY LIAR. Another visit to a bleak industrial city somewhere in England. But Tom Courtenay is hilarious as a working-class Walter Mitty full of fascistic dreams, and Julie Christie as his beatnik girl friend is a bit of all right too.
KNIFE IN THE WATER. Polish Director Roman Polanski maintains a suspenseful pace, putting two men and one woman aboard a sailboat that appears to be mostly sex-driven.
THE CARDINAL. In Director Otto Preminger's hands, the 1950 bestseller about a poor priest from Boston who becomes a papal prince often seems fairly preposterous despite a smooth performance by Tom Tryon, a racy one by Romy Schneider, and a sensational one by Director-turned-Actor John Huston.
TOM JONES. The funniest movie in many a year. Henry Fielding's bawdy classic about vice in 18th century England has been pinched and patted into shape by Director Tony Richardson, with able assistance from Stars Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith.
BOOKS
Best Reading
"WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is the best of the new Russian novelists who have won recognition in the post-Stalin "thaw." These are two short novels about fringe members of Soviet society: the man who still believes in Das Kapital and the poor old peasant woman who has endured both czars and commissars.
A SINGULAR MAN, by J. P. Donleavy. The author again mines the stuff that dreams are made of: this one about the richest, handsomest, most irresistible American—who is, of course, also an accomplished necrophiliac with great taste in tombs.