Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

The Brave One (directed by Neil Jordan) As city dwellers and city lovers, we know living in New York can be scary. We just don't usually get reminders of how perilous our home is when we go for entertainment at the movie theater. Irish director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), with the help of one of our best and most revered American actors Jodie Foster, have constructed a randomly violent and morally ambiguous New York......

For New York moviegoers, this is a good week for those who worship at the cult of the director. In both the theatrical releases and the repertory columns, film fans of various established and up in coming auteurs will surely get their fill. Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee takes on the action thriller genre in his newest, Inside Man starring Clive Owen as a bank robber, Denzel Washington as the hostage negotiator on the case and......

Fun stuff in the Observer's interview with Spike Lee. He discusses his new documentary about Hurricane Katrina, his work, and living in the city. He moved from Brooklyn to live in an Upper East Side townhouse (here's a spread about it in Town & Country - his place looks amazing), but we thought his insight as a Brooklyn native was especially amusing:Over the years, Mr. Lee has ridden the waves of gentrification in New York,......

Although we wouldn't want to drown ourselves too much in a gigantic lake of hyperbole, a peak at this weekend's local film offerings is enough to make any cinephile utterly giddy. The New York Film Festival will be wrapping up with a tremendous program including what is billed as Michelangelo Antonioni's "preferred cut" of his classic 1975 Jack Nicholson starrer The Passenger. (We'll have a final bit of NYFF coverage tomorrow.) Plus, two of our......

Once again, movie lovers have plenty to rejoice about over the next week. Three international heavyweights have new releases and we're not including Jodie Foster going crazy on an airplane in that equation. One of New York's most important production companies gets saluted at MoMA plus there's this little thing starting at Lincoln Center tomorrow night which should dominate much of the city's film landscape for the coming fortnight just as it does this week's......

Ever since watchdog groups wondered if Jodie Foster was victimized playing a young prostitute in Taxi Driver, the welfare of children acting in Hollywood is closely monitored. However, Gothamist is disturbed by one young rising star's current position as the go-to victim: Little Dakota Fanning, who stars in today's new release, Man on Fire. Not only is she playing yet another preternaturally aware little girl in today's new release whose charming ways soften the reserve......

Gothamist knows why the paparazzi was invented, to capture moments like this one. As Sarah Jessica Parker is filming the final episode of Sex and the City in Paris, cunning photographers caught her stepping into dog poo. Gothamist is reminded of a chapter in David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day: Sedaris, living in Paris, tries to explain why Jodie Foster is carrying a bag of dog poo, because, in France, picking up after dog......

A Robert DeNiro impersonator was arrested and jailed after burglarizing his ex's apartment, which is in the same building where Iris, the young hooker played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, lived. The Post reports that Joseph Manuella followed his ex girlfriend's roommate into their apartment at 250 East 13th Street and stole his ex, Evelyn Liu's, "wallet with credit cards, Palm Pilot, fax machine, $400 cash, and a $1,000 security-deposit check from a third......