New in Theaters: ‘August: Osage County’

Julianne Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and Julia Roberts in ‘August: Osage County’

Tracey Letts’ playAugust: Osage County was a sprawling, Eugene O’Neill-esque slab of all-American dysfunctionality that played like gangbusters on the stage. It’s just about the last thing that you would want to see Harvey Weinstein and a pack of Oscar-festooned actors get their hands on; but somehow the truncated film adaptation plays pretty smartly. It opens up the material without lessening too much of the story’s...