Ingmar Bergman’s critically acclaimed 1972 film Cries and Whispers, about a woman dying in the company of her helpless sisters, has been adapted into a multidisciplinary theatrical production by Ivo van Hove, the Flemmish director who enjoyed great success in New York and elsewhere with his radical re-imagining of familiar texts. His bold interpretations of plays such as Hedda Gabler, The Misanthrope, and Little Foxes have been hits in NYC, and in 2008 he staged a remarkable theatrical adaptation of John Cassavetes's wrenching film Opening Night. Van Hove is currently back at BAM with a vivid interpretation of another film, which opens tonight for a brief run of five performances as part of the Next Wave festival. Last week we met up with the director at an East Village cafe to talk about Cries and Whispers. more ›

SKATE: Free skating at Bryant Park just got...more free! Now you can get free rental skates every Wednesday provided you are one of the first 100 people to get over to The Pond Exhibit Area. more ›

MOVIE: The Brooklyn Independent Cinemas series (which takes place the first and third Monday of every month) delivers two shorts tonight. First up is Nevel is the Devil, where "a supervisor at a consumer product testing lab interrogates two suspects of a devilish prank." The second is The Last Romantic, which follows Calvin Wizzig, a poet, around New York in hopes of getting published. Watch the trailer here. 7pm // Barbes [376 9th St, Park... more ›

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• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a person struck by a police car at Canal St. and Broadway in Manhattan, an escaped prisoner at West 110th St. and 7th Ave. in Manhattan, and an amputation on Brewer Blvd. in Queens.
• A downturn in the markets will hurt more than those that work on Wall St. Mayor Bloomberg warns that a bear market will hurt the whole city as reduced tax revenues necessitate spending cuts.
• Woody Allen remembers filmmaker Ingmar Bergman in a Q&A with Time magazine.
• The Florida woman charged with abusing 11 adopted New York children managed to adopt eight of them in a four-month period in 1994, never once using her own name.
• The Gowanus Lounge looks at the feral dogs that used to reside in Red Hook, until they were rescued and spayed or neutered by an animal welfare organization.
• The Brooklyn Cyclones won the first politically-correct called baseball game in history against the home team Lowell Spinners in Massachusetts. Infielders were base persons and a vertically challenged stop. Errors weren't announced to spare the feelings of poor fielders.
• A Queens resident got in Mayor Bloomberg's face while on camera, telling him he can't take the borough for granted.
• Streetsblog clarifies the DOT's plan for bike traffic on 91st between 2nd and 3rd Aves., correcting misreporting by other media outlets that are getting the street's residents riled up -basically the DOT has no intention of painting or striping a bike lane on the street.

Only 2 weeks after his 89th birthday, Swedish film and theater director Ingmar Bergman passed away at his home on Fårö Island this morning, the Associated Press reports. "Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed the death, and Swedish journalist Marie Nyreröd said the director died peacefully during his sleep. Bergman never fully recovered after a hip surgery in October last year, Nyreröd told Swedish broadcaster SVT." more ›

also involves a filmmaker, this time on vacation in a sleepy seaside town where he's trying to finish his newest film script and pick up women. Many of Hong's most memorable scenes involve something simple like a couple getting drunk and their ensuing sexual tension, but the way he crafts the quiet exchanges is both subtle and electrifying. Like the work of Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman, Hong's movies celebrate the impact of a glance and the fascination in human drama. Some of Hong's films are available on DVD, but if you can take this great opportunity to see them projected on the big screen. more ›

Two quite controversial and buzzed about movies hit New York theaters this weekend. So far the critical opinion of raving lunatic Mel Gibson's new foreign language feature, . Now we finally get to see the film they thought was going to be such a public relations nightmare. Leo plays a South African diamond smuggler who teams up with a Sierra Leone farmer (the always excellent Djimon Hounsou) to outwit a syndicate of businessmen. From the trailers it looks pretty heartpounding, and not just because the lovely Jennifer Connelly is also in it. more ›

It's that time of year again, when the New York Film Society at Lincoln Center and a small group of local film critics selects the entries from new world cinema they feel deserves their erudite stamp o' approval. As this year's pre-screening Festival ID tag points out, their 44 years of discernment includes a pretty elite bunch of films and filmmakers, and this year is no different. The NYFF doesn't set out to be mainstream fare, like the younger Tribeca fest, and they pride themselves on this. more ›

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the lineup for the New York Film Festival 2004, and it looks like NY will again benefit from being, arguably, the world's last major film festival by getting films that have played at other festivals by the time the NYFF starts October 1. Opening the festival will be Agnes Jaoui's Look At Me (premiered at Cannes); Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education (also at Cannes) is the centerpiece, as well there being a Pedro retrospective (Viva Pedro!); and Alexander Payne's Sideways will close the festival. Indiewire has a good article about the festival's lineup, and we've taken their lineup list and reproduced it here (after the jump). more ›

Pico Iyer's essay about how Hollywood has been slowly steering away from Hollywood endings mentions recent films like Cold Mountain, Lost in Translation, House of Sand and Fog, and Mystic River as having darker or less resolved endings. But, as Iyer acknowledges, the tradition can be seen with Gone with the Wind or Casablanca. Which made Gothamist wonder what are the endings that linger more: Seeing Vincent Vega walk end Pulp Fiction alive (versus dead, had the film run sequentially) or James Stewart, left alone, the woman he loves dying twice, at the end of Vertigo? Hannibal Lecter getting away at the end of The Silence of the Lambs or Thelma and Louise getting away but not quite? Dorothy back at the farm in the Wizard of Oz or most anything Ingmar Bergman makes? For what it's worth, Gothamist loves seeing Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant get together in a romantic comedy as much as we love seeing Woody Allen and Diane Keaton fall apart. more ›