recent posts
- Mariska Hargitay, Ken Burns, Alan Berliner: Non-Fiction Filmmakers Award Season
- David Amram: The First 95 Years at Dizzy’s Club
- “Piper No!” Parker Posey and The White Lotus Cast Have a Lot to Say About Incest and Good Parenting
- Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen at the New York Film Festival: The Boss in a Melancholy Moment
- George Clooney: Movie Star in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly/ Engaged Citizen in Real Life
Category: Authors
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Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were only 29 and 28 respectfully when they embarked on the unfolding of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. Speaking to the well-heeled donors at a benefit at Guild Hall this week, for a staged reading of All the President’s Men, a screenplay…
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“Let’s swing,” exclaimed Wynton Marsalis from the rear of the Guild Hall stage, leading into a stellar night of sublime sound featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra. Of course, this was Wynton’s triumph—a recognition of jazz as American classical music and the final stop in a U. S. and Canada tour. The 90-minute set…
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Not to judge her too harshly, Bertha Russell as played to perfection by Carrie Coon, is a piece of work. Machinations galore do not make this doyenne of new money a bad person, just one you fear, and one you hope will succeed. That is the triumph of Season 3 of “The Gilded Age:” a…
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Midcentury author Jack Kerouac is the least dead of dead writers. When he died in 1969 at the age of 47, he left behind unpublished manuscripts and an untoward legacy as the so-called “King of the Beats.” His most famous novel On the Road, a road trip, a bromance, a linguistic tour de force, went…
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“It’s meta, it’s very funny, about a bunch of creatives trying to put on a musical about Marilyn Monroe,” said choreographer/ director/ theater legend Susan Stroman about her current Broadway musical, “Smash.” “It’s really about what it takes to create something—whether it’s a musical or something in life.” That’s the energy Stro –as she’s called–…
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Based on a true story, THE ALTO KNIGHTS stars Robert DeNiro in two roles: best frenemies Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Childhood pals, they hung out in The Alto Knights social club. Dapper, refined for a mobster, Costello wants out of “the business.” Scruffy and rude, Genovese wants in—that is, to reclaim his head-of-the-family position…
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Harrowing tales of black boys and men during the Jim Crow era are the meat and potatoes of Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s fiction. When filmmaker RaMell Ross, who made the acclaimed 2018 documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” was given an advanced reading copy of Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, he was working…
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From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few–you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic. The…
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The novels of William S. Burroughs may be difficult to adapt—just ask David Cronenberg—but in the able imagination of Luca Guadagnino, the transformation of Queer to film is a triumph. The packed audience at the recent Alice Tully Hall premiere, a high point at this year’s New York Film Festival, went wild as the creative…
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Forget “meet-cute,” the winning rom-com trope that made writer Delia Ephron’s career. In Left on Tenth, Ephron’s play based on her memoir at the James Earl Jones Theater about finding love after her husband died, we get the more powerful “Bechert.” As Peter Gallagher, in the role of Peter explains, it is Yiddish for fated,…
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At the end of Audrey Flack’s new memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, published when she was 92, she takes stock of a life well lived: I am lucky that my mind remains clear and sharp, filled with ideas for new art. The creative spirit is running strong and I continue to work. These words, and…
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Even more than meeting any Hollywood star, Alec Baldwin loves documentarians, he said this week, after a screening of Skywalkers: A Love Story, the first film screened at the newly refurbished Guild Hall and the first of the series, Summerdocs. The elite doc series, a cornerstone of HamptonsFilm programming, founded by Artistic Director David Nugent…
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Guild Hall Academy of the Arts President, the painter Eric Fischl got to hone his comedy chops at this year’s spring gala, fashioning a speech on a string of cliches—thanks to A. I. That set the night off in good spirits, against The Rainbow Room’s customary spectacular panoramic views of the city now fogged in,…
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In the revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theater, Amy Ryan as formidable, grim-faced Sister Aloysius is the kind of no-nonsense nun so fearful—under her eye, the consequences of actions good or bad are the same; you definitely don’t want to be caught. As directed by Scott Ellis, a…
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Oscar winner Marion Cotillard in feathery white posed before photographers on opening night of this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. She’s a big star, known internationally since her debut role as Edith Piaf, but for this yearly festival, a collaboration with Unifrance, it did not take long before she melded into the…
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Back in the day, I thought Harry Smith was a deadbeat. Now, he’s a dead Beat. A filmmaker, artist, student of the occult, mysticism, cats’ cradle and paper airplane master, and famously a star of one of Andy Warhol’s interviews, Harry Smith was a cultural figure in his day, as a rich exhibition of his…
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Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of “Works and Process” the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in…
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At the swank premiere of Ava Du Vernay’s new film ORIGIN at Alice Tully Hall last week, made evident: this director is fearless. Taking Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a 2020 best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson, DuVernay created her own genre, taking the lessons of the book, folding them into the narrative of the…
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In the doll metaverse, Barbie is queen. A party at the posh Peninsula Hotel brought together her movie creators with members of the Academy to anoint her with awards. The movie about her has had world domination in sales. Even in Morocco, where I saw it when it was released in July along with Oppenheimer—famously…
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Introducing her documentary, Mourning in Lod at HIFF, Israel-based filmmaker Hilla Medalia announced that a crew member had been murdered—one among thousands– in the Hamas attacks from Gaza on Jews during the Shabbat/Simchat Torah holiday. Mourning in Lod plays out a story of connection and communication after terror comes to a community at peace. What…
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Writer Bob Colacello is the best kind of gossip; he observes people with a big heart and humor. In his latest book, an art volume of vintage New York photos by David Jimenez, accompanied by his text—a forgetting, as Colacello told a packed house at the Peter Marino Foundation in a conversation with Ivorypress publisher…
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You know the old adage: I would have paid more attention had I realized how important it was. In 1983 when I taught a summer writing workshop in Tangier with Paul Bowles at the American School of Tangier, the School of Visual Arts, under the leadership of founder Silas Rhodes invited a distinguished faculty that…
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Among the many Barbie international variations, Barbie in a sari, in lederhosen, in a kilt, none exist in a burka. So how would Barbie play where women, covered except for the eyes, are simply not seen? In Tangier, still an “international zone,” a thriving tourist spot, the streets are crowded with women and men in…
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The Writers’ strike was on everyone’s mind at the 76th annual TONY awards on Sunday night. Opening with a gorgeous dance number on the expansive United Palace Theater stage, the TONY show was its own Broadway show on upper Broadway that is, in the heights, Washington Heights. We do know that Lin-Manuel Miranda has enormous…
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A hit at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons, a fiction film of a quasi-true story of Holocaust survival might have a hard time being made today. Perelman, a Ukrainian born Canadian filmmaker has been on my radar since his 2003 feature, House of Sand and Fog which starred Ben Kingsley and…
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