Category: Events

  • Meryl Streep can do anything. In her new movie, Florence Foster Jenkins, she is the title character, a real life self-created diva, Florence Foster Jenkins, who was the subject of ridicule for her very bad voice, at the same time that she had a cult following of fans—and still does. This period movie directed by…

  • Directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow pay tribute to Brian De Palma in the best way possible in the documentary, De Palma, by showing his work. With an interview with this Hitchcock-influenced filmmaker at its core, the film features clips of De Palma’s extraordinary career, with lots and lots of anecdotes about craft, compromises, and…

  • Typical of Yo Yo Ma: he hides behind the scenes. A prime mover of musical happenings, this world famous, prodigy cellist recedes into the backdrop, even when the event is about him, as in Morgan Neville’s new documentary, The Music of Strangers. You expect an interview with the maestro about his life and work, some…

  • As anyone who has ever spent time in a hospital room knows, the laughs are few. On opening night of Halley Feiffer’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater on Tuesday, the audience filing in…

  • Running up to the Tony Awards, a special lunchtime event celebrated Broadway last week: Stars in the Alley, that’s Schubert Alley fitted with a special stage and eats by Junior’s. Moderated by Sean Hayes and Mo Rocca, two comedians of the first order who kept things funny and zipping along, this show comprised of bits…

  • Herb Alpert kept checking in about his pin stripes, asking a rapt audience, some of whom traveled from Florida just to hear him perform at the Café Carlyle for opening night this week: “Was I wearing this suit?” Like a woman who does not want to repeat an outfit for the same group, he joked,…

  • Movie icon—and lately best known for her role on American Horror Story— Jessica Lange has performed on Broadway only twice before, in two Tennessee Williams masterpieces, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, and now she’s in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As Mary Tyrone, morphine addled matriarch of the Tyrone family,…

  • “Of all of our movies, this one changed my life,” Chris Hegedus said, introducing her new documentary, Unlocking the Cage at a special HBO screening prior to its theatrical release at Film Forum this week. That’s a lot to claim from the filmmaker pair, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker who together made films from inside…

  • Really? Anthony Weiner wants unconditional love. This big baby, as he appears for real in Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s entertaining documentary Weiner, the former congressman wants to parlay his dick on the Internet, and be elected for office. That’s the size of it. After having been outted for this offense, Weiner ran for mayor,…

  • It would be great to think of 2008 as a bygone past, and the dire consequences for workers phased out in a bad economy yesteryear’s news, but the play Skeleton Crew, an Atlantic Theater Company production at the Linda Gross Theater, Dominique Morisseau’s powerful look at Detroit autoworkers, now moved to the, registers a cycle that’s still out…

  • Okay. So The Nice Guys is a Russell Crowe / Ryan Gosling film bromance, a hilarious romp, featuring car chases galore, broken glass and bones, bloody bodies, and a startling, zombied Matt Bomer. Still, there’s a touch of nostalgia for an early Russell Crowe who came to the aid of Kim Basinger in a film set in…

  • This time of year, Jane Fonda is usually at the Cannes Film Festival, but this year she is working back home. After a screening of the first two episodes of the second season of Netflix’ Grace and Frankie, part of a new Tribeca Talks series at the SVA Theater for the Tribeca Film Festival, the…

  • Last week at the Pierre, the Fountain House annual symposium and luncheon focused on the topic of “Suicide: Looking for Answers” with a panel of experts in this field. A special humanitarian award was presented to HBO’s Sheila Nevins, introduced by Rosie O’Donnell. Dr. Maria Oquendo opened the symposium with the grim news that suicide…

  • Women don’t have it so good in Tennessee Williams’ plays, and Orpheus Descending is one of his darkest. In the production at St. John’s Lutheran Church in the village, you can see why this one, with its histrionic speeches and soap opera story, is rarely produced. Which is why this production, low budget and noble, is…

  • It was a big night for Megan Hilty on Tuesday, not only the opening of her two-week engagement at the Café Carlyle, but she’d garnered a Tony nomination that morning for her comedic bombshell turn in the revival of Noises Off! “And I wasn’t even singing,” she exuded, her blond curls taken back into a…

  • Irritating and irascible, the subject of the documentary short, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, the French intellectual writer and filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, could be charming, and cunning as he got his desired interviews.  His epic-length Shoah (1985) went farthest to document the Holocaust, the most cataclysmic and defining event of the twentieth century, even as…

  • As leading man to the pounding disco drama, American Psycho at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Benjamin Walker is all abs and six pack. Sinfully envious, his Patrick Bateman embodies the ethos of the bygone late century: what he cannot have, he seeks to destroy. His body, and apartment’s walls are often red splattered as if this…

  • For some, even the talk of math inspires a mind freeze. The actor Dev Patel who plays a real life math genius from Madras claimed to be one of those last night at the premiere of his new movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity. As Srinivasa Ramanujan, his emphasis was the relationship, not the one…

  • The normally reticent Robert DeNiro could not repress himself at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for the annual Chaplin Award Gala last night. Presenting clips of Morgan Freeman’s greatist hits, and there are lots of them, DeNiro groused, “Morgan gets to play Nelson Mandela and God. In the past year I played an intern, and…

  • Even when you know where The Meddler is going, Susan Sarandon is so likable as Marnie, a mom from Brooklyn with a thick accent and a big heart, you root for her and yet understand why her daughter Lori wants to keep her at bay. It’s not every mother who would corner your ex, and…

  • Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend. Even as the artist Elizabeth Murray was making news, installing the major retrospective of her extraordinary sculptural paintings at MoMA in 2005, one of 4 women so respectfully displayed, room after room on MoMA’s 6th floor galleries, she was diagnosed…

  • Nobody moves like Chita Rivera. With all due respect to Catherine Zeta-Jones who earned an Oscar for her film role as Velma in Chicago, with one quick pelvic thrust in director Rob Marshall’s direction for Rivera’s opening night at the Carlyle, Chita Rivera blows away all competition. Of course she originated the role of Velma…

  • The essential ingredients in John Carney’s films: music and heart—see Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013)— bubble up in ample supply in his new one, Sing Street. The movie had its premiere Tuesday night at Metrograph, a new old space on Ludlow and Canal, just around the corner from necktie designer Alexander Olch’s chic boutique on Orchard.…

  • At Café Carlyle this week, Katherine Jenkins’ magnificent voice fills the intimate room with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” even before she gets to the stage, a wonder in a strapless magnetic blue ball gown. Billed as a Welsh superstar, a title you would never dispute, she sings opera, folk songs, and show tunes, and tells tales of…

  • Arthur Miller was well served on Broadway this season with revivals of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, both brilliantly directed by Ivo van Hove. At the Walter Kerr Theater, the spirits in The Crucible come alive, and for a moment the girls possessed by demons and led by Saoirse Ronan’s Abigail look…