recent posts
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Events
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If The Golden Girls weren’t a sitcom, or if The Big Chill was an all-women cast, it might look like Linda Yellen’s new movie Chantilly Bridge, a bringing together of old friends for a reunion. A thirty-year jump from Yellen’s movie Chantilly Lace, “Bridge” features the same actresses, all with big careers: JoBeth Williams, Jill…
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The iconic American satirist Kurt Vonnegut might seem an unusual inspiration for a jazz suite but composer/ pianist Jason Yeager brought the Slaughterhouse Five author live in a musical homage at Birdland this week. Originally performed in tandem with Vonnegut’s centennial year at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis in November, the show…
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The only one of this year’s nine muses awarded by NYWIFT to actually have been in a movie as a muse, Sharon Stone played goddess to the hilt. At a packed 700-person luncheon at Cipriani 42nd Street, she spoke of growing up in a town so small there was no traffic light; watching Fred Astaire…
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Even the pre-Oscar buzz augured a return to old-school. The academy had its wits about them awarding Everything Everywhere All at Once, which, for the most part, swept the earlier awards. When that phenomenon began, the world seemed divided: some could not understand its metaverse. Others said, it spoke to them. Because the latter group…
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While many quibble with this year’s Oscar list for its lack of female directors, this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema; a yearly event hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, features two women with superb films. For Opening Night, Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, translating to Paris Memories, stars this year’s Cesar winner for Best…
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At the Morgan Library last week, in celebration of a show of his drawings, painter George Condo spoke about knowing he was an artist at age 4. It took a while before language kicked in; enrolled in school, he said, he responded to lessons with artwork. As he matured, so did his influences: French writers:…
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Billy Crudup "has the kind of good looks that appeal even to straight guys,” quipped Bill Irwin, setting off the evening’s theme. Jokes about Billy Crudup involve his handsome, age-defying movie star mien. As the actor was honored and roasted at the Edison Ballroom this week by longtime friends and co-stars, among them Sam Rockwell,…
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The piano at the center of August Wilson’s wise play The Piano Lesson is an object of beauty and resilience. Carved of a family history, this piano is a remnant of slavery, of ancestors being bought and sold, children separated from parents and siblings. Which is why the fight between Boy Willie (John David Washington)…
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It is a truth widely acknowledged, don’t mess with gray haired ladies, (and others in Barbarella wigs). Based on a true story of four fans in love with Tom Brady, the new movie, 80 for Brady, features the Frankie & Gracie team, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, plus Sally Field and Rita Moreno; these women…
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Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted…
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Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of…
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Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with…
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The play Between Riverside and Crazy at the Helen Hayes Theater opens on the Tony awarded actor Stephen McKinley Henderson seated in a wheelchair in a well-worn kitchen at breakfast, looking like a black Buddha in a flannel shirt. The audience silently takes in the clutter of appliances and china laden cupboards. It is multi-Grammy-winner…
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Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s Everyman, is a plum role for any actor: the character speaks to everyone. Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of this “salesman,” puts this emblematic character, the center of Death of a Salesman, through the Hudson Theater roof in this latest superb revival, recently moved from London. Back in the day, Miller oversaw a…
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The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In…
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If you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s White Lotus, check out the Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo. Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroanni, Pier…
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Those of us marked by a personal Holocaust history may be damaged by this cataclysmic event’s long shadow. Playwright Tom Stoppard evaded this essential legacy, as Hermoine Lee spelled out his background in her excellent recent biography. Beautifully staged at the Longacre Theater under Patrick Marber’s fine direction, Tom Stoppard’s fictional telling of his family…
