Herbie Hancock remembers Pannonica, the Rothschild heir who so loved American jazz that she abandoned an aristocratic European life of castles where royalty dined, to live in New York, surrounded by cats (felines and players), and make her rounds from club to club in pursuit of the music. Driving her...

Pedro Almodovar's love affair with his leading lady is legend, as is his romance with movie stars of old. In his new movie, Broken Embraces, the Closing Night feature of the recent New York Film Festival that will open on Friday, he casts Penelope Cruz as a call girl/actress in...

This is not a movie for sissies!
Based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road is a road movie on a landscape, barren after some unnamed cataclysmic event. Typical of the genre, this is also a buddy movie, father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee)...

They had me with Houdini!
About a minute into the Prologue of this monumental musical, the bound escape artist upended is lowered over this sweeping tableau in three tiers: immigrants living in squalor, rich whites in suburban splendor, blacks in subterranean piano joints plunking a fresh, transgressive sound....

There's something hot about the guys in Oren Moverman's well-crafted movie The Messenger. Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster play a team of soldiers whose task it is to inform NOK's (Next of Kin) about the death of their loved ones in Iraq and Afganistan-not your typical sexy subject. And...

During intermission at a recent performance of Finian's Rainbow, I looked into the orchestra pit to find a musician, Wayne Goodman, anticipating Act II as much as I was. Marvelling at Burton Lane's great songs, including such classics as "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" "Look to the Rainbow," and...

Playwright John Patrick Shanley, referring to Tennessee Williams as a "gorgeous unstoppable beast," recounted an incident in a restaurant when he, a budding writer, maybe thirty feet away from the master dramatist, could not bring himself to say hello. Such is the power of "influence" that any person in theater...

It's a fact: folks will flock to see Idiot Savant, Richard Foreman's new play at the Public Theater, just to see its star, Willem Dafoe, in a billowy blouse and skirt. Indeed, what a sight that is. Not to mention his hair in a top tail like a suma...

The iconic and infamous cover the walls at the Brooklyn Museum's fine exhibition (on view till January 31, 2010), "Who Shot Rock & Roll."

Yes you will see many old favorites, like John Lennon wearing a New York City sleeveless tee in Bob Gruen's contact sheet from the familiar...

If the view from under the Brighton Beach el is not quite today's world vision, it offers a nostalgia trip to the late 1930's that is worth glimpsing, especially through Neil Simon's round lenses. The subject of Brighton Beach Memoirs, directed by David Cromer, is a budding writer's coming of...

What can you say about a woman who vanishes in proverbial thin air? The mysteries about the remarkable Amelia Earhart and her disappearance in 1937 with her navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) over the Pacific Ocean persist and make ideal fodder for biographies and biopics.

In Amelia, the new...

The revival of David Mamet's 1992 Oleanna in current production at the Golden Theater stars one of my favorite actors, Bill Pullman, whose elastic face and frenetic movements are on full display in this theatrical pas de deux with the patrician, cool Julia Stiles.

They play John, a professor...

In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play. Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that...

Filmmaker Michael Moore apologized for being late to the premiere of his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. President Obama, a guest on David Letterman, was clogging traffic and Moore got caught up in his motorcade. "We could have just kept going," said Moore from the stage of Alice Tully...

The actor Ben Whishaw has that dying poet thing down. In Jane Campion's new movie Bright Star, he is a tender presence, portraying the ill-fated John Keats who dies at age 25 before fulfilling the bright future suggested by the poetry that survives him, including "La Belle Dame Sans Merci,"...

The name of this riveting documentary, the latest by Joe Berlinger, puns on its subject, oil, at the same time that it indicts an industry for its indifference to a people and part of our planet it views as expendable. In Ecuador, in a place that was once a paradise,...

Quentin Tarantino's saturated colors in his new work, "Inglourious Basterds," illustrate his concern with make-believe. Which is why when a steamed up friend called to say he is an "Anti-Semitic" jerk, the audience at the Academy of Motion Pictures's screening she attended speechless in dismay, I knew that despite my...

Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent left-wing journalist in '70s Germany found the revolutionary spirit of the Red Army Faction so appealing, she abandoned her children to join up with a counterculture much like the U. S. Weather Underground in its terrorist tactics. Andreas Baader was one of its leaders along with...

What are the chances that on a given day you can see performances by American theater masters influenced by the Japanese arts? On Sunday afternoon, a little known, experimental work by Tennessee Williams, The Day a Man Died, was performed at East Hampton's Ross School. Forget the romantic reveries of...

The documentary film Boy Interrupted -- to air on HBO on Monday August 3 with a DVD release to follow on August 4 -- not only tells the story of a 15-year-old's death by suicide, but it also tells the story of a mother's anguish dealing with her son's lifelong...