It’s a love story as old as time. Girl goes on an IKEA shopping spree with her daughter, who is suspended from school. Girl sees Boy. Girl stalks Boy. Girl’s daughter gives Boy her mother’s phone number, and they live happily ever after.
On June 8th, Shirley and Berkely Smith, both 46, returned to the Read More
The last film by novice indie director Ry Russo-Young was an empty bottle called You Won’t Miss Me, about an alienated 23-year-old misfit just released from a psychiatric hospital. Her new film, Nobody Walks, is an empty bottle about an alienated 23-year-old misfit from New York who is making a video about insects for her art thesis. She seems to have a thing for 23-year-old misfits. Too bad she can’t find a way to make a movie about them that will keep anyone awake. Co-written by Lena Dunham, whose TV sitcom Girls is another guaranteed cure for insomnia, Nobody Walks is 82 minutes long—and I was snoozing 30 minutes in. This is not good for anyone anxious to build a reputation or entertain an audience. Read More
In an age of idiotic garbage overpopulated with alternate realities and toxic avengers in Halloween costumes, I cannot tell you how touching, restorative and vitamin-enriching it is to see a gentle, tender and intelligent film with A-list stars playing real people dealing with real problems in the everyday world. Instead of stupid gags and punchlines, Hope Springs is a character study in elegiac pastels about how people love, then change and eventually drift away from each other—and the daunting energy it takes for them to get their old mojo back while the apple still bites. Separately, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are national treasures, but together they are simultaneously spectacular and intimately awe-inspiring. I have never loved either one more. Read More
For those who agree to share their apartments, if not their entire lives together, a legal document may help smooth out the details in the event of romantic derailment.
With more and more Americans—New Yorkers especially—eschewing marriage in favor of less-formal arrangements, a cohabitation agreement has become a must-have, Crain’s reports. Read More
What happened to Playwrights Horizons? Once a bastion of the best and brightest new plays in the New York theater, this noble company has turned into a wobbly showcase for the kind of experimental writing that lives and dies in workshop productions on college campuses in Vermont. Having barely survived a pointless farrago of office politics called Assistance, I have now squirmed my way through The Big Meal, a boring case history of family life as symbolically reflected through three generations of revolting looking menu items that six adults and two children must consume until their plates are empty. The play has been quickly erased from my memory, but the heartburn lingers on. Read More
The Vow is not exactly a woman’s picture. It’s more about how a man falls in love, loses his love and gives up everything in life to focus on regaining his love. Maybe it’s a woman’s picture from a male point of view. However you slice it, it’s a welcome loaf—far from perfect, but as filling as a home-cooked meal. Read More
Touré, the author Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, has been busy! Not only did he co-host Housingworks’ Gin Mingle fundraiser this week, the annual gin-soaked bookstore party, but he also wrote a marriage column for Time magazine. Read More
Among the couples scheduled to be married in New York yesterday, the first day that gay marriage could be performed in the state, were artists Deborah Kass and Patricia Cronin, according to The New York Times.
Ms. Kass, who is represented by Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin Gallery and Vince Fremont, makes work Read More
Little, low-budget, independent films every week, every month, all year long … that’s what keeps the dying movie business from its own burial, six feet under. A Little Help, written and directed by Michael J. Weithorn, is a benign slice of life about suburban angst on Long Island. It’s not much, but thanks to the Read More
Lucky is a black comedy about greed, marriage and murder with Tom Hanks’s look-alike son Colin—a chip off the old block—as a shy, nerdy aw-shucks office drone named Ben Keller, whose dreary job in an accounting firm is going nowhere until he wins the $36 million Iowa State Lottery. Ben has suffered an unrequited passion Read More
