newcritics

After an adventurous weekend that involved attending a wedding at a beach resort during a tropical storm, the Siren is back in warm, safe, almost-dried-out Brooklyn and ready to announce the Next Big Thing. No, no, not the New York Film Festival–the New York City of the Mind edition of Wednesday Night at the Movies [...]

BBC America has a new show for their Sci-Fi Saturday line-up called Primeval. I watched the three first episodes this past weekend, on demand on cable and on air, and was really impressed. The premise sounds a little silly, especially as it involves dinosaurs, but it seems to work.
Eight years ago, evolutionary zoologist Nick Cutter’s [...]

This is Anne Bancroft Day on TCM, and they are showing her in movies ranging from Anne Sullivan, the determined teacher of deaf-and-blind Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker” to the boozy Mrs. Robinson seducing Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.”
Before those triumphs, there was an unforgettable lunch with the young actress born Anna Maria Italiano [...]

As any Project Runway fan knows, the show has lost something. This season even Tim Gunn can’t make it work and I’m guessing Nina is beyond bored. I know I am. Claire and I were hoping we could muster up the enthusiasm to breathe life and excitement into PR’s last season on Bravo, but [...]

As we all know, Project Runway is in its 5th and final season on Bravo, with word out that it will be moving to its new home at Lifetime for its next run. I have mixed feelings about this. I have mixed feelings in general when it comes to Project Runway and the course it [...]

When last we saw the enigmatic Don Draper, he was sitting on the bottom of his living room steps on Thanksgiving, 1960; his wife and children have gone to her Dad’s for the holiday. He didn’t want to go, since he’s not really participating in his marriage or his fatherhood. But he was affected by [...]

Let me first start with an apology. Jennifer and I were perfectly aware that the Bravo’s final season of Project Runway started last night. Perfectly aware. But life got in our way, and somehow beat out Heidi Klum in our list of priorities. But for the sake of our audience (and [...]

Here we go again with another shot of surrealism, this time courtesy of The Leningrad Cowboys with The Red Army Choir. You have to see this to believe it, and even then it is hard to reconcile with reality.

Just in case you missed Part I.

A London gallery next week will show pictures of an American legend, some of them unseen for almost half a century. Taken by my friend Marvin Koner, they show, not the familiar man in black with a life-scarred face, but a smooth-skinned 27-year-old at the brink of a career that would sear his voice and [...]

Jo Stafford died on Wednesday. May she rest in peace in a heaven of beautiful, sultry music. My parents had a compilation album that had her “You Belong to Me,” and it was the first adult song that I learned all the words to when I was very young.
She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, [...]

We’ve just closed a fantastic five-part film series hosted by Lance Mannion here at newcritics, some of the best live-blogging we’ve had since our launch 18 months ago - but it was also interrupted by a hacker-induced breakdown of the site’s infrastructure. And that reminded me that we needed to improve or perish, so we [...]

A friend and I joked that a lot of Angelina Jolie movies blend into one - you know, the one where she plays the tough badass… spy… who uses a lot of… knives and stuff… while wearing kickass outfits…

Quick, name the movie.
At this stage of her career, Jolie gives great movie star; that’s [...]

After an attack by “malware” hackers last week, newcritics looked more like Bonnie & Clyde’s bullet-sliced sedan than the functioning cultural colossus that it is has been over the past year and half. Well, the site’s back up, folks, and it seems like most of the data is intact. Finger crossed, of course. A huge [...]

It all started innocently enough over at my place when I put up this charming clip.
One of the two or three regular readers of my blog, who chooses, perhaps out of laziness, to go by the moniker Anonymous, left this comment:
Great 60’s Male Vocalists in No Particular Order:
John Lennon Elvis Presley
Paul Jones Paul McCartney
Roy Orbison [...]