recent posts
- Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026
- 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
Category: Film
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After a screening of his American Hustle, at a party at the Monkey Bar sponsored by OPI, director David O. Russell held court. Having paved the road toward Best Actor/ Actress awards for many cast in his movies over the years, actors must be dying to work with him although he made it clear that…
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Lee Daniels, always a provocateur, addressed the huge crowd at Cipriani Wall Street at this week’s Gotham Awards with a confession: he hates white people. No one gasped. It was not clear whether this proclamation was part of his complaint that no one in the cavernous space was listening to his introduction of honoree Forest…
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After a best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, there’s no stopping Bruce Dern. As Woody in Alexander Payne’s masterpiece “Nebraska,” featured in Toronto, New York, and the Hamptons Film Festivals, he’s a doddering but endearing old fool who takes seriously one of those announcements that he’s a sweepstakes winner, and convinces his…
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Casey Affleck has a youthful intensity: he’s too vulnerable to go to the deadly places he explores as a fighter to prove himself in the testosterone fueled “Out of the Furnace,” in theaters this week. The opening scenes are so brutal, with a screw loose Woody Harrelson going ballistic on his date at the drive…
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Two benefits this week featured a back stage glimpse into how theater is made: on Sunday night, Stanley Tucci, along with Anne Tatlock, was honored at the Plaza Hotel, at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala for his contribution to theater. Fitting, the presentation included performances: Li-Manuel Miranda and Anika Noni Rose sang from Miranda’s…
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The subject of race was addressed head on at a luncheon celebrating the film “12 Years a Slave,” easily the film of the year in an awards season gathering momentum. “I’m a black man, as if you didn’t notice, and part of the global identity of slavery” said director Steve McQueen on a panel led…
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Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She…
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Even by Peggy Siegal’s usual high celebrity quotient, the event was a coup: Hillary Clinton’s introduction of a short documentary, White Gold, at its premiere at MoMA. Last Wednesday, she addressed a packed screening room: Candice Bergen, Christie Brinkley, Chuck Close, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Schwimmer, and many others. The film’s subject,…
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Disney scores again! First it was multi-Oscar winning Mary Poppins, now Saving Mr. Banks, a biopic of Mary Poppins writer P. L. Travers. In the person of Emma Thompson she’s stern, a bit of a frump, Britishly out of step, yet endearing as she comes around giving Walt Disney the rights to make this classic…
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Death has a sweet-tongued tone, like a benevolent grandpa narrating the movie of Markus Zusak’s much beloved novel, The Book Thief, as he picks off characters on the large canvas of small town Germany during World War II. Yes the citizenry suffered bombings, conscription into the army, and deprivations of all kinds. But at least…
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The lovers in Felix van Groeningen’sThe Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar, live and love so intensely, you know from the start that something has to give. It was too good to last, says Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist as her marriage to Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a banjo…
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The songwriter of rock & roll classics like “This Magic Moment,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,”—yes, Elvis Presley’s hit– and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Jerome Felder, AKA Doc Pomus, was an American original. A Brooklyn boy, crippled by polio as a child, he was big hearted enough to charm the girl he…
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She may have been jet lagged and slightly tipsy from a drink or two at a pre-Tribute dinner at the New York Film Festival evening in her honor, but that did not make Cate Blanchett babble like Jasmine, her character in the latest Woody Allen movie. Quite the contrary, articulate, generous, and funny, Blanchett fielded…
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A buoyant crowd settled into lunch at The Explorers’ Club to celebrate Gravity. Producer David Heyman exulted about the beauty of the film, about two astronauts stranded in the weightless ether. Wow, “You should see the sun on the Ganges! It’s amazing!” This movie does what CGI, 3D, all the bells and whistles of movie…
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Just as the news seems bleak, a government shut down translating to national parks closing their gates to tourists, and workers home without pay, Google’s celebration of Yosemite’s anniversary seems especially ironic. The documentary Inequality for All turns its penetrating gaze onto another piece of evidence of meltdown: the vast gap between the 1% and…
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The name Alabama has such beautiful assonance, its flow of “a” makes its own Southern comfort! So the sound of “Sweet Home Alabama,” one song in a stellar soundtrack for the documentary, Muscle Shoals, is proverbial music to the ears, an anthem to the Southern rock that flourished in this idyllic spot. A mecca for…
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“I’m a sports nut,” explained Hugh Jackman, joyful that his son decided to join the school soccer team. The actor and song man was making his way around The Monkey Bar at a luncheon celebrating his new movie Prisoners on Thursday. He might just as well have been talking about the thriller’s opening scene, when he,…
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Is Alec Baldwin a good sport? At a pre-screening cocktail party at Mary Jane and Charles Brock’s East Hampton residence, a property complete with croquet and golf courses, Alec Baldwin M.C.’d a competition, kids against adults putting on the green to benefit the Hamptons International Film Festival. Of course one of the kids was Sky…
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An intimacy with the protagonist of the movie, The Patience Stone, is immediate. We see the young mother, performed by Golshifteh Farahani, at home, revealed in casual dress. In the street, she must cover up so completely, even her eyes are shielded by the cloth grate of her burqa. More remarkable: the intimacy goes further.…
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