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: Film
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Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film season’s tributes. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring films in Oscar-like categories. A balcony at Cipriani Wall Street becomes a giant schmooze fest, a meet and greet for many before the big events in Los Angeles,…
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No Oscar list this season will fail to have Alfonso Cuaron’s latest masterpiece Roma at the top. On critics’ minds: will the award be for Best Foreign Language Film or a straight Best Picture? But that’s not what’s on this director’s mind. Already an Oscar winner for Gravity, he turned his talents to a black…
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Actress, director Margarethe von Trotta was not thinking of making a documentary film, but when offered the opportunity to honor Swedish director Ingmar Bergman who would be 100 this year with a film about him, she could not say no. Von Trotta is best known for her feature films, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosenstrasse, The Lost Honor…
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1 Jake Gyllenhaal, hosting a special screening of his sister’s new film, The Kindergarten Teacher, at Metrograph, was all praise for Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I’ve been watching her act all my life,” he smiled broadly at a crowd that included Christopher Lloyd, Israel Horowitz, Diane Sawyer, and many others including his Wildlife director Paul Dano and…
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“Contemporary art is a luxury brand,” declared HBO’s Richard Plepler, introducing Nathaniel Kahn’s excellent, entertaining documentary, The Price of Everything, at a posh premiere at MoMA last week. “And the artist is our last best hope.” These words were not lost on a crowd that included artists like George Condo, Marilyn Minter, Larry Poons and…
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When New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham would train his camera on you—whether at a posh opening or on the street—it made your day. Anna Wintour –Cunningham photographed the Vogue editor since she was a teen—famously used to say, “One dresses for Bill.” His discerning eye assessed celebrities and civilians alike, snapping those with elan, style,…
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If any one can make the perilous professional sport of rock climbing sexy and glamorous, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi can. In Free Solo, their latest documentary (the couple made the extraordinary Meru), they turn their lens on renowned climber Alex Honnold, as he fulfills a dream, to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National…
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Despite a long and distinguished career making film portraits as creator of PBS’ American Masters series, Susan Lacy will not just do anyone. She proclaimed at a Q&A with Alec Baldwin at a Hamptons International Film Festival pre-screening of her HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, she would not make a film about someone…
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Peace in the Middle East feels like a mirage, a glimmering haze on a distant desert horizon. But in 1992, key figures from Israel and the PLO came together in a neutral place in Norway armed only with hope to frame a peace agreement on the fragile and beleaguered strip of land that is called…
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Under a makeshift tent, a staging spot for plating his culinary creations at the Brock residence in East Hampton, Flynn McGarry, a phenomenon as a young chef with his own Lower East Side restaurant, Gem, and a new documentary about him, Chef Flynn, shook hands, his fingers coated in egg yolk. “That’s how you want…
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Patricia Clarkson is getting used to playing villains. If you’ve been watching Sharp Objects, the HBO thriller in 8-parts that will have its final episode this coming Sunday, you’ve seen this actress from New Orleans at her sinister best, a matriarch called Adora who is anything but adorable; her name alone exudes irony. Clarkson wears…
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Mission Impossible: Fallout was #1 at the box office this week –no surprise to me. Of all the movie mega franchises, I love Mission Impossible the best. Lalo Schifrin’s score is an aphrodisiac to me. And the rest may have something to do with the hero Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a man of super…
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Comedian/ actor Robin Williams was so beloved, his suicide four years ago at age 63 came as a shock to almost all who knew him. In a new HBO documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, close friend, Billy Crystal recounts the last time he saw Williams he was in tears, and when Crystal asked…
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The Paley Center was chockablock with long lost friends and family, a hug fest rejoicing a new must-see documentary, Three Identical Strangers, that starts in the celebratory mood of a miracle: triplets, separated at birth, and their happenstance reconnection as teens. As Tim Wardle’s smart film traces the path of these brothers, through home movies,…
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In his memoir, Without Stopping, the American writer and composer Paul Bowles describes a party held on the beach in North Africa’s Caves of Hercules, with one grotto that had been decorated by Cecil Beaton. Truman Capote, fearful of scorpions, had to be carried down the face of the cliff by a group of Moroccans.…
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When Laurie Anderson talks about carrying no baggage in her new book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, a tome literally about loss, of precious objects and dross, of anything that weighs you down, take her seriously. At her current one-woman exhibition at Guild Hall, comprised of large scale paintings of her dog…
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My kids weren’t interested in the nerdy television personality of Fred Rogers when they were growing up, maybe because, as the Academy Award winning documentarian Morgan Neville put it, introducing his new movie, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? at a special screening at MoMA this week, as a cultural figure, he was a two-dimensional. That’s…
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That Summer, the summer of 1972, Peter Beard and Lee Radziwill had the idea to make a film about East Hampton. On the Memorial Day weekend, a crowd of East Enders attended a private screening of That Summer in East Hampton. Director Goran Olsson was not present, nor was Lee, but Peter Beard and his…
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All I ever knew of Saint Francis of Assisi was that he talked to animals, said filmmaker Wim Wenders this week, at a special screening of his latest film Pope Francis: A Man of his Word at the Whitby Hotel, just a stone’s throw from Trump Tower. The current pope is the first to call…
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As guests filed into the room for a special screening of The Seagull at Lincoln Center, Patti Smith was enthusiastic for Chekhov, and Christopher Walken nodded hello to guests that included John Cameron Mitchell, Lena Hall, Ben Shenkman, Patricia Bosworth and A. M. Holmes. Stephen Karam who adapted the classic for director Michael Mayer brought Jayne…
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The specialness of the Carlyle Hotel, as landmark and cultural shrine to old New York, cannot be overestimated. So says a documentary film, Always at the Carlyle, directed by Matthew Miele and executive produced by the Carlyle’s own Jennifer Cooke, that premiered this week at the Paris Theater, itself an old New York cultural shrine.…
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What is presidential? This week at the Tribeca Film Festival, a special screening featured part one of four of the Netflix series, Bobby Kennedy for President, marking the 50th anniversary of his 83-day presidential run. Filmmaker Dawn Porter deftly intercut archival footage with key interviews, with John Lewis, for example, William vanden Heuvel, and D.…
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