Results tagged “film”

Click on the film stills for details and reviews on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include The Book of Eli, The Spy Next Door, Fish Tank, Carmel, Our Daily Bread, Hausu,Labyrinth, and Showgirls. more ›

Click on the film stills for more details and reviews on this weekend's new releases and repertory screenings, which include Case 39, The White Ribbon, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, Old Partner, The Chaser, The Muppet Movie, and Taxi Driver. more ›

After the heady rush of opening presents—or not, depending on your faith, views on material gift giving, etc.—Americans are expected to go to the movies today and this weekend, thanks to Christmas Day releases like Sherlock Holmes and It's Complicated and recent releases Avatar and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel. more ›

Now that we solved that whole tax credit deficit problem, there's a new worry for the filmmakers who want to point their lens at New York City. Crain's reports that "the latest shock to the industry is a plan by the city to charge the largest fees in the nation for filming in its buildings [$3,200/day]. The Mayor's film office is also drawing up plans to charge for its famous free permits. Even more troubling, the city's tax incentive program is out of money and in the process of being scaled back, and the state is in negotiations over whether to renew its tax incentives." Well, that's an exhausting list. more ›

Call it a comeback. Following the announcement that Polaroid cameras and film would be gone forever and ever and never return; and following every hipster in town eating up the film on eBay to document their party nights ever-so-nostalgically; and following Urban Outfitters temporarily stocking them... Polaroid is returning! Cameras and film will be on sale by mid-2010, or you can try to buy this special kit on the 16th for the not-so-old-timey price of $430. more ›

Click through the gallery for movies playing this weekend, including new releases Taking Woodstock, The Final Destination, The September Issue, Big Fan, Halloween II, Still Walking, and more. more ›

Click on the film stills above for more on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include Passing Strange, The Baader Meinhof Complex, Five Minutes of Heaven, World's Greatest Dad, Shorts, Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha, Fifty Dead Men Walking, X Games 3D: The Movie, My One and Only, Post Grad, Art & Copy, Spaceballs, and Fargo. more ›

One of the pursuits the newly unemployed have turned to is being a film or TV extra. The NY Times speaks with the folks seen milling in the background—one, laid off from a private equity firm, put the $8/hour pay in perspective: "I’ve gotten a few paychecks as an extra, but I haven’t even looked at them yet. My intention is to get back into finance, and in the interim, I’m going to keep doing these fun little side jobs." Casting agencies are recently flooded with many more potential extras some of whom are really into it: Another person explained, "There’s a whole subculture of people in the city who make their living as extras. Many extras are like the Lost Boys — outside-of-the-box individuals who come from inside-the-box places, like the suburbs. When they get on set, they find a family of eclectic, creative types, and it’s like, ‘Welcome to the crew.’" (We think he means the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, though these Lost Boys would be cool, too.) And the Times reporter tried out as an extra and found herself, along with 100 other extras, "herded up the backstairs of a dilapidated studio that surely had not passed fire inspection since the late 1980." more ›

Fade to black! Looks like we're going to have to get used to some faux New York in our films and television shows: the state's tax credit program has run out of funds. It was Spitzer who proposed the new budget in early 2008, which started to bring more productions to the city, but it was just announced that the $515 million allocated through 2013 has already been spent. According to the LA Times "studios that contemplated shooting movies and TV series in New York are looking instead to places such as New Jersey, Illinois and Canada instead." Crain's reports that Fringe, Life on Mars, and Damages are already considering pulling out of the city, and it's being reportred that Silvercup Studios haven't signed on any new TV shows or movies. The Queens Gazette reports that "new allocations must come from the state legislature as an emergency allocation or be included in next year's budget, which is supposed to be approved by April 1." more ›

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Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk tells the story of Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became the first openly gay man to be elected to a major public office in the United States, only to be assassinated within his first year of serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At turns tragic and exhilarating, the film chronicles the last eight years of Milk’s life (played by Sean Penn), when he worked on campaigns for public office and the protection of gay employees. more ›

It's a big weekend at movie theaters—click through the gallery to see what's opening. more ›

Of all the kids in this year's freshman class at NYU, it's probably safe to say that Avijit Halder is the only one who's the son of a drug addict and Calcutta prostitute who was burned to death. At age 11, Halder was one of the children featured in the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels, about the perilous lives of children in Calcutta's red light district. The film's director helped Halder get out of the slum and into America, where his talent for photography (and a lot of financial aid) won him admission to the Tisch film program. Unsurprisingly, it's been an interesting transition; Halder tells the Sun that his NYU classmates continue to amaze him: "There are these moments in the classroom when they ask, 'What's your favorite line from this movie?' and I'm like, 'Oh my God, who are you guys?'" more ›

Last night Radar Magazine hosted a screening of the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke, about a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (played by Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to keep his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a lot of heart, and it's very funny and full of twisted surprises we won't spoil here. Suffice it to say that the anal bead Choke bookmark (photo after the jump) that came with the gift bags speaks volumes about this "dirty-minded, satirical-psychotic comedy." more ›

Speaking of Moonstruck, this week the Central Park Film Festival is screening movies highlighting the different boroughs of the city. Tomorrow night's kickoff film is Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith as a plucky secretary from Staten Island trying to make it in the business world. The rest of the films: 8/20, The French Connection (a Bronx candy store under surveillance); 8/21, Strangers on a Train (the Alfred Hitchcock thriller); 8/22, Moonstruck (with an introduction by Academy Award winner screenwriter John Patrick Shanley); and 8/23, August Rush (with a performance by the film's Academy Award nominated choir, IMPACT) more ›

Compared to the hype that surrounded the first film adaptation, this second X-Files movie is opening almost discreetly this weekend. Is the studio’s subdued promotional effort a sign that I Want to Believe is a mess, or is Space Chimps just sucking all the air out of the room? The Times’s Manohla Dargis says, “I wanted to believe. But with his big-screen blowup of his great and weird television series The X-Files, Chris Carter has turned me into a reluctant skeptic. Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark.” Amy Biancolli at the Houston Chronicle is even more succinct: “The truth is, they're boring now.” more ›

We ran into Passing Strange co-creator Heidi Rodewald at Two Boots in the West Village over the weekend, and she confirmed news that Spike Lee will be directing a film version of the critically acclaimed but box office-challenged rock musical. Lee will film the show three times this month for cable TV; twice with audiences and once without. At Two Boots, Rodewald summed up Passing Strange’s difficulty selling tickets on Broadway by paraphrasing an old producers’ maxim: “We made the mistake of making art.” more ›

June 30th, Hud more ›

Savage Grace tells the decadent true story of Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillaine), heir to a plastics company fortune, and his impulsive wife Barbara (Julianne Moore) as they fall apart all over Europe in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Times’s A.O. Scott deems it “oppressive”: “Bisexuality! Marijuana! Anal sex! A father who sleeps with his son’s girlfriend! A son who sleeps with his mother’s boyfriend! All of great intrinsic interest, to be sure, but Savage Grace doesn’t seem quite sure of how to communicate its own fascination with such doings, whether to convey shock, envy, pity or bemusement.” more ›

D.W. Young's A Hole in a Fence, the documentary which focuses on Red Hook, has been floating around for a while and is coming back to town this week -- just before the new IKEA opens its doors in the 'nabe. In 46 minutes Young explores the hurdles the neighborhood is facing and "the complicated issues of development, class and identity facing the city's most populous borough." Young urban farmers and graffiti writers are followed as they watch their landscape disappear alongside their elder counterparts. more ›

The Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack whose films include Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Way We Were and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, died this afternoon in his Los Angeles home. The cause was cancer. more ›

After years of hemorrhaging film production business to cheaper locations like Canada, New York City is seeing a spike in movie shoots, back up to the pre-9/11 level. Bloomberg reports that the city saw a 36% rise in production last year, with over 245 movies and television shows shot citywide in 2007. A consulting group hired by the mayor’s office determined that the industry pumps $5 billion a year into the economy and employs some 100,000 people. more ›

The imposing shadow of Indiana Jones looms, but this weekend belongs to Narnia, when C.S. Lewis’s second book in the series – Prince Caspian – finally gets the Hollywood treatment to accompany that epic Phish song. This installment has a lot more combat than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the super-brilliant Peter Dinklage. The Voice’s Ella Taylor says it’s fun, you know, for kids, though adults may decide that, “other than the fights, everything else in the movie is equally bloodless.” Other reviews are generally favorable. more ›

Last year, after Stanley Bard was ousted by the board as manager of the Hotel Chelsea and replaced with BD Hotels -- who just got ousted themselves, filmmaker Abel Ferrara moved back in to his old digs. The NY Post reports that the move was to help in the making his documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks

"I lived on the floor with the ghosts," Ferrara tells Page Six. "I didn't come in with a point to it, so I just lived there and began filming. The result was the hotel from soup to nuts. It's about the people that lived there, the ghosts, and the people that live there now. These artists need help and support."

Speed Racer, from the mysterious sibling filmmakers behind the Matrix trilogy, is opening to well-deserved critical derision. It’s a 135-minute insipid, soulless commodity that lifts some of the Japanese original’s storyline but absolutely none of the charm. The movie opens with a 34% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes; perhaps J. Hoberman’s pan gets it best: “Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be less. It's the delusions minus the grandeur.” more ›

New Yorker and Polaroid appreciator, Joe Howansky, has started a project to commemorate the soon-to-be-extinct Polaroid film, while simultaneously connecting with strangers through the medium. He explains:

I will send you a Polaroid of anything anywhere in New York City. I don’t already have these stocked up - each one will be taken just for you. You will have the only copy in the entire world of a picture that was taken by someone else for you and you alone. That means way more than any other medium or method of exchange - there is a solitary, tangible record of a single moment in time shared by two strangers.

Coan Nichols (aka "Buddy") and Rick Charnoski have been making movies together on 8mm film since the late 90s; their main focus being skateboarding. At some point they abandoned their New York City stomping grounds for the warmer weather of the West Coast, but the city is still the inspiration for their latest release. Deathbowl to Downtown chronicles the origin of skating in NYC and is "the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in-depth." (View trailer here.) more ›

Aspiring actors, look now further than the Morgan L stop in Williamsburg for your big break! This flier advertises casting for a little film called: "Niki Gets Lost In BushDick." The plot is pretty simple: Niki stumbles upon a band whilst wandering around "BushDick" and (to put it mildly) ends up "sleeping with" them, all, at once. Copyranter guesses that the band must be indie rock; perhaps some real life Brooklyn band porn names are in order. Yeah, Say Her? The XXX Affair? Either way, can't wait for the soundtrack! more ›

Deathbowl to Downtown – The Evolution of Skateboarding in New York City will be seeping into theaters starting this summer (with a national release this fall); the film is the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in Manhattan. Tracing "skating's epochal shift from the parks and pools of the 70's, to ramp skating in the 80's, to the street ascendancy of the 1990's as seen from a New York-centric perspective," it includes footage and interviews with pioneers from the past and those still grinding today. more ›