Time Stands Still (2010)

No one writes tortured artists as well — or as frequently — as Donald Margulies (Dinner With Friends, Sight Unseen, Collected Stories). And he's never written characters quite as tortured as photographer Sarah (Laura Linney) and her journalist boyfriend, James (Brian d'Arcy James), in the intensely moving Time Stands Still, now back on Broadway after a limited run in early 2010. Sarah has just returned from Iraq after a roadside-bomb explosion, and her physical scars (''my Phantom of the Opera look,'' she deadpans) are far less grave than her emotional ones. James plays nursemaid and tries to make amends for not being full of shrapnel himself. They're not exactly the couple you want to sit down and make small talk with — unlike, say, their editor friend Richard (Eric Bogosian) and his new girlfriend, Mandy (Christina Ricci). Margulies gets a lot of mileage out of the older-man-younger-woman situation — as Sarah says to Richard: ''I think it's sweet: You always wanted a little girl'' — but he admirably makes Mandy more than just a pretty little punchline. In her stage debut, the doe-eyed Ricci holds her own with her three costars, theatrical heavyweights all. And in her second go at the role, Linney has zoomed in on little bits of warmth in the detached, screwed-up woman who lives her life, unapologetically, behind the lens. A-

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