There aren’t any more Breslins or Hamills, exemplars of a masculine New York postwar street journalism. Now these superstars of newsroom culture star in a state of the art documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, to air this week on HBO. At a star-studded premiere at the Time Warner Center with dinner at Porterhouse, they were celebrated in high style—Jimmy Breslin died in 2017, and a frail Pete Hamill could not attend– even as the world they brought to life feels like a near forgotten memory of a bygone era.
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Now that the Academy Award nominations are out, with Roma, Capernaum, The Shoplifters, Cold War and Never Look Away the academy’s picks for Best Foreign film, the winner in this category will be hard to predict. Opening in theaters this week, Germany’s Oscar entry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, provides a glimpse into an artist’s life against the backdrop of the Nazi’s declining power in Europe, and the advent of the Communism in Germany. Based loosely on Gerhard Richter’s career, his coming of age in Dresden, escape to the West, painting studies in Dusseldorf, and phenomenal professional and personal success, this epic length movie moves briskly through its three hours plus: it’s a love story with a potent villain played by Germany’s uber romantic hero, Sebastian Koch, with young lovers Tom Schilling and Paula Beer. Schilling’s Kurt makes his breakthrough discovery of collaging gauzy images of photos from the past. In a traditional movie narrative, this filmmaker depicts Europe’s destruction by the Nazis, euthanasia of mental patients, political loyalties and injustices and its aftermath. As in his Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006), a potent message comes forward: Yes, Germans suffered too. -
Non-fiction films take center stage at the Cinema Eye Honors, awards for the art of documentary filmmaking. At the Museum of the Moving Image this week, pioneers and newcomers to the field, gathered to recognize achievement in editing, directing, graphic design or animation, cinematography and other aspects of story-telling craft. Oscar voters have their own list; the Cinema Eye nominees, and winners, coming from theatrical, television, and streaming venues, may not be your most familiar movies, such as this year’s Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they are the ones most admired by industry insiders. Academy Award winner Morgan Neville said he was attending: because his documentary about Mister Rogers was nominated, and because he loves the documentary community. -
The road movie Green Book, winner of numerous awards this week, is also shadowed by controversy. Are recent discoveries of racist tweets an attempt to bring down what is for many the Oscar film of the year?At a celebration for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant this week, friends and family of both jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver Tony Lip gathered to remember the real life characters of this crowd-pleasing road story. Daniel Craig hosted, and stuck around just long enough for the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, to arrive. As he left, a waiter requested a selfie with him, and the Bond actor obliged.
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With this year’s Golden Globes in Hollywood preceding the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual award dinner by a night, the big question was how did directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) or actors like Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), winners at both events, traverse the country with such speed, looking fresh as can be? Imagining private jets, I was briskly informed by an insider, they were on a 7 A. M. flight out of L. A. this morning, arriving in New York in the afternoon. At Tao Downtown, Roma was honored: while our president looks to make a wall, Roma gives us a window. Roma won not only for Best Film and Best Director, but Best Cinematographer: that would be Alfonso Cuaron himself, so for sure, he’d make every effort. The transition West to East may have looked seamless, but the Golden Globes, so green in everyone’s memory, made a lingering impression. -
Back in the day, at the height of abstract expressionism, Warhol was the enemy. When subjectivity in art was all the rage—i.e. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings– Warhol was commodifying soup cans, world leaders, and other celebrities. Such artists as de Kooning and Kline would enjoy more than their 15 minutes of fame, and Warhol with his production line productivity, his commercial factory considered an antithesis to fine art. Now with the current exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum (Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera), it’s a good time to reevaluate the mid-century’s art. -
Celebrating her new movie Mary Queen of Scots this week at the Monkey Bar, the actress Saoirse Ronan, now 24, said she’s has wanted to play the role of this ill-fated queen since she was 18. “Mary is a big deal where I come from, an icon,” she noted, and though many notable actresses have played her, there was enough new in the source material, a copiously researched book by Tudor scholar John Guy, to warrant another look. Director Josie Rourke was attracted to the period material through the book, which reads like a “forensic thriller”—“I’m just a nerd,” she joked. That, and Ronan’s enthusiasm: “My path to this film was through Saoirse.” -
For Oscars, the Best Foreign Language Film category is often a fierce race with some of the year’s best offerings. When The New York Film Critics Circle anointed Alfonso Cuaron’s Mexican-language Roma best film, the move acknowledged a “darling” that’s been on many critics’ “best” and “favorite” lists beating out American or English language hits such as Green Book, A Star is Born, and The Favourite, among many others hotly debated. That selection also made room for Cold War as Best Foreign Language Film. At this year’s New York Film Festival, where I first saw it, this black & white gem, the Polish Academy Award entry, resonated deeply for me, a reaction confirmed at a more recent second viewing following a Q&A at the Brasserie Ruhlmann between the actress Rachel Weisz and Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski. -
Reviving the classic antics of the premiere comedy duo of the 1930’s is no joke. A new movie, Stan & Ollie, features performances by John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, based on the final tour of the very lean Stan Laurel and the very large Oliver Hardy, as their fame declined. With a script by Jeff Pope and under the fine direction of Jon S. Baird, the comic team comes live, a testament to the talents of this cast. New audiences will be introduced to a historic moment in entertainment, the visual gags and simplicity of the time. Audiences for whom Laurel & Hardy were childhood staples will delight at the laughs, and will be moved by the underside of their hilarity, the resilience of their friendship, the challenges of maintaining celebrity. -
“I don’t sing. I never touched a piano,” Rami Malek told filmmakers at his audition for Bohemian Rhapsody. That did not stop him from incarnating Freddie Mercury, Queen’s frontman until he died of AIDS, in a role that just earned Malek a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama and may be a prelude to an Oscar nod.At a luncheon at the Russian Tea Room this week celebrating his achievement in Bohemian Rhapsody members of the academy praised his performance as he explained how he managed to electrify the screen. To get the right moves and music, he got Eddie Redmayne’s movement coach, and then he watched Mercury and danced around at home for a year. “When Brian May of Queen was on set, I did my best version of Freddie. I was working on him so long, I fell in love with him,” Malek gushed. “I keep blowing him kisses.”
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It was the lustful look as Glenn Close’s character locked eyes with Michael Douglas at dinner in the clip from the unforgettable Fatal Attraction that was truly the show stopper at the 583 Park Avenue party space where The Museum of the Moving Image held their gala honoring Close’s extraordinary career on stage and screen this week. Everyone knows what follows, from the boiled rabbit to the bathtub in this game changer for cinema history, and if this were the only movie Close ever did, the only role she ever occupied, it would distinguish her legacy. Add to that her Cruella DeVille in 101 Dalmations, her Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard recently revived on Broadway, and her role opposite the formidable Jonathan Pryce in her current movie, The Wife. Her demeanor can morph in a moment, paced meticulously as you measure her emotion. You may even gasp, breathless. -
Spoiler alert: At Season Two’s start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mrs. Maisel’s marriage is still in turmoil. Everyone glued to this thoroughly entertaining Amazon Prime series is familiar with the domestic impasse, a source of angst for the couple, and humor for everyone else. Why can’t two people deeply in love be together?As episode 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel opens, our heroine, the divine Rachel Brosnahan, forced to take odd jobs, answers phones at one of those switchboards, moving about on a swivel chair. Think Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing. And then she is summoned home. Before you can say Ooh La La, our Midge is in Paris with her dad, the amazing Tony Shaloub, for some perfectly pitched father-daughter banter, and neither one knows French. Ever resourceful, Midge manages to do her act even there, finding an expat New Yorker at a drag show to translate her weepy story of failed marriage. Get ready to sob in hysteria.
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On the expansive stage of Broadway’s Marquis Theater, a new production of The Illusionists does the near impossible, bringing the intimacy of close up magic to a big 1444-seat house. Eschewing the larger escapist tricks, or cutting a woman in two, or turning a mouse into an elephant, the show keeps the magic magical by making its intimacy large. Featuring Shin Lim as “the Manipulator,” the show gives simple card tricks a new allure. Able to baffle Penn & Teller twice on their show, this recent “America’s Got Talent” champion mesmerizes with his ability to find your card in more and more seemingly impossible situations; where there’s smoke, he can make an entire deck disappear. -
Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined in a snazzy reboot at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of Works and Process the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in Central Park. -
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, before the night’s filet mignon is served, and while the nominees for Best Actor, Feature, etc. continue to be hopeful. There, Ethan Hawke pontificated about Claire Denis and how she should receive a Gotham. We could not praise him enough for his movie Blaze, one that he directed about a music legend. That was before he took home a Best Actor statue for his performance in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, and Schrader received his for Best Screenplay. But the night was young. -
There’s a sweet hotel on Waverly, on the north side of Washington Square Park that could be the prototype of Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery at the Golden Theater. Even if that’s not the spot where Gladys, a remarkable Elaine May, runs an art gallery that does not seem to make much for the owner or the artists, it could be. This funny, real as the table you can touch drama, trades on the familiarity of places and people: Ellen, Gladys’ beleaguered daughter (an excellent Joan Allen), her husband (a fine David Cromer); and two young actors, bookends of each other: Don, an artist (Michael Cera) and Gladys’ grandson Daniel (Lucas Hedges in his Broadway debut), the IT boy in such films as last year’s Lady Bird, and this year’s Mid-90’s and Boy Erased, taking over from Cera, a prior IT boy. -
New York City Center celebrated its 75th year with a performance of the iconic A Chorus Line followed by dinner at the Plaza Hotel. Back in 1975 when it first hit the stage at the Public Theater, A Chorus Line was a game changer of a musical. Scripted from taped interviews with theatrical types: singers and dancers, the book, written by Michael Bennett, collaborating with lyricist Ed Kleban, with music by Marvin Hamlisch—well, this was the winning dream team that made A Chorus Line the Hamilton-scale hit of its day. Re-visioned now 43 years later for this one-week engagement, the musical feels fresh, and simply fabulous. -
“Thank you for your service is not enough,” said Montel Williams, a US Navy veteran, who also said, “I promised not to cry” as he accepted his award at the 2nd annual Salute to Service luncheon hosted by Variety and The History Channel at Cipriani 25 Broadway. Ken Fisher, a friend who had accompanied Williams to Dover to meet with Gold Star families, introduced him as a “veteran’s veteran.” Having recently suffered a massive stroke, Williams showed up anyway, for veterans, and was teary-eyed reminding everyone to do more. They may be home, he said, but “their service is not over.” -
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 & white, acutely detailed, Spanish and indigenous language realization of a key figure in his childhood, a maid he renamed Cleo who came to live with his family in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. A mother figure to him, from a disadvantaged class, he asks himself, what does she represent in the world of now? -
John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey hit the Café Carlyle stage singing– that is Jessica sang Paul Simon’s “American Tune” accompanied by John on the guitar. At this point, as regulars at the Café Carlyle and so familiar on NPR with their highly entertaining Radio Delux, first names are in order for this couple, married in life and music. There is simply nothing like settling into their sublime show, especially after the tensions of Election Day in the rain. With a superb Konrad Paszkudzki on piano and an excellent Mike Karn on bass, there was no talk of religion or politics. -
Family values loom large in the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway. The hyper loneliness of Arnold, a gay man who performs in drag is what the actor Michael Urie kvetches about in his pursuit of love. Dressing as the play opens under its neon Torch Song lights, Arnold could be anyone longing for a lover, with spider lashes and red lips, equal only to the spectacular Andrew Garfield’s Prior Walter in the recent revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. While that great show explores an AIDS ravaged America, this setting inhabits more intimate space: a ‘70’s gay bar’s backroom, a bed, and a kitchen. That’s where Arnold’s mom comes to visit, and she is every bit as large and terrifying as any woman painted by de Kooning, or penned by Philip Roth. As performed by Mercedes Ruehl, she’s a nightmare in pastel, but she’s Arnold’s, and in due course, even as they spar for supremacy in suffering, they belong to each other. -
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 of Katharina Blum (co-written and co-directed with her ex-husband Volker Schlondorff), among them, now screening at Quad Cinema for a retrospective of her work. And with Criterion putting together a boxed DVD set of Bergman’s films, she accepted the challenge of making the documentary, wondering, she told me this week on the phone from Munich, “how can I make a film about such a genius?” Told, do it in a personal way, she made Searching for Ingmar Bergman a most insightful, entertaining tribute from one filmmaker to another. -
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 co-writer Zoe Kazan. The titular kindergarten teacher joins a roster of edgy women brought to life by Gyllenhaal’s ample talents. Think Secretary where her character enjoys a good spanking. In this movie, she’s a thwarted poet who recognizes the poetic gifts of one of her students, a five-year old Jimmy Roy played by one of the producer’s children’s classmate Parker Sevak. Wishing to nurture his verse, Gyllenhaal’s Lisa goes creepy, unacceptable. Every parent will get the willies watching what she does, all with a “good heart.” -
In Northern Ireland in 1981 The Troubles pit Irish against Irish, resulting in a great deal of anguished, epic drama. Think Michael McDonagh, and the movies of Ken Loach. In Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, at the Bernard B. Jacobs theater on Broadway, a monumental 3 hours and 15 minutes zip by, beginning with the news: the body of a ten-years missing man, turned up in a bog, hands and feet bound. Nearby his wife holds the fort, living in her husband’s brother Quinn’s lively household with her son, now a teen. To celebrate the harvest they are cooking goose, and just as the family learns the news about the recovered body, the once live bird hangs on a hook at the kitchen window, bound, emblematic of Seamus’ remains, best left to the imagination. -
“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 Jeff Koons, all featured in the film. In addition, museum curators, private collectors, and auction house personnel were all part of the mix celebrating a movie about a market that keeps its prices up. After all, “you can’t have a golden age without gold,” as someone wisely put it. All the while, the work created on camera, as some question what makes art art, or good art, seems to ignore the vagaries of commerce, allowing the money minded to thrive.
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