Tuesday, January 2----The New York Times Arts and Leisure Weekend, which begins this coming Friday, is fast becoming one of New York’s most anticipated cultural events of the new year. With a mix of discussions, panels, concert performances and other delights in the fields of theater, dance, film and music, the Weekend is bringing a post-Holidays lift to the Big Apple. The Arts and Leisure Weekend will present several film programs….a combination of screenings of some of the year’s most...

Saturday, December 30-----For Westchester County film buffs, and intrepid New Yorkers not adverse to going off-island, the Jacob Burns Film Center is a distinctive cultural resource in the heart of New York’s northern suburbs. For the past five years, the Film Center has offered a serious alternative to the megaplex monotony of film theaters outside of Manhattan, with unique special programs and the best of independent and international cinema. This is clearly evident in just the first we...

Thursday, December 28-----In a bold new experiment designed to reach younger audiences, New York's famed Metropolitan Opera will offer several of its most celebrated productions to an international network of movie theaters. The first of these will be the December 30th presentation of Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE. The production, directed by stage and film director Julie Taymor, will be beamed live from the stage of The Metropolitan Opera directly into movie theaters around the globe. All of ...

Tuesday, December 26----Following the international success of Pedro Almodovar’s acclaimed femme fest VOLVER, arthouse distributor Sony Pictures Classics is presenting a national tour of eight Almodovar classics in spanking new 35mm prints. New Yorkers can sample the series when it unspools at the Walter Reade Theater starting tomorrow through January 3. VIVA PEDRO, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is a wonderful way to see out the old year, or ring in the new one. And with ...

Saturday, December 23----When I was growing up Jewish in Brooklyn, New York in the 1960s, Christmas Day meant only two things…..Chinese food and going to a movie. In those halcyon days when Christmas was more of a religious event than an excuse to go shopping, almost all restaurants, stores and other commercial venues were closed on Christmas Day.....with the exception of Chinese restaurants and most movie theaters. So, it became a Jewish tradition (and the only option in town) to frequent ...

Thursday, December 21----The Museum of Modern Art, usually known for its rather highbrow offerings, presents a family-friendly series of Holiday Classics during the busy Christmas/New Year holiday season. Movies for the Holidays, a series of favorites from MoMA’s extensive film collection, will feature screenings in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from December 19 through January 2, 2007. Films to be featured in the series include: ELF (2003), directed by Jon Favreau and starring W...

Tuesday, December 19----Alan Arkin, one of the most respected actors of his generation, makes a rare appearance this evening at New York's Walter Reade Theater. The special evening includes a screening of Arkin's latest hit, the quirky indie comedy LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, followed by an onstage conversation between the actor and Kent Jones, Associate Director of Programming of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The evening will also feature clips from Arkin's remarkable career, which has now spa...

Saturday, December 16---A retrospective of the career of French director Jacques Rivette has been unspooling at New York's Museum of the Moving Image since mid November. Several of the director's most ambitious and least known film gems are yet to be screened, as the series continues through the month of December. Intrepid film lovers should run, not walk, to this rare and wonderful series of a true cinema original. Rivette was a one-man film revolution. A critic for the influential film mag...

Thursday, December 14----The Museum of Modern Art continues its grand tradition of honoring visionary artists from Hollywood's golden age, with a 21-film retrospective of the films of famed film score composer Franz Waxman, on the centenary of his birth. FRANZ WAXMAN: MUSIC FOR THE CINEMA opens on Saturday, December 16 and runs through January 17th at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at New York's citadel of culture, the Museum of Modern Art. Franz Waxman was one of the best known and most in...

Tuesday, December 12---UNITED 93, the harrowing re-enactment of the last hours on one of the doomed planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, has received the nod as Best Picture of the Year, from the New York Critics Circle, considered the most prestigious and influential of all the national film critics associations. The win by UNITED 93, which was echoed last week by the Washington DC Film Critics Association, catapults the docudrama into prime position for multiple Golden Globe and Oscar nomi...

Saturday, December 9-----Cinema of the early part of the twentieth century existed on two sides of a divide. Silent or sound. Pre-Code and Code. The sexual frankness, moral corruption and sometimes kitchy melodrama of the early sound films of the 1930s have become a kind of treasure of American cinema. The Film Forum, New York's stellar arthouse complex, is currently presenting some of these tawdry treasures in their December film series, FOX BEFORE THE CODE. The FOX, of course, is Twentieth C...

Viggo Mortenson in ALAISTRE Thursday, December 7-----The high profile being brought to contemporary Spanish cinema by the international successes of Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER and Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (both screened to audience acclaim at the 2006 New York Film Festival) has only stimulated the interest of international filmgoers to explore deeper into the prolific Spanish cinema scene. Giving New Yorkers a sampling of the blazing talents currently at work in Spain is the ...

Tuesday, December 5----The Maya Stendhal Gallery, one of New York's most adventurous gallery spaces, is currently presenting a collection of over 40 short works, created and curated by pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, artist, poet and archivist Jonas Mekas. Dubbed WWW.JONASMEKAS.COM---RECENT WORK, the program includes works shot on film, video and in new media platforms. The 84 year-old Mekas, one of the founders of the independent film movement, remains vitally prolific and engaged in the c...

Saturday/Sunday, December 2/3-----The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents the theatrical world premiere of Jonathan Nossiter's MONDOVINO in its 10 hour entirety, starting today at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. The 10-part series on the aesthetic, politics and commerce of winemaking is being presented in five two-hour programs. MONDOVINO was one of the first documentary films ever presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. Tracing winemaking’s past and present and, j...

Thursday, November 30----One of New York's biggest film parties was held last evening. The 16th Annual Gotham Awards were presented at New York's fashionable Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River. The star-studded program is a fundraiser for the Independent Feature Project (IFP), a not-for-profit filmmmaker association that helps novice indies throughout the year. The Awards were recently reorganized to be half film celebration and half film tribute. While the Gothams have awards for Best Pictur...

Tuesday, November 28---With December 1st marked as World AIDS Day, a day to reflect on the progress made since the disease was first discovered 25 years ago, as well as concern that it is still raging in most parts of the world, a film festival in New York will mark the occasion with a series of screenings and events. The New York AIDS Film Festival (NYAFF), now in its fourth year, that runs from November 29 to December 4. It is a five day series of HIV- and AIDS-related film screenings, panel...

Saturday/Sunday, November 25/26----Robert Altman, one of the most influential film directors of his generation, passed away earlier this week at Cedars of Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Rumors about Altman's declining health have been circulating since his announcement at last year's Academy Awards that he had received a heart transplant in the last few years. What the public and even close associates didn't know was that the iconic director had been diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, but ...

Friday, November 24----The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the veritable New York City institution and one of the most important film archives in the world, is presenting the first comprehensive American retrospective of the work of master filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, on the anniversary of the centenary of his birth. The Retrospective will feature all of Rossellini's ground-breaking films, as well as several lesser known titles and works from his later career for film and television. The series...