recent posts
- 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
- Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Film at the 91st NYFCC at TAO Downtown
- Mariska Hargitay, Ken Burns, Alan Berliner: Non-Fiction Filmmakers Award Season
- David Amram: The First 95 Years at Dizzy’s Club
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International films have made it to top honors at the Academy Awards. Witness Parasite (South Korea), 2020 Best Picture. This year, on the Best Picture nomination list, The Secret Agent (Brazil) and Sentimental Value (Norway) have each taken victory laps at the Golden Globes, New York Film Critics Circle, Gotham Awards, and with other esteemed…
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The documentary HOLDING LIAT tells the story of a kibbutz dwelling couple awaiting the fate of their daughter Liat Beinin Atzili, who with her husband Aviv Atzili had been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The triumph of this film is how, under these grim circumstances it manages to hold in emotional and dramatic…
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Image by: The Associated Press respectfully – January 8, 2026 The New York Film Critics Circle celebrated its 91st anniversary this week, at TAO Downtown. As celebrations go, this one was tame, not raucous, until Isaac Misrahi, presenting the screenwriting award to Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, likened performing his cameo in MARTY SUPREME as having his…
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Documentarian Ken Burns won the Critics Choice Impact Award last month. Many attending the dinner at the Edison Ballroom could not resist joking about this filmmaker’s series – epic length, and irresistibly historic. Every worthy subject inspires long form story-telling. Yet, more intimate films prevailed too: among many sweet moments at the 2025 ceremony was…
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At 95, Amram maintains a schedule that would be daunting to men half his age, with generosity, charm, and youthful panache. At Dizzy’s Club this week, and in celebration of his November 17 birthday, he warded off bad reviews: if you improvise, you have no material to get wrong, he joked. The audience, including Arturo…
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The White Lotus season 3 may have been set in hot and kinky Thailand, but that doesn’t mean it lacked family values. Dressed in a lacy white gown with black trim evoking a Southern gothic look, Parker Posey revealed how showrunner/ director Mike White prepared her for the role as Victoria Ratliff in HBO’s The…
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Photo by Danny Clinch that features Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen in a promotional image for the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. The photograph was taken by Clinch and is associated with the film, which stars White as Springsteen. If you are looking for the E Street Band or Clarence Clemons, you may find Scott Cooper’s film Springsteen: Deliver Me…
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After writing a play about German girls tasked with tasting food prepared for Hitler, Michelle Kholos Brooks worried about using der Fuhrer’s name in its title. She asked her father in-law, who just happens to be Mel Brooks, who famously featured Hitler in the title of a musical within the iconic musical The Producers: “Springtime…
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I usually take notes when I review plays, but I could not risk taking my eyes off Deirdre O’Connell in Lucas Hnath’s play, Dana H. Because the actress’ mouth is moving to the sound of Dana Higginbotham in an edited interview with writer/artist Steve Cosson from 2015, speaking about events of 1998, lip-syncing, her face…
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At the Brooklyn Museum, “David Bowie is . . .” draws huge crowds, as it should. Dense with history, art, and music, the exhibition, a transplant from Europe where I first saw it in Berlin, is essential viewing. My memory piece from January 2016, written on the occasion of Bowie’s unexpected death, seems especially appropriate:…
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Best known as J. Peterman, Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld, John O’Hurley performs his show at the Café Carlyle as if he were that character projecting his outsized personality on an intimate stage. He’s cornered the market on “arrogance and pomposity,” he is quick to point out, as if those were a virtue, and then he…
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Your first perception as you drive up to Fred Stelle’s serene North Haven waterfront acreage is Wow, fruit trees. Pears aplenty not yet ripe. Abundant apples showing a blush, anticipating autumn. And beyond, a vintage house, a former actors’ colony during the Depression, getting a bit of this architect’s signature touch with a bit of…
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When the Frick Museum featured “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshius,” its formidable Fall exhibition that just completed a 3-month run, curators could not have anticipated a timely coincidence: that a new documentary in which a humble, self-effacing and very talented inventor seeking to…
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Bill Cosby must have been feeling frisky. Arriving at the Madison Square Garden Theater for the 7th annual “Stand Up for Heroes” benefit this week, he wrapped Cindy Adams in his homey sweater and began to roughhouse the gossip columnist. Recovering from the encounter, Adams asked, is my hair still up? It was. And Cosby in…
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Among many resonant moments in Liz Garbus’s documentary Love, Marilyn, a pouf-lipped Lindsay Lohan reads from Marilyn Monroe’s diary, one in an ensemble of A-list blond stars –and a few brunettes– including Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Jennifer Ehle, Elizabeth Banks, Viola Davis, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Lily Taylor. When a cache of diaries, poems…
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New plays by the eminent American playwrights Neil LaBute and John Guare are an event. In Reasons to be Happy at the Lucille Lortel Theater, LaBute, who also directs, rekindles the relationship of Greg and Steph from his 2008 Reasons to be Pretty, retooling these characters with the fine actors Josh Hamilton and Jenna Fischer. As it…
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This entertaining show may be billed as a jazz quartet, but as aficionados know, John Pizzarelli has a secret weapon: his dad. As he tells you, Bucky Pizzarelli, now 87 and seated beside him, has a long and distinguished career on guitar performing with Vaughn Monroe and other big bands of that era, but with…
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Flight, Robert Zemeckis’s new movie, closed the New York Film Festival with a bang, taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds. Pilot Whip (Denzel Washington), seen drinking heavily before and during this disaster, maintains his demeanor, landing the plane with less damage than you would imagine. He is a hero, but as…
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To mark the 50th anniversary of the prestigious New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center premiered Ang Lee’s new movie, Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s popular novel. Introducing this spectacular 3D adventure tale about a boy shipwrecked on the high seas, sharing a lifeboat and survival strategies with a Bengal tiger,…
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Freshly returned, triumphant at the Golden Globes, Harvey Weinstein exhibited no jet lag introducing a new film, Coriolanus at the Paris Theater: There are three great Shakespeare films, he exulted, Olivier’s Hamlet, Olivier’s Henry V, and this one. The film’s star and director Ralph Fiennes then introduced cast members Jessica Chastain and Vanessa Redgrave to…
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Marilyn Maye’s return to the Metropolitan Room was like a camp reunion for the saloon set. Saloons, she informed the crowd already familiar with her patter, are otherwise called “upholstered sewers.” This chanteuse, elegant in her mid-80’s in a blond bouffant, sang tunes suggested by her “regulars,” many of whom she addressed from the stage…
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At 15, Abigail Breslin wears makeup. Clad in day-glo chartreuse for the premiere of her new movie, Janie Jones, she's now a young starlet. Based on director David M. Rosenthal's real-life discovery of his preteen daughter who he never knew existed, this evocative father-daughter indie film also stars Alessandro Nivola as an infantile alcoholic rocker…
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Film director Paul Morrissey, erstwhile manager of Andy Warhol's Factory, has been dogged, his career overshadowed by the Warhol legend. His iconic films Trash, Lonesome Cowboys, Heat, and Flesh were merely presented by Warhol and so deemed the artist's films, while it was Morrissey who actually made them. “Andy had Asperger's Syndrome; he didn't do…
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