MOVIE: After Marion Cotillard took home the gold for best actress in La Vie en Rose last Sunday, French cinema is sure to be all the rage. Today the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008 series kicks off with a screening of Roman de gare (pictured). Buy tickets and get the schedule here. Friday// 6:30 and 9pm // Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts [70 Lincoln Center Plaza] // $12 (stand......

Buildings, clockwise from upper left corner: Prada Store Soho, American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center, Hearst Building, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Morgan Library expansion, Apple Store Soho, Conde Nast Building, and Seagram Building; in the center, Grand Central Terminal interior and the Chrysler Building The Chrysler Building. The Seagram Building. The Apple Store Soho? The Center for Architecture's executive director Rick Bell made a list of 10 great buildings to see in New......

Above, photograph of Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson and Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan in front of a model; below thumbnail is a rendering of the WhiteKnight At the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, British entrepreneur Richard Branson unveiled the aircraft for his Virgin Galactic space travel venture and promised, "2008 is really going to be the year of the spaceship." Scaled Composites (which designed the spaceplane, SpaceShipOne, that had a human-piloted space flight a......

Gothamist reader luzer took some arresting, very "Wild Kingdom"-like photographs of a hawk snacking on a squirrel in Central Park, near the American Museum of Natural History. luzer posted photographs on Flickr and writes that some of the humans who gathered to watch the spectacle "guessed it was Pale Male. I am not convinced (we saw another one later in the park)." While New York is very urban, there are still many places where......

ArtCal calls him, "the most controversial and downright interesting graffiti artist at large in the UK today" and whether or not you agree -- Banksy is decorating our streets, galleries...and even Brangelina's household walls. In New York he has pranked his way into the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. Recently it was announced that his images would be used to sell luxury condos in Williamsburg...and just yesterday......

Have you re-read the classic coming-of-age JD Salinger novel, Catcher in the Rye, lately? amNewYork takes a trip down memory lane, and 5th Ave, with a pair of Holden Caulfield-tinted glasses. Apparently people like the Central Park Conservancy historian get a ton of inquiries about the New York references in the novel. The most popular question, "Where do the ducks go in the winter?" Referring to the ducks in the Central Park pond that our......

Every year the American Museum of Natural History unveils their unique take on holiday decor and their answer to the Rockefeller Center tree...the origami tree! Last year the tree had a safari theme, and this year it reflects the museum's current Mythic Creatures exhibit. This year there's also a three-headed dragon wrapped around it, like garland, which was made of 10,000 Interlocking pieces of paper! 16,000 members of OrigamiUSA made all of this happen, and......

FAIR: Attention vinyl junkies! WFMU is hosting their Record Fair starting this eve and running throughout the weekend. "Hundreds of dealers specializing in the out sounds that WFMU is adored for delivering year round will gather for three days of merciless hawking o' the wax, and thousands of area music geeks are already trembling with nervous anticipation!" There will also be live performances this year, check out more details here. Friday, 7pm to 10pm and......

The Willamette Meteorite, originally from Oregon but residing at the American Museum of Natural History since 1908, was sent to auction Sunday (well, 30 lbs of its 15.5 tons was). How much did it, and another famous meteorite (the Brenham Main Mass), get when they took their place on the auction block? Zero, zilch...nada. Though WCBS reports that "an ordinary metal mailbox zapped by a falling space rock in 1984 was sold for the unearthly......

FILM: Ease in to Halloween with classic horror flick The Innocents, based on Henry James' novella The Turn Of The Screw. Evil and innocence, the strange and the everday, will mingle as you...enjoy complimentary vodka an tapas! 6pm // Mantra Lounge [986 2nd Ave] // Free, RSVP here EVENT: Neurologist Oliver Sacks explores "the complexities of human response to music and its powerful ability to move us physically and emotionally" tonight as he shares experiences......

The Willamette Meteorite may have landed in Oregon in 1902, but the 15.5-ton rock has resided in NYC for the past 101 years. The American Museum of Natural History acquired it in 1906 and it's been on display there ever since. Now a 28-lb chunk of that meteorite is about to be on the auction block, with an expected price tag of $1.3 million (the entire thing was originally purchased for $26,000 prior to being......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: Airmail in Brooklyn, truck vs train overpass in 31st St & 20th Ave in Queens, an amputation at Grant St & St Pauls Ave in Staten Island and a bomb scare at Broadway and Mercer (NYU) in Manhattan. A former deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani is now an "ambassador" for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. But it's not that shocking, since Fran Reiter had lead the Liberal Party before joining......

Photographs of animals taking a stroll make Gothamist happy, so we must share this great photo from WhatISee, who noticed some African spurred tortoises at the American Museum of Natural History. Mud and Hermes live at the museum and venture in their Upper West Side neighborhood to nosh on some leaves. There are some cool photos here of their shells and people's reactions, but we love that they know to go home.......

Police are handling the death of a young woman, found in her mother's apartment at NYU-owned 4 Washington Square Village, as a possible homicide. The woman, Boitumelo McCallum, last seen either on Wednesday night or Thursday morning, was found on Sunday, after subletters smelled a foul odor coming from the locked room and called the super. The Daily News reports that the police discovered McCallum's decomposed body "wrapped tightly in a bedsheet and wedged between......

THEATER: HERE Artistic Director Kristin Marting concludes the OBIE-winning art center’s season by directing performer/dancer Alexandra Beller in us, “a highly athletic, sensual and dynamic blend of movement with song, text and a layered soundscape. Beller created this deeply personal commentary on the state of the union from the perspective of a woman who is at a crisis point in a love relationship.” As we haven’t seen it, we’ll defer to The New Yorker on......

THEATER: Breedingground Theater Company continues their three week Spring Fever Festival of work by self-producing artists. (We suggest perusing the full lineup on the company’s website, though we caution that it's quite an eyesore.) Nevertheless, one that happily caught our eye is Chess’d, about a ninja and a man in a white tux playing a game of life-sized chess. The game escalates into a no-holds-barred life-or-death struggle, which reviewer Daniel Kelly declares “hilarious from start......

The parents of Destiny Mesa claim they only decided to sue the city after the teacher who lost track of their kingergartener daughter in a crowded Manhattan museum wasn't disciplined. The suit alleges that the school did not have enough chaperones for a field trip from Staten Island to the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. The New York Post reports, however, that the teacher assigned to look after Destiny Mesa......

Time announced its second Time 100 list of influential people. (For whatever reason, Time doesn't provide a full list with separate links to all the influentials, so here's a list from FishbowlNY.) Based on our reading, the New Yorkers (and we're including some people who live in Westchester, but work in the city) who made the list include 30 Rock's Tina Fey, subway superhero Wesley Autrey, Senator Hillary Clinton, banker Stephen Schwartzman, director Martin Scorsese,......

Spider-Man Week is coming to an end. What happened out there while we weren't looking? In one of the more interesting spider events this week, Tobey Maguire got a big creature placed on his arm at AMNH by entymologist and curator Norm Platnick: Through Sunday you can check out that very same spider at AMNH, as part of their Spiders Alive! exhibit. Did you see any signs of Spider-Man this week? Here he is in......

Mayor Bloomberg's plans for making the city more habitable over the next 25 years include more than just planting a million trees in the next decade. They also involve reopening the High Bridge in Harlem and the McCarren Park Pool, which has lately served as a summer music venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The High Bridge, the city’s oldest standing bridge, will get a $65 million face-lift over about two years beginning in 2008, said......

This Sunday, the Mayor will formally unveil more PlaNYC details (though the website has been up for a while now). He'll give the speech at the American Museum of Natural History, to which New York Mag says, "while we're excited to see the plan, we confess the museum's symbolism is making us nervous: dinosaurs … carcasses … oy." MUSIC: Celebrate the earth with some tunes this weekend at the Green Apple Music Festival. Musicians will......

After the Sun mentioned the Mayor's upcoming Earth Day PlaNYC speech may include mention of a congestion tax, even more details about what the speech will include have come out. The NY Times says the Mayor is "expected to advocate more than 100 proposals," from cleaning up polluted sites to making buildings more energy efficient. The most controversial part of the plan is the congestion pricing idea. The NY Times says Bloomberg administration staffers......

Last week, Rudy Giuliani ruffled some Italian-American feathers when he did an impersonation of Don Corleone during a California campaign stop. Newsday reports that the former Mayor "recycled" an "old New York gag" by saying, "Thank youse all very much for invitin' me here tuh-day, to this meeting of the families from different parts'a California." The reaction from Italian-Americans is mixed: The president of the Italian American Museum and Coalition of Italian American Associations,......

At the end of this month, your friendly neighborhood Spider Man will be all over New York for...Spider Man week! A five-borough-wide celebration (marketing ploy) featuring a ton of live events, screenings, parties and exhibits. The city has been central to the Marvel Comics legend since Spidey's beginning in 1962, so it only makes sense to launch the latest movie here. "On one hand, New York is a battleground, and on the other, it's a......

The latest exhibit coming to the American Museum of Natural History is the first ever to "trace the cultural and natural history roots of some of the world’s most enduring mythological creatures". In other words: Dragons and Unicorns and Mermaids, oh my! The exhibit, Mythic Creatures, won't be opening until May of this year, but it will stick around until next January and highlight legendary fantastical beasts and undersea monsters. From the description: "For......

This would have been an excellent week to escape to Miami! We are going to have a bitter blast of cold air beginning later today. It's already quite windy outside, but tonight and tomorrow will feel downright nasty as an arctic air mass whooshes into town. Before then temperatures will creep up toward 40 degrees. After the front, we'll see a quick cooling into the 20s before reaching the lower teens tomorrow morning. If you're......

Fake gold, dinosaur bones, and pictures of Attila the Hun are no longer the only objects you can take home from the American Museum of Natural History. Now, scholars can be awarded a Ph.D. in comparative biology from the Museum’s newly created Richard Gilder Graduate School, America's first doctoral program at a museum. The first class of students will enroll in the fall 2008. John Flynn, the lead curator at the AMNH who recently......

Despite mostly negative reviews "Night at the Museum" has been boffo at the box office, raking in over $160 million since its release. The movie's popularity has spilled over to the American Museum of Natural History. In the first ten days after the movie's opening the museum reported a twenty percent jump in attendance over the same period last year. The movie, which takes place at the fictional Museum of Natural History, drew its inspiration......

If it's winter, it's time for the Bronx Zoo's Holiday Lights. The lights, which are in the 10th year, have been up since November. This weekend, there's a Dinosaurs Rock exhibition between 5PM and 9PM where kids can dig for dinosaur fossils - and there are lighted displays of dinosaurs, too. The Dinosaur Dig will be there tomorrow, too, and if you're going with a child, here's a $5 off ticket promotion for online......

You may have noticed that we've added another data source to our Gothamist Newsmap: now twice as much mayhem! Today's catastrophes: a water rescue in the Hudson off Houston Street, a "scaffold incident" at Leonard and Broadway, and double and triple shootings in Queens and Brooklyn. Yikes! On tonight's Nova science Now, Neil deGrasse Tyson (from the Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History) "mass extinction, the 1918 pandemic flu, robot engineer Cynthia......