Coming To America, Eddie Murphy's first foray into playing multiple characters on film, is one of our favorite movies of all time. When we heard about a real life taxi fleet owner who happens to be an African Chief, we were screaming "Good morning, my neighbors!" to everyone we came across for a week. So you can imagine our glee when Vulture pointed us to a Yelp review of McDowell's: "Yeah, that place is a dump. Stopped going there 'cause some mutherfucker that looked like Samuel Jackson kept on robbing the place. WTF?" more ›

Normally, the Hollywood insider's baseball game is too convoluted and self-involved to bother paying attention to, but every once in a while, something juicy enough for the mainstream comes along. Today's gossip involves dry-as-chalk New Yorker critic David Denby breaking a press embargo on reviewing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and the hoopla that's ensued as a result. more ›

File under: gratingly genius. Chow recently compiled a list of the "78 Most Annoying Words to Read in a Restaurant Review" (ugh, "tummy?" "redolent?"), and now blogger FoodieBuddha has gone and written what can only be described as The Most Annoying Restaurant Review Ever, of Soho's beloved (and soon-to-expand) Torrisi Italian Specialties. "In my opinion, the food at Torrisi might not be conceptually decadent, but it is gutsy and oh so yummers … or yummilicious … or yummo … or perhaps the more reserved 'yummy.'" more ›

Last week, 15-year-old chef Greg Grossman served a five-course dinner at pop-up restaurant The Feast, and critics were unimpressed, to say the least. Normally when we have 15-year-olds who desperately need a haircut cook for us it's a symphony of the senses, but apparently Grossman hasn't yet mastered the art of molecular gastronomy. Time to run him out of town on a rail! more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews of this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include: The Adjustment Bureau, Rango, Take Me Home Tonight, Red State, Deneuve, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Beastly, Ex Drummer, I Saw the Devil, Diary, 1973-1983, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. more ›

East Village restaurant Vandaag is "a comfortable restaurant of vaguely Dutch inflection," writes Sam Sifton at the Times. "Large and airy, high ceilinged, uncrowded and clean, Vandaag (the name is Dutch for 'today') is the sort of dining room you could move into with a couple of tattered leather armchairs, and sit all day, bare feet on the polished concrete floor, reading novels." He loves the cocktails, finds the pork chop too "tough," but adores the chilled cucumber soup that "comes tasting of ginger, mint and gin, with hints of pickled cantaloupe and smoked eel. Sounds awful? It is the opposite." Two stars out of four. more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews of this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include: The Expendables, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Animal Kingdom, The Legend of Earthsea, Eat Pray Love, Peepli Live, The People I've Slept With, Salt of This Sea, The Blues Brothers, and Husbands and Wives. more ›

This week David Chang's Má Pêche, his first foray out of the East Village, is on the receiving end of three critical appraisals. The most significant is Sam Sifton's two star review in the Times, which deems it "a very good restaurant for a Midtown business lunch, a celebratory steak dinner or a drink and some snacks after work... Má Pêche is the first Momofuku restaurant truly suitable for dining with those the Internet calls the olds. (Though like some of its forebears, it takes no reservations.) Eating there is a little like visiting your formerly bohemian artist friend, whom you haven’t seen since he signed with Deitch and bought a double loft in TriBeCa." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times enthuses about Takashi, "a modest and wondrous strange new restaurant on Hudson Street in the West Village that specializes in raw offal and Korean-style Japanese barbecue. They are simple exciting dishes: a taste of passion best consumed with cold sake and an open mind...Two philosophies are at work within it. The first has to do with the quality of the meat, which is superior to anything you will find in a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant, at least in Manhattan. The second has to do with the diversity of the cuts of meat Mr. Inoue offers his customers. The overarching point of Takashi is to celebrate the cow in its entirety." Ha, and what better way to celebrate animals than by slaughtering them? more ›

The plebeian theatrics of professional wresting serve as an electrifying metaphor for mass media manipulation in Kristoffer Diaz's exuberant satire The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. Instead of dismissing professional wresting as white trash pabulum, the "sport" is presented as a fauvist art form, seen through the eyes of fast-talking narrator Macedonio Guerra, a shrimpy Nuyorican wrestler who's living out his childhood dream of bouncing off the turnbuckles, playing the loser foil to stars like the ripped Chad Deity, a sort of Hulk Hogan meets Kanye West star. Because Guerra (Desmin Borges) is a self-taught master of all the tricks, he's paid by impresario Everett K. Olson, (AKA Vince McMahon) to make Deity look like the champ. more ›

Jean-Georges Vongerichten's ABC Kitchen, an eco-friendly restaurant on the ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home, gets the Times treatment today. Like most other critics, Sifton is impressed with the food, but of course he needs to keep it punk (though not too punk) by gently mocking the swells. He tosses it two stars, and describes the atmosphere as "spiritually materialistic... The restaurant is airy and open and relaxed the way the second homes of the wealthy often are, with LED-style lighting over warm floors... You meet people like this. Only when they are spectacularly good-looking and appear to be attracted to you are they manageable. more ›

Eater has a letter that restaurateur Keith McNally (Balthazar, Pastis) sent to New York magazine critic Adam Platt. Platt wasn't that enthusiastic about McNally's new endeavor, Pulinio's Bar & Pizzeria, and McNally fires back: "The fact is, you're as out of touch describing young downtown New Yorkers as you are at understanding the restaurants where they like to eat. For in your middle-aged world it's axiomatic that busy, exuberant restaurants cannot and will not serve great food. This, unfortunately, is no less a form of prejudice than restaurateurs believing that bald, over-weight reviewers are incapable of reviewing lively downtown restaurants impartially." more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include Iron Man 2, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Babies, Metropolis, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, DDR/DDR, Trash Humpers, The Oath, Mother and Child, Clerks and Rules of the Game. more ›

For those times when a series of comical misadventures keep you from visiting White Castle in person, here's the next "best" thing: A scented candle that "infuses the home with the steam-grilled aroma of America’s first fast-food hamburger." This limited-edition item went on sale Monday at $10 a pop, with the net proceeds going to benefit Autism Speaks. It is already sold out, but White Castle's website notes that it's only sold out "for now." Is that a threat or a promise? Early reviews are not specifically too good: more ›

"Pulino’s is not really a pizzeria, nor a bar," declares Sam Sifton in his one star review of Keith McNally's latest venture. "The chef is Nate Appleman, a young transplant from San Francisco. His cooking is simple and brash, as American as it is inflected with Italian flavors, rustic in the sense that it comes out of smoky, wood-assisted ovens, and urban for the very same reason... You can sit at the bar there, drink Campari and read the newspaper, as you can at any of Mr. McNally’s establishments, feeling grand under a ceiling that soars above a checkerboard floor, surrounded by distressed mirrors, chicken-wire glass, towering walls covered with liquor bottles... Restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia, is how the novelist Richard Price put it, in Lush Life. That’s Pulino’s exactly." more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include Nightmare on Elm Street, Phish 3D, Furry Vengeance, Anton Chekhov's The Duel, Ghost Bird, Harry Brown, The Human Centipede, Please Give, and Sweet Smell of Success. more ›

The Mark Restaurant, another venture from chef/brand Jean-Georges Vongerichten, is a "welcome addition to the Upper East Side," writes Times critic Sam Sifton in his two star review. Located in The Mark hotel, the dining room "lies behind a small bar filled with low-slung pony-skin chairs. Older men unsure of how they’re going to get out of them sit there, pondering the issue over vodka as cubs and cougars banter and text. Dinner seems unlikely. Past them, though, down a dark corridor that doubles as a modernist wine cellar, a very good restaurant blooms." more ›

"Some restaurants are time machines," writes Times critic Sam Sifton in his perceptive two star review of the elegant "modern French, Asian-accented" restaurant SHO Shaun Hergatt, which opened in 2009 down the block from the New York Stock Exchange. "SHO Shaun Hergatt, the strange and occasionally terrific restaurant on the second floor of a condominium building in the financial district, even looks like one, down to the elevator that whisks you up from the lobby. Diners enter this simple metal box in 2010, talking about the beating Goldman Sachs took in the markets on Friday. They emerge in the late 1990s, Goldman still privately held, the economy booming in a city where restaurants reflected the excess. This calls for Champagne!" more ›

Oh, who cares? I mean, besides the producers who sunk millions into this nostalgia machine, and those starstruck Drama Club brats bussed in from the suburbs for a night, and of course the baby boomer fans of the '60s TV series, does anyone out there really give a damn whether this big Broadway adaptation of The Addams Family is actually "good"? If your tween wants to see it, you'll buy a ticket, no matter what the reviews say, and if you're a tourist hankering for a superficial spectacle, you'll step right up, too. (And they have been—the theater was filled to 100% capacity in recent weeks.) But are any real New Yorkers out there actually wondering whether this rote extravaganza, ostensibly inspired by Charles Addams's cartoons in The New Yorker, is worth the average ticket price of $100? more ›

Ken Ludwig's farcical screwball comedy Lend Me a Tenor first premiered in 1986, but this wearisome trifle feels so out of place in the Foul Year of Our Lord 2010 that it might as well be a relic from the Gilded Age. It's actually set in 1934 in Cleveland, but of course there's no hint of Depression-era squalor here; the milieu is Cleveland's upper crust, who are thrilled that world famous opera singer Tito Merelli (Anthony LaPaglia) has arrived for a single performance of Otello. But when the corpulent tenor is found dead to the world an hour before curtain, local impresario Saunders (Tony Shaloub) must scramble to find a replacement. more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews of Date Night, When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors, The Square, After.Life, La Mission, Everyone Else, Letters to God, The Black Waters of Echo's Pond, Ace in the Hole, and The NeverEnding Story. more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews of Hot Tub Time Machine, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Bluebeard, New Directors/New Films, Chloe, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Dancing Across Borders, Lbs., Eclipse, Mid-August Lunch, and Coming to America. more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include: Greenberg, The Bounty Hunter, Repo Men, The Runaways, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, City Island, Vincere, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hubble 3D, The Prowler, and Stand By Me more ›