Results tagged “reviews”

              

Click on the film stills for more on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include An Education, The Damned United, Adventures of Power, Free Style, Good Hair, The Heretics, Peter and Vandy, Yes Men Fix the World, Lisztomania, Bronson, Paranormal Activity, Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles,

            

Click on the film stills above for more on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include The Invention of Lying, Whip It, Zombieland, After the Storm, Afterschool, An American Journey: Revisiting Robert Frank’s "The Americans", Chelsea on the Rocks, More Than a Game, Where is Where?, The Wiz, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

              

Click on the film stills above for more on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Fame, Pandorum, Blind Date, Surrogates, The Boys are Back, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, In Search of Beethoven, Irene in Time, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Passing Strange.

Charles, the clandestine West Village restaurant that Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema recently skewered for its affected, still-under-construction front, gets eviscerated by Frank Bruni at the Times today. He goes meta with this one, once again writing in the voice of a vapid, trend-spotting socialite pecking out an email to Graydon Carter, whose Waverly Inn inspired Charles's game of hard-to-get: "[The windows] are covered in old newspapers and blue tape, as if the space is under construction or even condemned, and they’ve been that way for so long that when I paused on the sidewalk the other night to read the fine print, I learned that Sarah Palin had resuscitated the McCain candidacy. The newspapers are at first funny, then odd, then just sort of sad, maybe because Charles doesn’t have enough else going for it. In the end I couldn’t get around that. I suppose it’s pretty inside, though it’s so dark you can’t tell, so dark that Bitsy and I never could decide if that was Maggie Gyllenhaal two tables away." For further reading, here's Charles's most recent DOH inspection results: a whopping 36 violation points...but maybe that's just they're way of dissuading you from dining there?

            

Click on the film stills above for more details and reviews on this weekend's new releases and repertory screenings, which include The Cake Eaters, Tokyo Sonata, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carmen & Geoffrey, Waiting for Dublin, Miss March, Z, The Last House on the Left, The Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, and The Dead Zone.

          

Click on the images above for more details and reviews of this weekend's movies.

          

The first NYC location of The Standard Hotel opened recently after more than two years of construction; located literally above the High Line, this is the sort of ominous looking structure that Curbed once likened to the AT-AT All-Terrain Walker from Star Wars. (Or for the more adult-minded, a "perpetual lap dancer" on the High Line, because of the way it evocatively straddles that old elevated railway.)

         

Click on the images for more on each of this week's releases.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall opens today, remember? Of course you do, because the movie’s marketing campaign has flooded the city for months with posters like “You Suck, Sarah Marshall,” pissing off a lot of real-life Sarah Marshalls in the process. By now, you know that it stars Jason Segel (Knocked Up) as a jilted slacker who books a Hawaiian vacation to get over his ex, only to find her at the same hotel with her new rock star boyfriend (Russell Brand)! Ha ha ha! What are the odds? David Denby calls the movie "fitful and halfhearted.” And the promising cast – including Paul Rudd, Bill Heder and Jonah Hill – are “working in second gear.”

Writing for the Post, Andrea Strong feasts at Broadway East (pictured), the chic new Lower East Side organic restaurant with the dainty carbon footprint: The restaurant composts, filters and carbonates its own water, uses a green linen company, and donates waste cooking oil to the Environmental Energy Recycling Corp. Oh, and the food? Strong calls it “a brilliant compromise” between carnivores and vegetarians, “showcasing veggies along with organic meat and sustainably harvested and locally procured seafood.”

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni marvels at Manhattan’s new wave of high tone restaurant openings during a recession, and pins the trend not on entrepreneurial bravado but on the fact that it takes years to get a fancy eatery open, and most of these new places were envisioned in flusher economic times. It is true that in 2005, the top fifth of earners in Manhattan made 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826 compared with $7,047 – comparable to the income disparity in Namibia. Yet thanks to tax cuts and stagflation, the income gap has only widened in the past three years. Dinner at Per Se is as unattainable as ever for New York’s lower orders, but even with Wall Street turbulence it’s unlikely the ranks of the well-heeled will thin to the point where a fashionable restaurant can’t manage. Of course, chefs like Ken Friedman (The Spotted Pig) are artists and don’t chain their muse to the vagaries of the economy: “I’m certainly not the kind who would look at the Dow. Does a writer write or not write a book based on the economic climate? Does a songwriter write songs that way?”

This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Lebanese Ilili, saying “Ilili is probably the atmospherically grandest excursion into Middle Eastern cooking that New York has ever seen.” While much of the menu is inconsistent, he loves the kebabs and kaftas. Says the service is “occasionally confused.” And get the essmalieh for dessert.

At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. Euro Shop, a small store whose window is decorated with the flag of the European Union has always intrigued us. Among other things it offers a half dozen types of paprika paste; a meat counter filled with bacon, sausages and pork crackling; and a plethora of Hungarian junk food. Now that we’ve had their homemade...

READING: Our interviewee from yesterday, Adrian Tomine, will be reading tonight at Book Court. The graphic novelist not only has his work in some of the more prestigious rags, he's also got a full length graphic novel, titled Shortcomings.

Clarence Dean, a registered sex offender in Florida and Alabama, was charged in the murder of a young woman whose body was found at a Times Square hotel. While cleaning a room on Thursday, a housekeeper at the Hotel Carter, on West 43rd Street near 8th Avenue, noticed some plastic bags under a bed and realized there was a body inside. Dean had checked out of the room on Wednesday.

Mayor Bloomberg loves the arts and supports many arts and cultural institutions as a (billionaire) philanthropist. And yesterday, he made sure that NYC public school students get a chance to love the arts as well, by introducing ArtsCount, a way to make sure schools and their principals are offering arts programs "through accountability and quality improvement initiatives."

Gothamist recently flew from New York to Paris and back. In the post-Heathrow world of strict carry-on rules, we brought nothing more than a book into the cabin. Consequently, we were stuck eating Continental's dismal dinner, optimistically called 'lasagna bolognese.' It was among our worst meals in recent memory, and we didn't get past the first few bites. Even the brownie was bad.

Open House; Nutmeat: A Fairytale Burlesque; House; The French Defense; The Bicycle Men; Hugging the Shoulder; and The Day the Universe Came Closer. Complete schedules and tickets for all are located on the Fringe listing site.

In our never ending struggle to find more ways to piss away our time, we were browsing through some of the weird links the New York Times sticks waaaay down at the bottom of the left menu. That's when we happened to notice NYTimes Video, a huge arcihve of video shorts produced by Times staffers. There's lots of fun stuff down there-- one-minute movie reviews, David Pogue videoblogging at CES, recipes in Dining and Wine, Theatre Reviews, and even some local news. It's not quite NY1, but it's a good way to kill a half hour.

Delicious has long been an indispensible tool for our work here at Gothamist-- we have bookmarks for dozens of tags and monitor them throughout the day. Our favorites include Brooklyn, New York, and Photography, but our favorite tag is definitely "NYC." Starting today, Josh and his pals have added a new feature to make the NYC tag page even better: you can now see the most popular recent NYC tags. The default view for the NYC page is to show every link tagged with NYC-- often the same ones repeat, and it's a lot to keep up with-- this page makes it much easier to see the most important links. As of this morning, these are the NYC links that top the list:

"Last year Elton John declared that Rufus Wainwright was the greatest songwriter on the planet. Quite a profound statement from the king of pop himself. This was presumably based on hearing 2004's Want One, followed earlier this year by the groundbreaking opus, Want Two." Elly Roberts goes on to say that Wainwright's recent show at The Lowry was "An epic night, and a high watermark of a musician on top of his game, who has single headedly changed the possibilities of popular music." Our hometown (via Rhinebeck, New York and Canada) hero headlines the Beacon Theater two nights in row this week. We're especially excited about Wednesday's show. Regina Spektor is opening.

A few things to think about on a warm Saturday night:

to any more shows was necessary. But we trudged on, press badge around neck and open mind...er, kept open.