Corton: One of the most anticipated openings of the season, this modern French restaurant, formerly Montrachet, is the love child of big shot restaurateur Drew Nieporent (Nobu) and chef Paul Liebrandt, who dreams of owning a cryogenic freezer "for freezing the cooks when they misbehave." Located in Tribeca, the 65-seat space serves a three-course prix fixe for $76 and a tasting menu for $110. What financial crisis? Appealing options for the not-broke-yet include Ocean Trout......

The trailer for Beverly Hills Chihuahua was a thing of wonder, with a small army of dogs rapping in a spectacular Mayan Busby Berkeley chorus number. But cuidado: the finished product, which features Cheech Marin and Luis Guzman voicing Latino stereotypes for mucho dinero, has no rapping! The Detroit News says it's "not the apocalypse-signaling, cultural abomination its trailers make it out to be. The bad news: That's pretty much the best thing that......

Philippe Express: Don’t let the name throw you; the cuisine here is Chinese, not French, and Seth Rogen has no connection with the place. Chef Philippe Chow is all about Chicken Satays, Crispy Beef, and Salt and Pepper Prawns, which has worked well for him uptown on 60th Street. This downtown satellite, opening tonight, features red banquets and automated touch-screen ordering. And in a “Big Brother’s Watching You Eat” twist, the touch screens will remember......

The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke concerns a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to help pay for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother's (Angelica Huston) stay in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a lot of heart to temper all the black comedy. Rex Reed begs to differ: "I......

Have you heard? Everyone is so excited about the new Trader Joe's coming to town! Brooklyn's first branch of the grocery store opens up this Friday, and if you thought that in a city like New York it would take a little more than reasonably priced organic milk to get people excited, then you'd be wrong. OTBKB has a source deep inside the establishment who reports back that the Court Street store's opening will include......

A rendering of the lobby of Cassandra Cinema. Except for the avant-garde Ocularis screenings in the old Galapagos, North Brooklyn has been a dead zone for movie theaters for years. Why, just the other day the Greenpointers blogger could be heard begging the world to open up a movie theater near her: "I know it will take you years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I promise you I will go every Sunday......

Sycamore: A Flickr user named Finstr took this atmospheric photo at the opening night of Ditmas Park's newest bar. The opening of yet another bar in Brooklyn hardly merits mention, but Sycamore's a bit unique in that it's located within a flower shop. Or rather, one walks through a flower shop on the way in. Or you could also just buy your flowers and leave. Flatbush Vegan went all the way with the thing, though,......

Samuel L. Jackson—who, as Anthony Lane at the New Yorker notes, is about to turn 60—stars in Lakeview Terrace, a suburban noir featuring Jackson as an L.A. cop and single dad who cannot stand the liberal mixed-race couple next door. It's directed but not written by Neil LaBute, though Lane thinks "it sounds a lot like him, in the lethal simmer of its conversation...It’s a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace......

One of the (many) new venues taking root in Gowanus will be opening its doors this week. Back in June we checked in on the progress of The Bell House (run by Union Hall and Floyd owners Jim Carden and Andy Templar, along with Union Hall booker Jack McFadden). To recap, there will be a huge bar in the performance space as well as a front lounge bar, and an entrance to each will be......

It seems like just yesterday that Marty Markowitz was standing there in his Hawaiian shirt, announcing the borough's first Trader Joe's. Now, the Brooklyn Paper reports it will be opening in the landmark Independence Bank building as soon as next week! September 26th, to be exact. "The supermarket will open at 9 am and the festivities will feature giveaways, live music," and of course, more Markowitz. But be warned winos, this location at the corner......

The recalculated red hotness of Red Hook came in the form of a Fall food and drink preview dedicated strictly to the neighborhood in last week’s Time Out, written up with an ersatz, vaguely Swedish alphabet meant to evoke IKEA label kookiness. Among the umlaut-heavy listings was one for Stumptown Coffee’s first New York store, which will reportedly open in the former heating and air conditioning place seen here, at 219 Van Brunt Street. Some......

Tierra: Tapas now and forever! Franklin Becker, the chef who recently stepped in to try and breathe life into Sheridan Square, now has another responsibility: Tierra. Per the press release, it’s where "Old School Tapas" meets "New School Tapas." The menu emphasizes adventurous wine pairings with items like Cabrales Filled Dates, Warm Goat Cheese Torta, and Chicken Livers on Toast. It opens tonight in the space formerly occupied by Tasca, and the publicist's breathless description......

This summer came news of a Greenpoint bar called Five Leaves opening and being backed by Heath Ledger (and now by his estate). Urban Daddy has the latest, on the day of the unofficial opening, reporting that "the designer is the man behind Moto, Smith and Mills and Tailor ... The end effect is a bar that Thomas Edison might have built for his buddies. The handmade light fixtures are steel and wire concoctions that......

Righteous Kill—which sounds like the title of the sequel to Death Blow—stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino as New York detectives searching for the serial killer who murdered their acting abilities, ha ha. There are critical take-downs galore here, but this one from Rolling Stone tickled us: "Some people think Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be a kick to watch just reading a phone book. Well, bring on that phone book. Righteous......

Photo courtesy Todd Hells Kitchen. File this one under unsurprising: The shiny new TKTS booth in Times Square that's supposed to finally open this month over 18 months late is also way over budget, the Post reports. The ambitious new discount theater ticket outlet, which features an all-glass skin with an amphitheater-style roof (pictured) and "a shimmering and floating carpet of color and light," has cost 100 percent more than its original $8 million estimate.......

Photo of Radiohole's Anger/Nation courtesy Radiohole. The Fringe, the Summer Play Festival, the Ice Factory—all that's behind us. With summer all but over, it's time for the big dogs of Broadway take center stage once again. Today the Times arts section is packed with ads and articles about the upcoming theater season, which critic Charles Isherwood has dubbed A Season of Men. That's mainly because there are two David Mamet plays set to open, Arthur......

Hea: Pronounced HEE, this South Asian and Japanese restaurant is named for "an extremely popular Cantonese slang word invented by Hong Kong teenagers, which refers to a relaxed or 'chill' state of being." To keep things chill, the bi-level place emphasizes "communal relaxation" with a bar lounge on the first floor (pictured) and formal dining with a sushi bar upstairs, where diners will be greeted by a 300-year-old calligraphy table, "behind which glitter ancient Chinese......

A.O. Scott over at the Times loves A Secret, Claude Miller’s "haunting" new film adaptation of a French novel by Philippe Grimbert. The movie skips through time, covering the pre and post war lives of a fractured Jewish family in France. Scott calls it a story of "confused passion and ethical struggle" that "leaves in place a sense that something horribly and splendidly strange can lie under the surface of ordinary experience.... The film......

Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce star in Traitor, a terrorist thriller conceived by Steve Martin that the Village Voice calls "uneven yet engrossing." In it, Cheadle plays an American-born mercenary who at age nine witnessed his Sudanese Muslim father die in a car bombing. When the flick finds him as an adult, he's seemingly gone from U.S. Special Ops to selling explosives to jihadists, with Pearce as the FBI agent on his tail. The......

Rumors of another big box department store following Ikea's footsteps into Red Hook have been all but confirmed by the Brooklyn Paper, which is reporting that BJ’s Wholesale Club is "on the verge of announcing plans to move into the former site of the Revere Sugar factory." That would put the members-only retailer just down the street from Ikea and bring Red Hook residents closer to fulfilling their dream of living in a world class......

This week Frank Bruni files two shorter reviews for the Times instead of handing down his usual hefty decision on a single restaurant. He heads east to follow up on Sushi Yashuda on 43rd Street, declaring that from the time it opened "more than eight years ago, when William Grimes awarded it three stars in The New York Times, it has been among the best. And a recent visit suggested that there’s been no slippage,......

Clo: Like uWink before it, Clo, an new automated wine bar in the Time Warner Center, has liberated customers from burdensome interaction with human servers and their constant demand for gratuities. The video above, courtesy WCBS, shows the computer-run bar in action. (Do what you need to do to tune out the shrill newscaster voice.) The Times explains that customers can simply touch on a wine name to get details on tasting notes, food......

You know summer's over when the biggest movie opening is Hamlet 2, a Sundance hit about a high school teacher's struggle to save the school's drama program by writing, directing, producing and starring in a zany time-travel musical. (Okay, there's also Death Race, which the Times calls "a supercharged junkyard apocalypse powered by an unabashed relish for brutal comeuppance and a flair for delirious vehicular mayhem.") British funnyman Steve Coogan – you know, the......

Tropic Thunder – an action/comedy lampoon of a Vietnam action movie gone awry – would seem worth the price of admission just to see Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface, but Robert Wilonsky's Village Voice slam does give one pause: "When it isn't tossing softballs at the studios, Tropic Thunder is the very thing it parodies: a wall of noise engulfed in flame... Stiller is back in the send-up business, nibbling gently at the soft,......

PetalBelle: Aw, this cute new SoHo waffle place from the owners of Lombardi’s will, Thrillist reports, be serving Belgian “liege” waffles made with “a wide-grain Scandinavian sweetener some call ‘pearl sugar,’ and others ‘Nütra Sweet.’” Eater further notes that there are “four flavors of gelato" and – deep breath – "basic coffee drinks." 158 Sullivan St, (212) 677-1580 Botinica: Red Hook has a fancy new bar to go with its fancy new Swedish retailer. It’s......

Swing Vote, anyone? You know, starring Kevin Costner as an “apathetic, beer-slinging, lovable loser, who is coasting through a life that has passed him by, until his daughter sets off a chain of events which culminates in the election coming down to one vote: her dad’s!” HAHAHA! Take it away, Boston Globe: “Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize. It's predicated on so many forces of incompetence converging in a single spot......

Chickpea: We used to love Chickpea, that fresh falafel place on Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place that let you squirt as much tahini as you wanted into your pita. But we lost interest when they went through that whole confusing name change contest – marred by allegations that the game was rigged – and ended up calling themselves Kosher Village. Now it’s Tahini, and they bake their falafel, which is as about healthy as......

Compared to the hype that surrounded the first film adaptation, this second X-Files movie is opening almost discreetly this weekend. Is the studio’s subdued promotional effort a sign that I Want to Believe is a mess, or is Space Chimps just sucking all the air out of the room? The Times’s Manohla Dargis says, “I wanted to believe. But with his big-screen blowup of his great and weird television series The X-Files, Chris Carter......

Convivio: The Tudor City restaurant formerly known as L’Impero has been reborn as Convivio (pictured), a more casual but still swish venture from the same team, Chris Cannon and chef Michael White. Located in a historic 1920s building, the space is made deluxe with burnt orange banquettes, a hand-hammered copper bar top, and reflective lacquered ceilings. White – who spent seven years studying Italian cuisine in Imola – emphasizes the southern part of the boot......

Macondo: Named after the fictional Colombian village in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, this new Lower East Side restaurant gives Latin street food a gourmet twist. We stopped in for dinner Thursday night, and though they're still working out the kinks (the frozen drinks took forever, and some of the staff had no idea what they were setting down on the table) it's worth a trip for the cod fish Arepa alone.......