Craig Wedren is the former front man for the sorely missed D.C. band Shudder to Think, a group that seemed to intuitively grasp all the overlooked possibilities of the late-80s/early 90s post-punk landscape and render them into a sound that was at once startling, bizarre and irresistibly catchy. Since the band’s end ten years ago, Wedren has made a career as composer of soundtracks for movies such as Wet Hot American Summer and The Baxter,......

EVENTS: Both Open House NY and The New Yorker Festival are upon us. You can check out more of OHNY's event here, and The New Yorker Festival here. Some picks: The New Yorker Festival hosts a conversation with Errol Morris tonight. He'll be talking with staff writer Philip Gourevitch about Abu Ghraib, with clips shown from Standard Operating Procedure -- his new film is a study of the prison-abuse scandal. Friday // 8pm // Directors......

THEATER: With his zany imagination and distinctive bass-baritone voice, Joseph Keckler (myspace) has been generating buzz throughout the gooey honeycomb of the downtown performance art cabaret scene. Tonight he sprinkles his particular blend of whimsical catnip at Dixon Place with Cat Lady, in which a man re-enacts an ordinary day with his mother, who runs a community theater with cat actors out of her home. “Past lives are recalled, songs are sung, and finally a......

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center For the seventh year running, the Film Society at Lincoln Center brings New York audiences some of the best new films Italy has to offer with their series "Open Roads." The program this year includes selections by a whole range of filmmakers, from established ones like Mario Monicelli (who just turned 92!), to the new guard who are making more "independent" work. Just some of......

Day Night Day Night (directed by Julia Loktev) Living in New York and going about your daily life post-9/11 you really can't help but have the possibility of a further terrorist attack lurking in the back of your mind. This morbid potential tragedy is the subject of Julia Loktev striking first feature which played at this year's New Directors/New Films Festival and gets a theatrical release this weekend. However instead of making a big budget......

New York mid-December always smells vaguely of pine and peppermint, despite our recent springtime temperatures. Bring that cozy holiday feeling with you into the cineplex for a couple of new feel-good holiday movies. Will Smith will tug at your heart strings big time as the struggling dad trying to become a stockbroker in The Pursuit of Happyness. Set in the '70s in San Francisco, Smith plays Chris Gardner, a door to door medical equipment salesman......

Yeesh, there sure are a lot of new movies out this weekend. Choose wisely and you will be well rewarded. In a shameless bid for our "penguins are cute" bias, Warner Brothers releases the animated Happy Feet about singing and tap dancing Emperor Penguins. If only furry black and white birds who rap to Stevie Wonder beats weren't so darn adorable! If you're still in Arrested Development withdrawal, the hilarious Will Arnett stars in Bob......

Happy Halloween! One of the best movies to watch around this time is ET, with some Reece's Pieces of course. Above is the trailer, from 1982. Pretty dry, really, we imagine if the trailer was made now it would have an angle more like this one. Ah, trailer spoofs. The best trailer spoof turning a scary movie in to the exact opposite has got to be The Shining one that came out a while ago,......

We've reached the midpoint of this year's 44th annual New York Film Festival but there's still plenty of stellar cinema to come. Here's a few flicks Gothamist has caught that we've loved. Volver This year the festival's centerpiece movie is Pedro Almodóvar's newest, Volver starring Penélope Cruz. Fans of old school, high women's melodrama Almodóvar will stand up and cheer for this new film; it's a ghost story and a five hanky weepie about the......

This weekend at the movies means a bunch of overblown new releases. Clerks II is out this weekend and if Kevin Smith didn't think he was the coolest before, he does now that Joel Siegel's walked out of one of his press screenings. You can read about the whole back and forth then decide if you too will be more offended by some reference to bestiality or that Jay and Silent Bob still have cultural......

The trend for Broadway shows to be based on popular films continues unabated but this twist reported in Variety today is actually kinda cool. The production team of George Reinblatt, Christopher Bond and Frank Cipolla will be opening Off Broadway Evil Dead: The Musical based on the 1981 cult classic horror flick by Sam Raimi. It'll be directed by Bond and Hinton Battle, who also choreographed the show. Tying in with the Midnight Movie plot......

EVENT: Help raise some money for the good fight with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Time's Up! Two long time allies are coming together to raise money and awareness for the environment. RMO is NYC's punk rock radical marching band and will lead the evening of music that includes Monkeyshine 9, Heavy Creatures, Quick Release and Phil Not Bombs. Also featuring DJ Suggested D's dance floor madness and the infamous blender bike. Time's Up!'s has......

This week the box office juggernaut that is the new X-Men sequel has scared away all of the competition from the new releases category. All save for one plucky little environmentalist otherwise known as our former Future President of the United States, Al Gore and his scary documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. However, if you're gonna be one of those people that's all "I'm anti-Brett Ratner and his tyrannical reign of self-aggrandizement" and you've already been......

With the Golden Globes happening this past weekend, everybody catching up on big winners Brokeback Mountain and Walk the Line while waiting for the Oscar nominations a week from Tuesday, and movies less than a month old already receiving their second releases (Terrence Malick's The New World reopens today in a slightly shorter version), it might seem like this period between New Year's is still all about the movies of 2005. But in reality, there......

Don't get confused – today is Friday. Gothamist has been a bit under the weather, hence our little weekend movie preview showing up today rather than on its usual Thursday. And while we all anxiously count down the minutes until Monday's Golden Globes, there are a lot of great movie options available without even considering all the 2005 films hoping to take home a prize. Some Quick Gothamist Picks: One of the best places to......

Ah January. That lovely first month of the year which big Hollywood uses as its annual dumping ground. The Awards eligibility period is over, and now is the time to catch-up on all those films being talked about that came out at the same time over the past few weeks. Still, New Yorkers are lucky as we retain many filmgoing options. Sure you can check-out the latest video game adaptation from hackmeister Uwe Boll, but......

Here we go: it's a huge weekend for year-end Oscar-bait and questions abound. Will audiences flock to see the "forbidden" love of Brokeback Mountain? (And was anybody else as disturbed at Focus Features' obvious attempts to downplay the male love story as much as possible and feature the relationships with the respective wives in every trailer?) Will fans who made worshipped the bestselling novel approve of Chicago director Rob Marshall's retelling of Memoirs of a......

There's only one major wide release this weekend, and although it stars an Oscar winner, we can pretty much guarantee Paramount isn't expecting any year-end kudos for Aeon Flux. In fact, it looks like the studio is hoping to slyly score a big opening weekend on the draws of Charlize Theron in skintight rubber and fans of the old MTV animated series because they aren't letting critics anywhere near it -- apparently no press screenings......

The holiday movie season is officially upon us. In fact, it started yesterday. We already spent more than enough time mentioning some little musical that will likely see its box office hopes dashed by the continuing dominance of Harry Potter. Nevertheless, several other big releases also appeared yesterday (at least in New York) in an attempt to grab a piece of the five-day weekend holiday marketplace. The big Oscar hopeful is Syriana from Oscar-winning Traffic......

The holidays are upon us. Tomorrow sees the release of two of the more eagerly awaited films of the season, and we haven't even hit Thanksgiving yet! We've been hearing fantastic things about the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. It wowed audiences at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and now critics are talking about Joaquin Phoenix's performance as they did last year about Jamie Foxx. One huge difference: Foxx lip-synced everything in Ray;......

Now that we're into November, awards season kicks off in earnest with big new releases such as Chicken Little. Wait. Sorry. Our mistake. After what seems like more than a year of trailers, the sky is finally falling for Disney's big animation experiment, but we actually meant Jarhead. Somehow, even arriving with an amazing pedigree that includes Oscar winning American Beauty director Sam Mendes, a best selling memoir as source material, and stars such as......

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......

September is generally considered a slow time for the movie industry, but Gothamist sees plenty of interesting cinematic diversions, both new and old, on the horizon for New Yorkers. There are several new releases this week, and while the widest opener among them -- The Man -- looks like a big bust, some of the smaller releases such as Keane and Touch the Sound seem enticing. But as is often the case, the city's alternative......

Nothing says All Hallows Eve quite like candy corn, that left over make up residue left by your hair line and scary movies. While Gothamist is a huge fan of kiddie fare like the classic It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" (available to rent on DVD via Netflix, no less), most people prefer that sensation of wanting to hide behind their seat in the movie theater at the end of October. A few Halloween movie......

If you consider yourself a child of the '80s, chances are the Steven Spielberg movie The Goonies (1985) holds a special place in your heart. This Friday and Saturday, it's the Midnight Movie at the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street at First Avenue. The programmers at this weekly event have been going mach-ten on the nostalgia factor this summer with earlier showings of flicks like the Dark Crystal and the Muppets Take Manhattan, and Gothamist......

The other Times Talk panel I went to was "Films that Deserve a Second Look" - films that New York Times film critics Stephen Holden, Elvis Mitchell, and A.O. Scott felt audiences missed the first time around. Many of the films they mentioned were victim to just being dumped by their distributors because they were not easily marketable as a teen comedy or date movie. Another problem is that films live and die in one......