Photograph of a vacant lot on the Lower East Side by p0psharlow on Flickr Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bicyclist struck on Queens Blvd. and 55th St. a smoke condition at the Heartland Brewery & Rotisserie At 350 5th Ave & East 34th St. Your name is Leila. You're a Verizon customer. You are receiving every text msg. addressed to Leila across the planet. A science teacher at a Staten Island H.S. along......

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism Brooklyn Academy of Music Repressive political regimes and free-wheeling cultural expression can go together hand in hand, and the flowering of film in Yugoslavia during the '60s is a great example of it. BAM Cinematek is devoting a series this month to this Black Wave, a film movement that combined "artistic, sexual, and ideological freedom with a sense of humor." One of the major features in this group of films......

Fritz Lang: King of Noir Museum of the Moving Image, through Sept. 30 With his fascination with psychologically shady characters and a visual aesthetic that's equally as shadowy, it's no surprise that when German director Fritz Lang came to the United States during World War II he became a major practitioner of that very American genre, film noir. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is devoting a whole month of screenings to Lang's......

Only 2 weeks after his 89th birthday, Swedish film and theater director Ingmar Bergman passed away at his home on Fårö Island this morning, the Associated Press reports. "Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed the death, and Swedish journalist Marie Nyreröd said the director died peacefully during his sleep. Bergman never fully recovered after a hip surgery in October last year, Nyreröd told Swedish broadcaster SVT." As the New York Times......

Army of Shadows (directed by Jean Pierre Melville) Only in New York: one of the best reviewed movies last year by local critics was a little drama about the French Resistance originally made in 1969 called Army of Shadows. Loads of screenings over multiple limited runs during the course of 2006 at Film Forum sold out, as flocks of New York film geeks rushed to see this flick which had never been released before in......

Frank Miller devotees have been salivating all over their computers in anticipation for the new adaptation of his Greek battle comic book 300, which comes out this weekend. Like the version of Miller's Sin City from '05, 300 makes nice with the stylized visuals giving us the most lush, chiseled, half-naked warriors and warrior wives ever depicted on screen. In particular the actors playing the Spartan queen and king, Lena Headey and Gerard Butler look......

If you're a foreign film fan or DVD fiend, if you've ever had a heated discussion about auteur theory, or insisted that seeing all of Fanny and Alexander was the right way to spend an evening, this might be the most perfect t-shirt for you: The Criterion Collection, which puts out stunning and comprehensive DVDs of films from around the world and from the past and present (two recent favorites of Gothamist: Their editions......

Sean Howe, Editor...

Yay! Spellbound finally opens at Film Forum today! Gothamist has been following this spelling bee documentary for a while, and will try to make it to West Houston today to see it. A.O. Scott loves the film, and mentions, one contestant, "Harry, a voluble boy from New Jersey, who struggles with an Anglo-Saxon plural noun (to write it would be to spoil one of the film's most excruciating and hilarious moments) referring to a......