"I N THIS BUSINESS," says Jack Nicholson--as J.J. "Jake" Gittis, private detective specializing in marriage difficulties, flushing his suave taunting

A LEXANDER PORTNOY complained that he was living in the middle of a Jewish joke--the Jewish joke of his whole

E ARL SCRUGGS and his boys were at the Performance Center last week in what has to be one of

I WAS WALKING along Boylston St. one day recently when I noticed a listing of "The Appalachia Shop" at the

W HAT WILL PROBABLY attract you the most about Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us are the surfaces of things, the

Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us opens with a gentle pan from the hazy skyline of a Mississippi morning across a

T HE CRITIC has to be a bit wary of these Tom Stoppard plays, since one of them puts a

G RACE PALEY is a great and neglected American writer. Her only previous book was a wonderful collection of short

A LL THIS STUFF--these notes, observations, glimpses and grotesques--need a justification that isn't to be found. It all belongs to

D ON'T LOOK NOW is a film about second sight: that means about another way of looking at things. From