Ridley Scott's Body of Lies stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a high strung CIA operative and Russell Crowe as his duplicitous supervisor who spends his days scheming covert ops from the ironically banal environs of his suburban home. A.O. Scott at the Times wonders: "If terrorism has become boring, does that mean the terrorists have won? Or, conversely, is the grinding tedium of this film good news for our side, evidence of the awesome might......

Every NYC movie/tv show can create a new pop culture landmark and tourist destination. Serious Eats points out that When Harry Met Sally had Katz's and Sex and the City had Magnolia, and now Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist has staked a claim on Veselka. Owner Tom Birchard told SE that they were "slammed all weekend" with folks allegedly wanting to recreate the scene where Michael Cera and Kat Dennings enjoy some pierogies at the......

Jason van Genderen’s Mankind Is No Island is a sweet and sentimental little film that was shot entirely with a cell phone in Sydney and New York. It's not the first example of cell phone movie-making, and certainly not the last (Spike Lee has recently enthused about the possibilities.) But this one has the distinction of winning $20,000 at last week's Tropfest at the World Financial Center Plaza. Not a bad haul considering the......

The trailer for Beverly Hills Chihuahua was a thing of wonder, with a small army of dogs rapping in a spectacular Mayan Busby Berkeley chorus number. But cuidado: the finished product, which features Cheech Marin and Luis Guzman voicing Latino stereotypes for mucho dinero, has no rapping! The Detroit News says it's "not the apocalypse-signaling, cultural abomination its trailers make it out to be. The bad news: That's pretty much the best thing that......

The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical novel Choke concerns a sex-addicted med-school drop-out (Sam Rockwell) who works as an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial-era theme park to help pay for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother's (Angelica Huston) stay in an expensive private medical hospital. The movie's creepiness gets under your skin a little bit, but it also has a lot of heart to temper all the black comedy. Rex Reed begs to differ: "I......

File under: should have seen it coming? Variety is reporting that Warner Bros. is gearing up to create a prequel to I Am Legend. "The studio has set D.B. Weiss to write a script that is based on a detailed outline that was hatched over the past few months by Smith," and others, and the film will show a pre-apocalyptic New York City as the final days of humanity are counted down. Since the studio......

A rendering of the lobby of Cassandra Cinema. Except for the avant-garde Ocularis screenings in the old Galapagos, North Brooklyn has been a dead zone for movie theaters for years. Why, just the other day the Greenpointers blogger could be heard begging the world to open up a movie theater near her: "I know it will take you years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I promise you I will go every Sunday......

Righteous Kill—which sounds like the title of the sequel to Death Blow—stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino as New York detectives searching for the serial killer who murdered their acting abilities, ha ha. There are critical take-downs galore here, but this one from Rolling Stone tickled us: "Some people think Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be a kick to watch just reading a phone book. Well, bring on that phone book. Righteous......

Last week rumors started swirling around the making of Ghostbusters III, and now Harold Ramis has confirmed some of them. He says, "Yes, Columbia is developing a script for GB3. Judd Apatow has made several other films for Sony, so of course the studio is hoping to tap into some of the same acting talent. Aykroyd, Ivan Reitman and I are consulting at this point, and according to Dan, Bill Murray is willing to be......

A.O. Scott over at the Times loves A Secret, Claude Miller’s "haunting" new film adaptation of a French novel by Philippe Grimbert. The movie skips through time, covering the pre and post war lives of a fractured Jewish family in France. Scott calls it a story of "confused passion and ethical struggle" that "leaves in place a sense that something horribly and splendidly strange can lie under the surface of ordinary experience.... The film......

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......