Weekend Review: HBO's The Normal Heart
The heart breaks while tempers violently flare in HBO's The Normal Heart (Sunday, 9/8c), Ryan Murphy's emotionally and politically explosive film version of Larry Kramer's provocative stage drama about the early response, within and outside the gay community, to the '80s AIDS crisis.
Teeming with anger, sorrow, passion and purpose, this powerful and harrowing movie is part tragic love story in plague times, part agitprop manifesto and tribute to tireless activism. "We're not yelling loud enough!" bellows Ned Weeks (an engagingly abrasive Mark Ruffalo), the story's pushy moral conscience, a belligerent scold who refuses to play nice when so many lives are at stake.
Fri, May 23, 2014
