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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Lawrence Wright, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” is also a performer/ playwright. Wanting to tell the backstory of writing his book, he created “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a one man stage play performed at The Culture Project. The film version directed…
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If you are a cook, there is a nail-biting sequence in the new movie, Jack Goes Boating, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman under his own direction, adapted from the stage play by Bob Glaudini that was such a hit at the Public Theater last year. In this astonishingly tender movie, wanting to impress Connie (Amy Ryan)…
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As a teen, Harvey Weinstein worked at Apple Records with the responsibility to shepherd about a young band, The Beatles, he told the well-heeled guests at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room Sunday night. He introduced a new movie The Weinstein Company will release in time for John Lennon’s 70th birthday on October 8: Nowhere Boy. In a…
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Did I detect a note of jealousy at Guild Hall where the Q&A following the screening of Last Play at Shea? The documentary traces the demolition of the famed ball park and home of the Mets through the history of rock performed there, from a legendary Beatles concert back in the day to Paul McCartney's…
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A handsome Rare Prince posed for photographers on the lawn of Goose Creek last Monday, for what might have been an advertisement for the coming Hampton Classic. The occasion was instead a special screening of Disney's thrilling biopic about the legendary Secretariat. Among his many distinctions, this stud sired some six hundred foals, and Rare…
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Josh Brolin introduced a special screening of The Tillman Story at MoMA last week. The documentary's “voice,” the Oscar-winning actor explained that he took on this project as narrator after seeing a bit of footage: “I wanted the Tillman family to adopt me,” he said clearly moved by their dedication to their famous son's legacy.…
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Just when you think historians have unearthed as many images as can be mined, illustrating what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II, a new can of film emerges, and becomes a catalyst for a re-reading of a vintage Nazi film marked “Ghetto.” Containing scenes from inside the Warsaw Ghetto shot in…
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What hits you immediately upon meeting Jacki Weaver, the extraordinary Sydney-based actress who plays Smurf (Janine) Cody in the movie Animal Kingdom is that she is nothing like the sociopath, the manipulative mom with darting eyes and flirtatious menace she plays in Animal Kingdom. This Australian Tarantino-like crime drama won top awards at Sundance, and…
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The Hamptons International Film Festival had scheduled the screening of the Oscar nominated documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the second in its SummerDocs Series in East Hampton for Saturday August 7, well before Wikileaks made Daniel Ellsberg a hot item-again, 40 years after he leaked The Pentagon Papers. …
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A high point of this summer's feel good movie opening this week is surely a superb Tchaikovsky concerto performed unrehearsed in Paris by a hilarious rag tag bunch of Russian musicians posing as the famed Bolshoi Orchestra. If you believe in such miracles, or can laugh at the conceit, The Concert, written and directed by…
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Long known as the friend (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), the mom (Pieces of April), the quirky aunt (the HBO series Six Feet Under), it's about time Patricia Clarkson starred in a movie. And star she does in Cairo Time, a fable about Juliette, a magazine writer who goes to Cairo to meet up with her husband, a U.N. official, for…
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Katie Holmes blew into town to attend Monday night’s New York premiere of “The Extra Man.” She briefly walked the red carpet, avoiding the screening and after party, before moving on to Toronto for an early call to the set of the tv mini-series “The Kennedys.” She plays Jackie Onassis, a role not unlike the…
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Long distance from LA, the television star I know best from Cheers, and who has just completed a season of Damages, Ted Danson wanted to talk about some other kind of damages, to our oceans. Enthusiastic as could be, he told me about Oceana, an organization interested in changing ocean policies worldwide. An evolution of…
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Homage to great cinema was a theme at two events at the Museum of Modern Arts this week. On Monday, in an evening hosted by the Hamptons International Film Festival, photographer Bruce Weber showcased excerpts from “Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast,” his documentary-in-progress about Robert Mitchum. Through Weber’s lens, the Hollywood tough guy of…
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Introducing her new movie, I am Love, to an audience of fashion and food people last February, Tilda Swinton in a razored asymmetrical blond hair do-we are used to seeing a redhead-said she would be on hand to help if we got impossibly hungry which is what happened with audiences at film festivals in Toronto…
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While we grapple with such problems as whether or not the recently out but obviously gay Sean Hayes is believable as a heterosexual in love with Kristen Chenowith in the delightful Broadway revival of Promises Promises, it is good to remember this privileged debate is hard won. Going back to a time when same sex…
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At the center of Daniele Thompson's delightful comedy of manners, Change of Plans, a hit at the 2009 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, to open theatrically later this summer, is a dinner attended annually on June 21, on World Music Day, by the same –more or less– collection of characters. On Tuesday, after IFC's special screening,…
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The word paparazzi always had a tinge of menace–camera toting maggots a-prey on celebrities–and got a worse name after the throng chasing Princess Diana through a Paris tunnel caused her death. But the Ur-paparazzo, a lone figure lurking behind Central Park foliage, disguised in funny wigs and hats, was Ron Galella. Famously sued by Jackie…
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Puh-leeze! Comedy icon Joan Rivers may be best known for dishing on the red carpet, or hawking her wares on QVC, her porcelain face, pressed to perfection, stretched over cheekbones, eyes frozen catlike, but from the first frame of this fine documentary by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, showing glaring close-ups of makeup applied to…
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The more Jane Rosenthal quipped, they had renamed the Tribeca Film Festival for the Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney, the less her words felt like a joke. The prolific Gibney made My Trip to Al Qaeda, the untitled Eliot Spitzer, and a segment of the closing night Freakonomics, all huge hits at Tribeca. As if these…
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Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival's premiere of Alex Gibney's documentary based on the play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, author Lawrence Wright's explained how he found himself in the midst of controversy after having scripted the 1998 action adventure, The Siege, proclaiming the true threat of terrorism. And then: 9/11 elevated his words to prophesy.…
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In 2008, a performer named Runaround Sue told me she made the call to the 150 burlesque artists in NYC and got Jonny Porkpie, Legs Malone, and Nasty Canasta to join her for a raunchy romp: tassels spinning from every body part, stripping down past the bikini line, peek-a-boo fan dancing, and serious body contorting…
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