This Friday brings good news, as Variety is reporting that the Ghostbusters are making their way back to the big screen. This isn't some thrown together, B-list, straight-to-DVD sequel, either. They say "the studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson." No word on yet on......

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......

Some anonymous filmmakers have created Save Coney Island: The Movie. From their YouTube page, where they posted a trailer this week, they describe it as follows: "When Thor Equities, an infamous real-estate company, threatens to build condominiums on Coney Island's core amusements, Amos Wengler, the troubadour, must keep the spirit of Coney Island alive with a song before all the memories fade forever. The life, spirit and essence of Coney Island explode on the screen......

Let's face it, New York City is going to have many cinematic love letters written to it, and they're not all going to be Woody Allen's Manhattan. The latest is called, simply, New York, I Love You, and amongst the long list of directors are Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. The cast includes bold-face names as well, like Robin Wright Penn, Ethan Hawke, Blake Lively, Hayden Christiansen, Kevin Bacon, Rachel Bilson, James Caan, Orlando Bloom...the......

You know summer's over when the biggest movie opening is Hamlet 2, a Sundance hit about a high school teacher's struggle to save the school's drama program by writing, directing, producing and starring in a zany time-travel musical. (Okay, there's also Death Race, which the Times calls "a supercharged junkyard apocalypse powered by an unabashed relish for brutal comeuppance and a flair for delirious vehicular mayhem.") British funnyman Steve Coogan – you know, the......

Last summer a rented garage on the outskirts of Queens, NY served as a workshop for a group of Trinidad teens living in the borough. They worked day and night on "enormous stereo systems jury rigged onto ordinary bmx bikes," with Randall Stevens on hand to document the creations, from scraps to mobile dance parties. The group is touted as America's first stereobike crew; Stevens's short film called Made in Queens and you can watch......

Tropic Thunder – an action/comedy lampoon of a Vietnam action movie gone awry – would seem worth the price of admission just to see Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface, but Robert Wilonsky's Village Voice slam does give one pause: "When it isn't tossing softballs at the studios, Tropic Thunder is the very thing it parodies: a wall of noise engulfed in flame... Stiller is back in the send-up business, nibbling gently at the soft,......

Newsday and Gawker, the first sources to publish the two original photos of the Montauk Monster, are now a little suspect of the ongoing "buzz" this creature is maintaining. As such, they did a little digging and end up back at one of the first theories: could it be a viral marketing scheme? Their dissection of the creature results in more confusion--albeit organized, bullet-pointed confusion--and raises points for each case (it's real, and it's fake).......

Security guards have stopped searching bags belonging to people attending a biweekly movie night in Tompkins Square Park after a group of 15 activists protested Wednesday night. The Villager was at the scene, where critics of the bag checks had vowed to strip naked to ironically facilitate the security searches. Mercifully, it didn’t come to that. Josh Boyd, a co-founder of the free movie series, called off the search “because it was upsetting people.” Jeffrey......

Because opening ceremonies for the Olympics are on Friday, most of the big studio movies are opening today. At the top of the heap is Pineapple Express, the new stoner comedy from Seth Rogen and southern art-house director David Gordon Green (friend of Gothamist). The action-packed romp, replete with an eponymous theme song by Huey Lewis, follows a stoner and his dealer on the run from some murderous thugs. Reviews are very mixed, with......

Beautiful Losers is coming to town later this week, screening at the IFC Center from August 8th to 28th. The film documents and "celebrates the spirit behind one of the most influential cultural moments of a generation. In the early 1990's a loose-knit group of likeminded outsiders found common ground at a little NYC storefront gallery. Rooted in the DIY (do-it-yourself) subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop & graffiti, they made art that reflected......

Swing Vote, anyone? You know, starring Kevin Costner as an “apathetic, beer-slinging, lovable loser, who is coasting through a life that has passed him by, until his daughter sets off a chain of events which culminates in the election coming down to one vote: her dad’s!” HAHAHA! Take it away, Boston Globe: “Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize. It's predicated on so many forces of incompetence converging in a single spot......

Photo of Bat Signal at Woolworth Building courtesy Olga Bass. As you may know, it's been a major headache trying to get tickets to The Dark Knight at New York City's only IMAX theater at AMC Loews Lincoln Square. The Fandango website only sells advance tickets in seven day blocks, which have been flying faster then free Bon Jovi tickets. And even when the next block of tickets go on sale, the options for most......

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......

Something tells us that most people who end up in the audience for Space Chimps this weekend will be people who either lost a bet or bought tickets in a failed attempt to sneak into The Dark Knight. And to hear the Times’s Neil Genzlinger tell it, there are worse fates: “Journalism is all about having the courage to write the truth even if it will get you mocked by your relatives and co-workers,......

Today the little movie that could, The Dark Knight, opens on the wings of a cosmic hype that could make it the third biggest box office earner this year. The first screenings began at midnight, continuing through the night, and many moviegoers were declaring it the best movie ever while still waiting on line to get in. The Observer talked to some fanboys (and girls) waiting for the IMAX screening at Lincoln Center last night;......

At a press/industry screening of The Dark Knight at the Lincoln Square IMAX last night, the line was already halfway down 68th Street an hour before showtime – and these are the overprivileged industry slobs. It’s going to be pandemonium Friday once the rabid fanboys take over. But you already knew that; the question of the hour is, “Does it live up to the hype?” Well, considering that the anticipation level rivals that of......

The black carpet was rolled out at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square cinemas for the feverishly-anticipated premiere of The Dark Knight. The film's cast and crew appeared at the premiere, but most talk, as it has been for the past since months, was about missing cast member Heath Ledger, whose sudden death in January shocked Hollywood and the public. The film's star, Christian Bale, said Ledger "steals the movie, I'm quite happy to say that......

Director David Gordon Green, called "one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic independent filmmakers of the last decade" by The Believer, will be sharing his lyrical take on southern culture with Brooklyn moviegoers starting Thursday, when BAMcinematek kicks off All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green. What's interesting about the week-long, early-career retrospective is that Green has paired each of his four feature films with six movies from the '70s and '80s......

Jill Priluck It's really finally happening, isn't it? First the Bat Signal hyped up the Woolworth Building, now the Batmobile is in town for the The Dark Knight world premiere tonight. The full-size toy was spotted outside the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater – the one with the IMAX – earlier today. Our correspondent tells us that "handlers were in the process of covering it because people taking pictures wouldn't stop photographing it. When people......

In May, Serious Eats alerted to the closing of a pet food store on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, as the storefront was stripped down to its original "beautiful stained glass sign from an old, possibly 1930s-era sweets shop." Soon enough a tapas restaurant popped up, called Get on Tapas (get it?), and locals were checking out the menu for the new neighborhood spot...only to discover they were fooled by Hollywood. Turns out the movie......

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......

Just as Sex and the City fades to black on the silver screen, another New York-based show steps in to fill the void. MailOnline reports that a Friends movie has gotten the greenlight, and word is that all former Friends are on board (the oldest of which, Lisa Kudrow, is now 45 years old). Sources say that within the next 18 months Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer......

This year’s Fourth of July blockbuster, Hancock, opens today. The quasi-comedy stars Will Smith as an angry homeless man with superhuman powers who causes massive property damage whenever he clumsily tries to save the day. The media has it in for him, but after he (tragically) rescues a publicist from an oncoming train, the grateful flack (Jason Batemen) helps him with an image makeover. The Times’s Manohla Dargis, of all people, calls it an......

Looks like Pixar’s hit another home run with Wall•E, a movie about robot love on post-Apocalyptic earth. Jeffrey Wells calls it “a masterpiece of its type” but can’t stand the way director Andrew Stanton has been downplaying the movie’s ecological context in interviews. Wells writes, “It's a lie, of course – dis-informing of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.” For those who......

Judging from Get Smart’s first remarkably unfunny trailer, you might assume this $80 million remake of the late-‘60s sitcom, starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway and Alan Arkin, would be a guaranteed flop, but it’s actually getting some decent reviews. (It’s a mixed bag, of course.) The Village Voice’s avant garde film buff J. Hoberman, of all people, deems it a “pleasant surprise… an all-purpose (and often quite funny) goofball action comedy.” Or maybe critics......

Ever wonder what that mysterious delay on your subway line was caused by? It could have been MTA worker Michael Martin sneaking away from his duties to write down the latest line in his screenplay (or for the latest screenplay he was hired to write, New Jack City 2). NY1 reports on Martin's rise from the underground to the mainstream.Martin was a subway conductor, and after totaling his car in an accident, entered a screen-writing......

Last week the NY Times' House & Garden section took a look at the mysteries planted by an architect in a ritzy Fifth Avenue apartment. This week, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report that Paramount has purchased the rights to the article for a feature to be produced by J.J. Abrams. Writers Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky have already been hired to adapt the piece into a film. Times reporter Penelope Green told the story......

Hoping to reverse the curse of Ang Lee’s The Hulk, director Louis Leterrier and Edward Norton have teamed up to unleash The Incredible Hulk upon the masses. Their take on the franchise keeps the origin story brief and cuts to the chase, as the Army tries to neutralize their experiment run amok. A.O. Scott at the Times writes, “Let’s not get carried away: The Adequate Hulk would have been a more suitable title... If......

In You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Adam Sandler affects an Israeli accent to play a Mossad commando turned sex-crazed NYC hairdresser. The script, co-written by Judd Apatow, Robert Smigel and Sandler, works hard to coax laughs out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, throwing in plenty of gross-out humor and comic stylings from Rob Schneider, who plays a dumb Palestinian. Need further discouragement? Variety’s Brian Lowry calls it Schneider’s “most relentlessly unfunny appearance under heavy......