Photo courtesy Mike Lewis. If you passed by St. Paul’s Chapel near the World Trade Center site yesterday you may have felt like you’d stepped back through time to the city’s raw, post-9/11 days, when the chapel’s fence was festooned with photos and tributes to the attack's victims. The new Nora Ephron movie Julie & Julia recreated the makeshift memorial, which was dismantled in November 2002. (Using a crane, the crew also pasted leaves to......

Filmmaker Ethan Coen has left his big brother behind and written three short plays all by himself. Called Almost an Evening, the triptych will be produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with a terrific cast that includes Elizabeth Marvel, who was riveting in Ivo van Hove’s unforgettable revival of Hedda Gabler, and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham. The plays “unsuccessfully tackle important questions. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four......

Manhattan Film Forum Following the overwhelming success of the Woody Allen series at Film Forum last winter, they've brought back the new 35mm print of the Woodman's classic ode to our great city for a one week run. Sitting back in the air conditioned dark, feeling the George Gershwin soundtrack and the stunning black and white photography wash over you, you'll fall for this metropolis and this movie all over again. As Allen's character Isaac......

Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, visited New York City yesterday. While the showiest part of their night may have been the presentation of a Global Environmental Citizen Award to the Prince from the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, we bet the most fun was had during the couple's visit the the Harlem Children's Zone. The Harlem Children's Zone, which includes the Promise Academy and other services and programs......

There is tons of speculation all over the Internet about the Oscar nominations for films released in 2006. As an Oscars fiend, we're not going to digress about the calculus of vote-splitting. Instead, we'll point out a couple things we noticed: - Best surprise nomination: Ryan Gosling's Best Actor nomination for Half Nelson; Gosling plays a drug-addicted teacher in Brooklyn trying to help one of his students...it'll be on DVD in three weeks - see......

Yes, yes, last night was the Golden Globes. And boy, that Warren Beatty NEVER SHUTS UP. People looked pretty (but Jennifer Love Hewitt, what the hell were you wearing?), and it was nice to see Helen Mirren rack up the awards, even though it got a little boring and we think more people saw Prime Suspect than Elizabeth I. Sure, Dreamgirls won big (Jennifer Hudson is a star - here's more and more confirmation......

- Jersey is open! - Spitzer thinks that Bloomberg is lowballing the MTA with the city's $500 million offer for the West Side Railyards. - The 34-year-old president of LIC bed-behemoth 1-800-MATTRESS has passed on. - Alleged Halloween psycho-rapist Peter Braunstein has reconciled with his father. And now he "just wants to die." - You gotta love the NYPD Bomb Squad logo. - Inside a New York-based Spyware firm. - Only one more month......

The Devil may wear prada and Superman may wear tight red briefs but what's really should get you hot and bothered on a long holiday weekend is Amy Sedaris in prosthetic teeth and high rise pants. Wooh-wee, that's some sexy stuff. No matter how you felt about Lauren Weisberger's thinly veiled roman a clef about life in the Vogue trenches, you have to admit that the preview for The Devil Wears Prada movie with Meryl......

Ever since that W cover with Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan, an unexpected amount of buzz around Robert Altman's new film Prairie Home Companion has been building. Maybe it's merely the oddity of combining Garrison Keillor's radio program, Altman's usual troop of amazing character actors and the teen starlet that has people intrigued but it finally hits general theatrical release. Besides a blonde LIndsay trying to hold her own with the likes of Lily Tomlin......

This weekend is the weekend of movie déjà vu. You will be struck with the nagging feeling that all of the major films new to theaters seem oddly like something you've seen before. But repertory programming out in Brooklyn or in the West Village will provide a much needed shot of creativity to counter balance the same old, same old. A remake of the '70s disaster classic, Poseidon opens this weekend with Josh "the poor......

Last night Gothamist attended the 4th annual benefit for the Academy of American Poets at Alice Tully Hall and was reminded that reciting poetry aloud is really a wonderful thing. As the kick-off to National Poetry Month in April, a panel of celebrity readers including William Wegman, Mike Wallace, Dianne Weist, Alan Alda and Meryl Streep read a few examples each from a variety of American poets. Great poets like William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath,......

Ben Younger, Director, Prime...

The Hollywood Reporter says that Meryl Streep will be playing the Anna Wintour-inspired devilish boss in the movie of The Devil Wears Prada. Streep has already played another Conde Nast employee, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, in Adaptation, so we can't wait until she plays Graydon Carter or Jeff Jarvis next (hey, she played a rabbi in Angels in America - she can probably do it!). We think that someone like Lara Flynn Boyle, with......

Here's a little Mayoral Race 2005 action to tie us over: Congressman and mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner held a protest against the West Side Stadium yesterday, but he was heckled by trade union guys. According to Newsday, the trade unionists were more "amused" than menacing, and called Weiner a "loser." But Gothamist could feel sorry for Weiner, because those union guys could probably take him, it turns out that Weiner heckled back. Another Democratic mayoral......

We thought this was a pretty amusing piece from the Times on the biggest flops thus far in the Broadway theater season. Dracula The Musical, which closed on Sunday, inspired the article, taking a blood bath with an estimated loss of some $7.5 million after a mere five months on Broadway. But that's a neglible loss compared to Bombay Dreams, which the article descibes as losing "the better part of $14 million." And a new......

Lockhart Steele's Curbed points me to the Douglas Elliman page for Meryl Streep's townhouse. Lockhart says that the building is on 12th between 5th and 6th -- if pushed, I guess I'd call that Greenwich Village. Elliman, on the other hand, calls it a "sought after Gold Coast location". Huh? Can Gothamist explain what probably the most landlocked part of Manhattan is doing being described as "Gold Coast"? I always thought the Gold Coast was......

If it involves movies or television, Gothamist is interested. And if it's the tiniest bit related to the Oscars, then we're all over it. That's why Gothamist has produced a Golden Globes commentary similar to our Oscar commentary from last year. Yes, awards shows are self-congratulatory and ridiculous, and the Golden Globes are not a reliable predictor of the Oscars (which aren't that great anyway but their usefulness as a marketing tool cannot be denied),......

The SAG nominations have been announced, and while the usual suspects of late appear, the biggest surprise is the strong showing for The Station Agent, with Peter Dinklage and Patricia Clarkson getting lead nominations and the cast receiving an ensemble nominations. The SAGs are voted on by actors, so these are usually a pretty decent indicator of who will be nominated for the Oscars' acting categories. We would like to see Johnny Depp get an......

HBO has been hyping their $60 million epic film, Angels in America, for weeks and weeks, and it seems that the hype of seeing Tony Kushner's Pulitzer and Tony–winning play on screen, directed by Mike Nichols, with performances by Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Mary Louise Parker, and Jeffrey Wright is justified. Gothamist read Angels in America ten years ago, so we've been eagerly awaiting the adaptation (buy Angels in America: The Millennium......

As the natural, expected follow-up to yesterday's post about Best Movie Sex Scenes, Gothamist looks bad movie sex scenes. Using The Guardian's list based on reader opinion as a starting point, of course Gothamist agrees that the love scene between Neo and Trinity in The Matrix: Reloaded is ridiculous, but the very worst scene ever? Come on, at least these two leads are sexy and appealing, even if the context and Zion is stupid. Number......

Oscar Commentary
Oscar is celebrating its 75th anniversary, I'm celebrating my 25th anniversary of watching Oscar....

As a hopeless cinephile, I feel that the year I spend watching movies is like having a crush on some unattainable person. It makes me feel alive, with all the planning and dreaming and effort I put into it, and somehow, even when I see a bad movie, it’s okay, because it’s one of the knocks I take in wishing that maybe this in time, after paying $10+ for a movie, it might reward my......