Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce star in Traitor, a terrorist thriller conceived by Steve Martin that the Village Voice calls "uneven yet engrossing." In it, Cheadle plays an American-born mercenary who at age nine witnessed his Sudanese Muslim father die in a car bombing. When the flick finds him as an adult, he's seemingly gone from U.S. Special Ops to selling explosives to jihadists, with Pearce as the FBI agent on his tail. The......

Rumors of another big box department store following Ikea's footsteps into Red Hook have been all but confirmed by the Brooklyn Paper, which is reporting that BJ’s Wholesale Club is "on the verge of announcing plans to move into the former site of the Revere Sugar factory." That would put the members-only retailer just down the street from Ikea and bring Red Hook residents closer to fulfilling their dream of living in a world class......

This week Frank Bruni files two shorter reviews for the Times instead of handing down his usual hefty decision on a single restaurant. He heads east to follow up on Sushi Yashuda on 43rd Street, declaring that from the time it opened "more than eight years ago, when William Grimes awarded it three stars in The New York Times, it has been among the best. And a recent visit suggested that there’s been no slippage,......

Clo: Like uWink before it, Clo, an new automated wine bar in the Time Warner Center, has liberated customers from burdensome interaction with human servers and their constant demand for gratuities. The video above, courtesy WCBS, shows the computer-run bar in action. (Do what you need to do to tune out the shrill newscaster voice.) The Times explains that customers can simply touch on a wine name to get details on tasting notes, food......

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......

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,......

PetalBelle: Aw, this cute new SoHo waffle place from the owners of Lombardi’s will, Thrillist reports, be serving Belgian “liege” waffles made with “a wide-grain Scandinavian sweetener some call ‘pearl sugar,’ and others ‘Nütra Sweet.’” Eater further notes that there are “four flavors of gelato" and – deep breath – "basic coffee drinks." 158 Sullivan St, (212) 677-1580 Botinica: Red Hook has a fancy new bar to go with its fancy new Swedish retailer. It’s......

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......

Chickpea: We used to love Chickpea, that fresh falafel place on Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place that let you squirt as much tahini as you wanted into your pita. But we lost interest when they went through that whole confusing name change contest – marred by allegations that the game was rigged – and ended up calling themselves Kosher Village. Now it’s Tahini, and they bake their falafel, which is as about healthy as......

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......

Convivio: The Tudor City restaurant formerly known as L’Impero has been reborn as Convivio (pictured), a more casual but still swish venture from the same team, Chris Cannon and chef Michael White. Located in a historic 1920s building, the space is made deluxe with burnt orange banquettes, a hand-hammered copper bar top, and reflective lacquered ceilings. White – who spent seven years studying Italian cuisine in Imola – emphasizes the southern part of the boot......

Macondo: Named after the fictional Colombian village in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, this new Lower East Side restaurant gives Latin street food a gourmet twist. We stopped in for dinner Thursday night, and though they're still working out the kinks (the frozen drinks took forever, and some of the staff had no idea what they were setting down on the table) it's worth a trip for the cod fish Arepa alone.......

Remember the plans for that fancy new TKTS theater ticket booth in Times Square that were unveiled back in Aught Six? Producer Ken Davenport (Altar Boyz) does, and the other day he was just wondering, you know, why the hell it’s not ready yet, since they originally said it would be open for business in just six short months. (The Times Square TKTS has been operating at the Marriot Marquis in the meantime.) So Davenport......

Red Hook seemed eerily quiet on Saturday, as we checked out the traffic flow on Columbia and Van Brunt Streets on the West Side of the neighborhood. Any prediction of overwhelming weekend gridlock seemed not to be panning out-- except for one Ikea bus ferrying people from Boro Hall, the scene seemed as quiet and bucolic as any summer weekend in years past. Indeed, maybe even quieter, as people who'd normally be out at......

Clover Club: This new Cobble Hill lounge has no connection to this Clover Club “located in beautifull [sic] Mark, Illinois,” so leave your green face paint at home. The atmosphere here, as evinced by the photo, is old world charm and sophistication, hearkening back to an era when men dueled with pistols, not text messages, and the curse of the Cosmo had not yet darkened New York. Small plates include oysters on the half shell,......

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......

The exhaustive coverage of today's Red Hook Ikea opening here and elsewhere around the web was the inevitable climax of a perfect storm of storylines: Rough-edged neighborhood with a lot of history gets another turn in the spotlight – or are those cross hairs? Has Red Hook now sacrificed too much of the charm that made its sleepy waterfront streets so appealing to artists? Or is the arrival of big retail business just what the......

While shoppers' enthusiasm for the new Brooklyn Ikea has been well documented today, opinion was decidedly mixed among residents who skipped the festivities at the new 346,000 square foot store. Jennifer Cohen, a Red Hook resident for the last eight years, voiced the most common concern, that the neighborhood's streets and buses would be overly taxed by thousands of shoppers descending on the store, which is far from the subway. According to Cohen, the B61......

Six of the twenty-two acres of land that Ikea occupies in Red Hook have been turned into a park and waterfront esplanade, built by the big box retailer as a deal-sweetener for their wary neighbors. You don’t need to buy any Swedish meatballs to hang out by the water, and the free Water Taxi service arranged by Ikea might make it an appealing weekend destination in its own right. But shoppers should be aware that......

After nearly six years of controversy, construction, worry and anticipation, the first Ikea in New York City opened in Red Hook, Brooklyn this morning. By the time the doors opened at 9:00 a.m., hundreds of shoppers had gathered on line outside the popular Swedish retailer. A festive atmosphere prevailed without any of the community dissent that had threatened to stymie the project from the beginning. Instead of demonstrations from neighbors worried about the incoming wave......

With the Knitting Factory looking for a new home, and Luna Lounge being closed since April, all signs are pointing to the former moving into the latter. In fact, a sign on the front door of the now defunct Luna Lounge says as much. The closing of the doors came with a sad little announcement on April 26th via their MySpace page, stating "Thanks for all the good times, everybody." The venue had only moved......

Tonight is the housewarming party, so to speak, for the Tenement Museum's new apartment and the opening of its first tour since 2002. This one is titled, The Moores: An Irish Family in America. They tell us that "it’s taken about 6 years from concept to completion for this particular project. That includes research, planning, fundraising, designing, bringing the upper floors up to code, purchasing artifacts for the apartment, developing content." Like their other apartments,......

Full map here. As the world waits in hushed anticipation for tomorrow morning’s grand opening of the Red Hook Ikea, many eager shoppers are agonizing over the best route in and out of the relatively inaccessible neighborhood. So Ikea has been making a big effort to lure customers and appease locals fretting about the traffic with some complimentary transportation alternatives:New York Water Taxi is operating free ferry service from Pier 11 in Manhattan directly to......

With the 346,000 square foot Ikea poised to open in Red Hook Wednesday morning, the Times fans out into the neighborhood to measure public opinion about the big Swedish store, which has come into being after vocal opposition from some local residents. The most commonly-voiced concern is about the traffic that will clog Red Hook’s streets; estimates vary from a few thousand visitors on weekdays to more than 14,000 cars a day on weekends. Some......

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......

Red Hook residents who used to party at Lillie’s bar on Beard Street may be surprised to discover that right next door to the decadent nightspot was an elegant restaurant waiting to be born. What was previously storage space has been thoroughly overhauled into a French bistro called La Bouillabaisse, which owner Neil Ganic (Petite Crevette) hopes to have running in time for the June 18th grand opening of IKEA, conveniently located across the street.......

Hollywood is apparently shocked that women can affect box office sales; Variety notes that after Sex and the City opened this weekend to the tune of $55.7 million, it shattered "decades-old thinking that females -- particularly older ones --can’t fuel the sort of big opening often enjoyed by a male-driven event pic or family movie." Way to go ladies? The NY Times reports that the romcom's success was mostly thanks to the fairer gender, with......

Kafana: Serbia has landed in Alphabet City, over on Avenue C. Owner Vladimir Ocokoljic tells NY Mag that what sets his new place (pictured) apart can be summed up in one word: “Pork.” Thrillist has the menu, and Ocokoljic isn’t playing: pork dominates, from the Meat Meze appetizer of assorted pork rinds to the pan fried schnitzel entrée rolled with ham and creamy spread. There are salads for the swine-averse, as well as some concessions......

From the ashes of the beloved Read Cafe in Williamsburg (that space is now occupied by the decidedly un-funky El Beit coffee shop) comes owner Laurence Elliott's new baby, The Rabbithole. Opening this Sunday, his latest venture is further south but still on Bedford, between South 4th and South 3rd Streets. When we spoke with Elliott back in March, he still had a long way to go turning the former apartments into a restaurant/cafe with......