My Kid Could Paint That (directed by Amir Bar-Levi) Documentarian Amir Bar-Levi spent a year following the Olmstead family as their daughter Marla became a darling of the contemporary art world. The only odd thing about Marla meteoric rise to fame? Her age. She was 4 years old at the time and painting elaborate abstract canvases selling for thousands of dollars each. Following a large profile of Marla on 60 Minutes that brought into doubt......

I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With (directed by Jeff Garlin) While there's quite a few new releases coming out that are worth checking out this weekend (like the western and the spacemen documentary), we wanted to reserve our pick for a charming little movie you might have otherwise ignored. Written, directed and starring comedian Jeff Garlin (who we interviewed earlier this week), it's the kind of modest, looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places story you don't often see these......

This month's Bon Appetit is the restaurant issue, highlighting recipes from restaurants all across the world, but our own Little Owl made the cover photo with their delectable meatball sliders. Other hometown shout-outs went to The Good Fork, for their Korean-style steak and eggs, a spiced plum chutney from Tabla, and WD-50's music playlist (including one of our current obsessions, Hall & Oates). A feature article focuses on some of our finest pastry chefs, who......

It's Only A Movie: Horror Films From the 1970s and Today Museum of the Moving Image, Queens Boo! It's time to hide your eyes and scream with delight over at the Museum of the Moving Image, as they'll be showing six weeks worth of old and new horror films starting tonight. You could say that scary stories are always about what metaphorical bogey men society fears most, but that became particularly evident in the horror......

Flags of Our Fathers Letters From Iwo Jima (directed by Clint Eastwood) To tell just one side of an armed conflict isn't telling the whole story, and Clint Eastwood's companion movies released last winter in time for Oscar season expertly uses that idea to illuminate the capture during World War II of the Japanese island Iwo Jima. Even more thrilling than the movies' exploding bombs or CGI parade of tanks is the deft and sensitive......

We were fortunate enough to be at the Time Out New York Eat Out Awards last night to watch the winners of both the Readers' Choice awards, chosen by readers who made over 14,000 submissions, and the Critics' Picks awards, selected by the TONY staff. The coveted plates hang on restaurant and bar walls throughout the city. Four gold plate awards went to those who won some of the top honors -- A Voce, for......

Volver (directed by Pedro Almodóvar): Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has a thing for lushness. He saturates his movies with rich colors, explosive patterns, larger-than-life characters and don't get us started on his fascination with star Penélope Cruz's bosom. For an openly gay filmmaker, Almodóvar really does relish that contemplative over-head down-the-shirt shot. While women and their relationships has often been a central theme in Almodóvar's previous work (in All About My Mother and Women On......

MUSIC: If the line to get in to The Good, The Bad and The Queen playing the Apple Store earlier this year was blocks long, we can only imagine what it will be like for YouTube video sensations Ok Go. The band plays there tonight, but will they bring the treadmills? 6pm // Apple Store SoHo [103 Prince St] // Free EVENT: Every last Tuesday of each month you can see the stars. Well, sort......

MUSIC: The Good, the Bad and the Queen play a sold out show at Webster Hall tonight, but before that they're playing a much more intimate show for free at the Apple Store. Not familiar with the band? It's headed up by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame. 2pm // Apple Store SoHo [103 Prince St] // Free Loney, Dear are joined by Tunng and Moi Caprice tonight at Union Hall. Loney, Dear played......

If things have seemed quiet at the usual New York haunts of movie folks like Film Forum or Grey Dog Coffee this last week, it's because practically the whole community is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. The annual launching pad of many subsequently huge independent features (see this year's Best Picture Oscar nom and last year's festival break out, Little Miss Sunshine), Sundance is a crazy week. Parties, swag, deal-making and......

MOVIE: The First Time I Was Twenty is playing tonight as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival. According to Paper, French director Lorraine Levy "tells the story of a smart, chubby Jewish girl who endures rampant sexism and anti-Semitism in order to fulfill her dream of joining her high school’s all-male jazz band. Pretty in Pink it is not." 6pm // Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center [165 W. 65th St] // $10......

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......

New York mid-December always smells vaguely of pine and peppermint, despite our recent springtime temperatures. Bring that cozy holiday feeling with you into the cineplex for a couple of new feel-good holiday movies. Will Smith will tug at your heart strings big time as the struggling dad trying to become a stockbroker in The Pursuit of Happyness. Set in the '70s in San Francisco, Smith plays Chris Gardner, a door to door medical equipment salesman......

Graphic designers tend to be an even-keeled lot, unless you mess with their precious Futura typeface plans. So at Monday night’s The Art of the Book: Covers With Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd and Milton Glaser, moderated by designer Michael Bierut at the 92nd Street Y, we weren’t surprised that book jacket designer and author Kidd made nice with Panelist Four – a man well into his senior years who boosted the show from the first......

It's December today and you know what that means...let the rampant awards season speculation commence! As the year comes to a close, it's that magical time when all of the movie studios begin unloading their most precious commodities into our theaters, making sure things come out in New York (and LA) before Dec. 31 so they'll be eligible for this year's Academy Awards. But of course, we're still weeks away from any nomination announcements for......

In September, The Wordless Music Series had their inaugural event. It featured Nels Cline from Wilco, pianist Jenny Lin and composer/multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp. At first we were a bit apprehensive of a concert without any vocals whatsoever, but we're warming up to the idea (the above video helped). Pairing classical and instrumental indie-rockers in a chamber music setting is actually pretty brilliant. Tonight we'll definitely be heading over to the second show of the......

The sun was almost shining yesterday when we headed over to Pier 40 for a behind-the-scenes, work-in-progress glimpse of a new exhibition as it was being installed for its end-of-the-week opening tomorrow. The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation, presented by the Van Alen Institute, celebrates architects, designers and artists working with an eye toward 21st century recreation. Curated by Zoe Ryan and designed by Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORKac, the......

Those mother-bleeping snakes. That mother-flipping plane. You know what we're talking about. This weekend marks the premier of the film that blog buzz built, Samuel L. Jackson's action adventure Snakes on a Plane. Hopefully it will be as cheese-tastic as it seems from the trailers and the title. However, whether you're first in line tonight at a midnight screening or not, there's still loads coming up to see at the movies. As for the other......

The food world can be a rough place. Restaurants and markets come and go with the blink of an eye -- your favorite place can be there one minute and belly up the next. This week, we've got good news and bad news, take your pick. The Good News - Dirty Bird to Go -- we couldn't be more excited to taste the latest from Alison Vines-Rushing, who wowed us at Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar.......

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author. I approached Jay McInerney’s The Good Life with a hint of trepidation, always slightly suspicious of any literary representation of that day in September. McInerney didn’t disappoint, at least not on that count. The aftermath of the attack, the atmosphere in the city – both human......

This week's literary events kick off tonight (1/24) at Housing Works Used Books Cafe (126 Crosby St.), with a reading from Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonorated, edited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a signing, starts at 7PM, and is free. Then tomorrow night (1/25) on the Lower East Side, don't miss the First Fiction Reading Series at Bluestockings (172 Allen between Stanton and......

Besides filming the new Robert DeNiro-directed The Good Shepherd in New York City and becoming an honorary Cambodian citizen, and besides shtupping America's Favorite Friend's husband and being hotter than hell, Angelina Jolie is making news with the announcement that MTV will air a "video diary" of her trip to Africa. Jolie and Jeffrey Sachs - yes, that Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, the noted economist who works for Columbia's Earth Institute and advice UN Secretary General......

EVENT: The Tank is the latest in New York club casualties. This weekend they're trying to raise money for a new venue, so head over to one of these events or donate online here. Tonight at 7pm / $10 Air America's The Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder will broadcast live from The Tank, which it also did during the Republican National Convention. This time the broadcast includes a live studio audience and......

Holy majoly. Today, the world - well, really everyone who believed in celebrity fairy tale endings - reeled with news that very blond and pretty Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have officially separated. In fact, this news was so big, E! had a newscrawl at the bottom of their screen. Brad and Jen issued a statement through People magazine: We would like to announce that after seven years together we have decided to formally separate.......

Failure hurts, so there are a lot of miserable producers right about now, given the abundant number of Broadway shows which have recently posted closing notices. Sunday was the last day for Eve Ensler's The Good Body - we liked it, but it just didn't catch on with the masses. We can see how it wasn't exactly great date night fodder, but couldn't the city's female contingency keep it going a hair longer? On January......

Our friends at Broadway's The Good Body, the Eve Ensler one-woman show, have alerted us to an enticing series of talkbacks that started Wednesday night. An interesting and eclectic mix of talking heads, feminists, movie stars, and so forth have been booked to give their takes on the show. Gothamist really dug this show and wants to go back and hear Gloria Steinem's take on this piece on feminine body image and the challenge of......

There’s no shortage of one-person shows on Broadway this season, and joining those ranks at the Booth Theatre is Eve Ensler, she of Vagina Monologues fame. We’re happy to report that Ensler’s Broadway debut is a must-see, especially for any woman who has ever looked at her figure with disdain (and c’mon, who hasn’t). The Good Body finds Ensler moving upwards from her vagina, spending time analyzing her mid-life obsession with having, yes, a good......

- The Williamsburg Bank goes condo - A bloggy love triangle - Dangerous pedestrian crossing in Chelsea - Eating In makes Cuban Pork with Mojo - Eli Manning will step up for the Giants - Dinosaur BBQ comes to NYC - The movie version of the NY musical Rent will be filmed mostly in SF - Is the Apple Store's singles scene any good? - An interview with Eve Ensler, of The Good Body......

Eve Ensler, Playwright and Activist...

Something to make all high school parents confident: Kids are now playing poker for big money at school. The Post notes that kids from Bed-Stuy to Stuyvesant are losing up to $300 as they try to emulate their role models on the World Series of Poker, playing during lunch and after school. One Stuyvesant senior, Max Last-Name-Withheld, saidThat's my aspiration. It's like somebody wanting to get in the NBA. I'm going to earn a living......