Erica Abeel

Hick, the acclaimed novel by Andrea Portes, features one of the freshest, catchiest voices in recent fiction. The voice belongs to Luli, the 13-year-old daughter of a pair of lushes in Nowhere Nebraska, and it's funny, trashy, snarky, outrageous -- a great yawp from the heartland that rings heart-breakingly true....

The good news: several of this year's standout films at the Tribeca Film Festival are by women. The bad news: some of the fest's worst misfires are also by women.

The good news first. Your Sister's Sister by Lynn Shelton (Hump Day) is pure delight, from its opening scene to...

Never mind if you can't get to Cannes. Right here in New York you can catch the surpassingly lovely Yossi by Eytan Fox, opener of the world narrative section at the Tribeca Film Festival. In a sequel of sorts to his 2003 Yossi and Jagger, Fox follows a dead man...

Vanity Fair marked the start of the 11th Tribeca Film Festival (April 19th to 29th) over cocktails on the portico of the State Supreme Courthouse. VF has perfected the party as art form. The grand stairs of the Centre Street courthouse were sewn with a bobbing field of tiny blue...

American films have devoted much screen time to male horndogs. But when it comes to the sexuality of an under-aged girl? It's either sanitized through romance, sublimated (Twilight), maligned (the character of the "slut"), or lampooned (American Pie).

Well, in Turn Me On, Dammit (which nabbed Best Screenplay for...

Edward Burns, the Tribeca-based filmmaker, is fast becoming a New York treasure. With Newlyweds, which premiered last week at the Crosby Street Hotel, Burns zeros in on a kind of Gotham Everyman -- at least the subset that lives below 14th Street -- exploring with disarming accuracy, humor and charm...

Are the only folks who are not celebrity gawkers the celebs themselves? As I emerge from the subway's Wall Street exit, there they are, a gaggle of gawkers, penned and contained, hoping to see, to photograph, to breathe the same air as ... who? Sean Durkin? Carrie Maclemore? And must...

Michael Fassbender, it's fair to say, has become the breakout actor of the year. This is cause to celebrate. While hugely charismatic, Fassbender does not trade on personality, presenting an Everyman who resonates with the public and stays recognizable from film to film. Think George Clooney and Tom Hanks. Rather,...

When that giant asteroid did a fly-by of planet earth the other day, it might have been a cosmic PR stunt for Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Even the infinite, accelerating universe, it appears, has a thing for movies. And with this film, Earthly cinephiles are in for a mind-blowing trip.

Every time you look, it seems, a new film festival has surfaced, both here and abroad. In fact, year round you could just surf one fest to the next, without missing a beat. Given this daunting surfeit, what makes the Hamptons International Film Festival zoom to the forefront?

The 19th...

In its 49th year the New York Film Festival is bursting with youthful energy, reaffirming its preeminence as a cultural cornerstone of New York's fall season. Part of the excitement, as always, is the range and breadth of the lineup, culled from the world's best films. From one day to...

In A Dangerous Method, which just premiered at the New York Film Festival, David Cronenberg has fashioned the thinking person's action movie. Instead of cars exploding and weapons blasting, great minds duel over the forces driving human behavior during the period that saw the burgeoning of psychoanalysis.

That this...

The New York Film Festival has landed -- with Roman Polanski's Carnage, a gala event deprived of my presence on account of the fact that I wasn't invited, so I can't report on it. Neat, nasty and New-York-set, Carnage (which I caught earlier) makes a nice opener. It's about two...

Unlike Cannes, the Toronto Film Festival (a.k.a TIFF) is a pretty staid affair. In this year's 36th edition, though, sex dominated the screen. David Cronenberg's critically praised A Dangerous Method pivots on Freud's notion of sex as a motor of human behavior. No fewer than three films -- Sleeping Beauty,...

Check out this contrast in star behavior. Before hitting Toronto, Madonna was at the Venice Film Fest promoting W.E., her sophomore directorial effort about Wallis Simpson and King Edward III. Handed a hydrangea blossom by a fan, she reportedly placed it on the ground, saying "I absolutely loathe hydrangeas. He...

At near mid point, a couple of trends have emerged at the Toronto Film Festival. Filmmakers are returning to solid story telling, scripting shapely narratives with a satisfying payoff, while avoiding slick, Hollywood-style wrap-ups. Secondly, auteurs who usually work the dark side have gone more mainstream. Witness hell-raiser David Cronenberg...

It's testosterone city, here in Toronto. As the city's giant annual film festival launches, it's shaping up as a showcase for a clutch of superb male thesps. Dominating screens during opening week are George Clooney and Ryan Gosling for a total of four films; while hard on their heels come...

We totter up an incline lined with flaming torches, regaled with the sound of Tibetan gongs. We arrive at an ante-chamber where a girl in bondage is flanked by two semi-nude women with hair covering their faces like human Llasa Apsos, as lunatic cackling bounces off the walls. It could...

Tweet this: could the New York Times go out of business? That's the question nervously circled by Page One, Andrew Rossi's riveting new documentary (due to christen The Film Society of Lincoln Center's new Eleanor Bunin Munroe theater June 17). It's a brave new news world out there of tweets,...

Life on the fest circuit can be dicey: one hand gives, the other takes away. The moment I type "accept" for the after-party of A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy, an email arrives saying, We cannot accommodate you at this time. Oh well, no loss, since the party kicked off at an...