Save your pennies, skip Film Forum and watch our classic pick on TV!
In our humble-ish opinion, the three funniest movies ever made are Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and, yeah, Ghostbusters, which, for a stretch at age 16, we watched pretty much every night, in the hopes that a close Read More
The City’s End: Two Centuries
of Fantasies, Fears, and
Premonitions of New York’s
Destruction
By Max Page
Yale University Press, 271 pages, $37.50
It took something like 48 hours to seal over Pompeii and all those Pompeians with pumice and lava and ash; and fewer than 48 seconds to flatten and fry Nagasaki, to begin Read More
This Sunday, TCM’s showing 24 hours of Paul Newman, and movie nerds, like football fans, probably have their tailgating all planned out. Slurp up spaghetti and Newman’s Own Sockarooni sauce while Hud drinks and disappoints (6 p.m.). Microwave a bag of Newman’s Own Light Butter Popcorn as Cool Hand Luke chokes down 50 hardboiled eggs Read More
Do yourself a favor: watch The Awful Truth on TCM, Friday morning, at 9:15. Don’t even TiVo it. Call in sick. Stay home. All about an unfaithful couple who divorces and then finally falls in love, it’s the real marvel of the ‘30s screwballs, more human and less ridiculous than Bringing Up Baby, as brawling Read More
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
By J.K. Rowling
Arthur A. Levine Books, 759 pages, $34.99
Nowadays, the story of the boy and his author is as familiar as the Nativity. Harry Potter, the unloved orphan with the weird-ass scar, turns out to be not just a wizard but—for reasons he can barely recall—one of Read More
AFTER DARK
By Haruki Murakami
Alfred A. Knopf, 191 pages, $22.95
Haruki Murakami works wonders with daytime. In the Japanese novelist’s very best books—Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)—un- or semi-employed protagonists discover that, when the rest of us are stuck at work, the everyday world turns out to Read More
Reader, he married her. A quiet wedding they had: Ted and—
Actually, about the only thing viewers of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother know for sure is that Ted’s happily ever after is already well under way by 2030. That’s the year he will corral his daughter Read More
Meet George Jetson; Jane, his wife.
Their deluxe apartment in the sky, you must admit, boasts quite the view. Rockets whiz past condos the shape of flying saucers. Stars flutter and flicker, and below the clouds are frozen like rivers.
Tonight’s another of George and Jane’s keycard parties. Pretty swingin’. Cosmonauts show off their ray Read More
After the big January blizzard, many buckets of purgatorial rain, a chilly, leafless spring-summer, suddenly. Greenhouse gas has cooked Manhattan into a tropical isle; all the hot, half-dressed girls have returned like robins. It’s getting so there’s no place you can rest your eyes without being assaulted by a salvo of flesh. The subway poles Read More
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, dads went by with well-bundled babies draped across them like mink stoles. Moms pushed strollers and pulled children. Couples held hands, coffee cups, dog leashes, cell phones, shopping bags. All the cheery, chatty toddlers at the playground stood around and mingled, as if attending a make-believe Read More
