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Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk tells the story of Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became the first openly gay man to be elected to a major public office in the United States, only to be assassinated within his first year of serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At turns tragic and exhilarating, the film chronicles the last eight years of Milk’s life (played by Sean Penn), when he worked on campaigns for public office and the protection of gay employees....

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Of all the kids in this year's freshman class at NYU, it's probably safe to say that Avijit Halder is the only one who's the son of a drug addict and Calcutta prostitute who was burned to death. At age 11, Halder was one of the children featured in the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels, about the perilous lives of children in Calcutta's red light district. The film's director helped Halder get out of the......

Left to right: Chuck Palahniuk, Clark Gregg, Aaron Gell, Sam Rockwell. Last night Radar Magazine hosted a screening of the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke, about a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (played by Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to keep his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a......

Speaking of Moonstruck, this week the Central Park Film Festival is screening movies highlighting the different boroughs of the city. Tomorrow night's kickoff film is Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith as a plucky secretary from Staten Island trying to make it in the business world. The rest of the films: 8/20, The French Connection (a Bronx candy store under surveillance); 8/21, Strangers on a Train (the Alfred Hitchcock thriller); 8/22, Moonstruck (with an introduction......

Compared to the hype that surrounded the first film adaptation, this second X-Files movie is opening almost discreetly this weekend. Is the studio’s subdued promotional effort a sign that I Want to Believe is a mess, or is Space Chimps just sucking all the air out of the room? The Times’s Manohla Dargis says, “I wanted to believe. But with his big-screen blowup of his great and weird television series The X-Files, Chris Carter......

We ran into Passing Strange co-creator Heidi Rodewald at Two Boots in the West Village over the weekend, and she confirmed news that Spike Lee will be directing a film version of the critically acclaimed but box office-challenged rock musical. Lee will film the show three times this month for cable TV; twice with audiences and once without. At Two Boots, Rodewald summed up Passing Strange’s difficulty selling tickets on Broadway by paraphrasing an old......

Photo via Brian Fountain's Flickr. The Bryant Park Summer Film Festival kicks off its 16th year tonight with the 1962 (Sean Connery era) Bond classic Dr. No, though it's likely the opening evening will get rained (and stormed) out. The Monday screenings will continue throughout the summer, however -- here's a look at the schedule:June 16th, Dr. No June 23rd, Bride of Frankenstein June 30th, Hud July 7th, The Man Who Came to Dinner......

We knew it would one day come to this, it’s fallen upon us at last, there is no escape. Reviews for Sex and the City have been generally derisive, ranging from Rolling Stone: “Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something.” To the Daily Mail: “In years to come, I suspect......

D.W. Young's A Hole in a Fence, the documentary which focuses on Red Hook, has been floating around for a while and is coming back to town this week -- just before the new IKEA opens its doors in the 'nabe. In 46 minutes Young explores the hurdles the neighborhood is facing and "the complicated issues of development, class and identity facing the city's most populous borough." Young urban farmers and graffiti writers are followed......

The Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack whose films include Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Way We Were and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, died this afternoon in his Los Angeles home. The cause was cancer. Pollack grew up in Indiana and headed to New York City when he was 17, joining The Neighborhood Playhouse and studying acting under Sanford Meisner. He acted, but, according to the NY Times obituary, Burt Lancaster told him to direct,......

After years of hemorrhaging film production business to cheaper locations like Canada, New York City is seeing a spike in movie shoots, back up to the pre-9/11 level. Bloomberg reports that the city saw a 36% rise in production last year, with over 245 movies and television shows shot citywide in 2007. A consulting group hired by the mayor’s office determined that the industry pumps $5 billion a year into the economy and employs some......

The imposing shadow of Indiana Jones looms, but this weekend belongs to Narnia, when C.S. Lewis’s second book in the series – Prince Caspian – finally gets the Hollywood treatment to accompany that epic Phish song. This installment has a lot more combat than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the super-brilliant Peter Dinklage. The Voice’s Ella Taylor says it’s fun, you know, for kids, though adults may decide that,......

Last year, after Stanley Bard was ousted by the board as manager of the Hotel Chelsea and replaced with BD Hotels -- who just got ousted themselves, filmmaker Abel Ferrara moved back in to his old digs. The NY Post reports that the move was to help in the making his documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks"I lived on the floor with the ghosts," Ferrara tells Page Six. "I didn't come in with a point to......

Speed Racer, from the mysterious sibling filmmakers behind the Matrix trilogy, is opening to well-deserved critical derision. It’s a 135-minute insipid, soulless commodity that lifts some of the Japanese original’s storyline but absolutely none of the charm. The movie opens with a 34% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes; perhaps J. Hoberman’s pan gets it best: “Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be......

New Yorker and Polaroid appreciator, Joe Howansky, has started a project to commemorate the soon-to-be-extinct Polaroid film, while simultaneously connecting with strangers through the medium. He explains:I will send you a Polaroid of anything anywhere in New York City. I don’t already have these stocked up - each one will be taken just for you. You will have the only copy in the entire world of a picture that was taken by someone else for......

Coan Nichols (aka "Buddy") and Rick Charnoski have been making movies together on 8mm film since the late 90s; their main focus being skateboarding. At some point they abandoned their New York City stomping grounds for the warmer weather of the West Coast, but the city is still the inspiration for their latest release. Deathbowl to Downtown chronicles the origin of skating in NYC and is "the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in-depth." (View......

Aspiring actors, look now further than the Morgan L stop in Williamsburg for your big break! This flier advertises casting for a little film called: "Niki Gets Lost In BushDick." The plot is pretty simple: Niki stumbles upon a band whilst wandering around "BushDick" and (to put it mildly) ends up "sleeping with" them, all, at once. Copyranter guesses that the band must be indie rock; perhaps some real life Brooklyn band porn names......

Deathbowl to Downtown – The Evolution of Skateboarding in New York City will be seeping into theaters starting this summer (with a national release this fall); the film is the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in Manhattan. Tracing "skating's epochal shift from the parks and pools of the 70's, to ramp skating in the 80's, to the street ascendancy of the 1990's as seen from a New York-centric perspective," it includes footage and interviews......

In 2006, Lou Reed revived his album Berlin by performing it in its entirety with a small orchestra for five sold-out shows at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The 1973 album, which riffs on themes of drugs, love and suicide, was a commercial failure when it came out; Lester Bangs described it as “the bastard progeny of a drunken flaccid tumble between Tennessee Williams and Hubert (Last Exit From Brooklyn) Selby, Jr.” But in......

Indie animator Bill Plympton has just finished his sixth animated feature, for which he hand drew every cell. Called Idiots and Angels, it tells the haunting and humorous story of a dyspeptic working stiff who wakes up one morning and finds, to his horror, angel's wings sprouting out of his back. Try as he may to rid himself of the grotesque mutation, they inevitably take over his life and soon become the wings of desire......

Keanu Reeves in Street Kings, Richard Jenkins, left, and Haaz Sleiman in The Visitor Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker play bad cop/badder cop in Street Kings, an adaptation of James Ellroy's (L.A. Confidential) novel about a brutal gang of LAPD cops. Though directed by David Ayer, who wrote the solid Training Day, the Washington Post says the “big-name casting brings no honor, or even fun, to the hackneyed roles.” And the movie’s “moral relativity...seems like......

The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival begins April 23rd and runs through May 4th, with over 200 feature length narrative films, documentaries and shorts from around the world. This year also features discussions with filmmakers, music events, a family film series, an ESPN Sports Film Festival and other special presentations. (Peruse the entire selection of films.) American Express cardholders will be able to buy tickets starting this Saturday April 12th. On Friday April 18th, tickets will......

Drawing on his roots in the fecund 1970s East Village avant-garde film scene, critic J. Hoberman has spent his three decades at the Village Voice introducing readers to the more adventurous cinematic worlds awaiting beyond the realm of Hollywood. He is the author of nine books, most recently The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, which was described by Slate as "an extraordinary publishing event." To commemorate his thirty years at......

brooklyn bridge traffic, by Idle Type at flickrToday on the Gothamist Newsmap: a crime scene/hanging at East 13th St. and Shore Parkway in Brooklyn, a child mauled by a dog in the area of 91-43 Gold Rd. in Queens, and a possible escaped prisoner on Wards Island across from Manhattan. Asbestos removal at the Carroll St. F and G line station appears to be a non-issue. Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn received a note......

Another Will Ferrell sports flick will inflate this weekend, capping off a nationwide “Funny or Die” promotional tour that brought him to Radio City Music Hall Sunday night. The movie is Semi-Pro, which stars Ferrell as Jackie Moon, owner of the 1976 Flint Michigan Tropics, a team in the maverick ABA basketball league. To keep his career alive against all odds, Moon initiates off a series of increasingly desperate publicity stunts to attract fans –......

Photograph by Joe Holmes on Flickr Documenting the city in the snow apparently has its limits. Gowanus Lounge noticed this photograph of the Gowanus Canal, taken yesterday, by photoblogger Joe Holmes. Holmes wrote on his Flickr page it was "taken seconds before I was told that photography is prohibited on the 9th Street bridge because of 9-11 concerns." Oh, man, that should be a problem for the Toll Bros. marketing department. And what if......

MOVIE: As the Oscars approach, take a look back at one of the past films to be granted a golden statue. Tonight Agatha Christie's classic mystery Murder on the Orient Express leaps from the page to the big screen when the 1974 movie is shown at Film Forum. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall and Anthony Perkins, the movie will help you hone your crime-solving skills (and possibly make you think twice about taking Amtrak).......

The construction worker who killed Adrienne Shelly in her West Village office pleaded guilty to manslaughter - and gave new details about why he killed the actress-director. Diego Pillco will receive 25 years in prison; as an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, the Post says his sentence will be "almost certainly followed by deportation." Originally, Pillco had told the police he killed Shelly in November of 2006, he was in a "bad mood" and picked a......