At the very charming Cafe Cafe on Broome Street yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing the very smart and cooperative actor Billy Crudup for a cover story in an upcoming issue of Best Life. Crudup talked a lot of about acting and the actor’s life. “I like complexity,” he says. My kind of guy.
The New York premiere of the documentary In the Family was held at the Paley Center in Manhattan the other night. Underwrtten by the Playboy Foundation, the film examines the emotions and issues that arise when a woman learns that she has a genetic predisposition to breast or ovarian cancer. With intelligence, anger, sadness and …
Richard Nixon was never one of my favorite people, but after reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland in May and James Rosen’s The Strong Man in June, and seeing the ad guys on Mad Men work on Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign in July, his malignant spirit has been hovering over my summer. Last night, on the eve …
What American Graffiti and Breakfast Club and other movies have done in fiction, American Teen does in a documentary –and rather more powerfully. Director Nanette Burstein spent a year at the high school in Warsaw, Indiana, following around members of the senior class. Eventually narrowing her focus of the 1200 hours of film she shot …
The Lives of Others, one of our favorite films from this past year, has just come out on DVD. Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the movie is about the cheapening of life in a police state, and, not so incidentally, how simple acts of courage can inspire others to take a stand. …
It’s very hard to sit through No End In Sight (see the trailer here), the new documentary by Charles Ferguson about the American misadventure in Iraq, and not feel deeply dismayed. In a series of interviews with soldiers and diplomats and policy makers who desired nothing more than to fulfill the president’s goal of free …