Catherine Hardwicke’s feeling for teen angst and female anxiety gave Twilight (the first film of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels) immense potential. But Chris Weitz’s sequel New Moon is full of lost potential. Harwicke’s visual elegance via cinematographer Elliott Davis emphasized the wooded Northwest territory as a natural wonderland where the heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) uneasy puberty emerged. Hardwicke gave Meyer’s fairy/gothic tale an idealized representation of universal adolescent tension. Bella’s attraction to teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) normalized today’s sexual permissiveness—the cultural pressure teens feel to be sexually active—with a concept both shrewd and authentically Bronte-esque. Read more

A stripped-down production of a musical can reveal hidden depths and new layers if the show is right. For example, Sweeney Todd and Company both benefited from a less-is-more approach. Ragtime, however, does not. Read more

ShowPaper Intramural Film Festival Nov. 21, Vaudeville Park, 26 Bushwick Ave. (at Devoe St.), Brooklyn, no phone; 8, $5 A one-day experimental film festival at a Williamsburg art fort could go e Read more

Italian Neorealism: A Feast of Film and Food Nov. 21, Walter Reade Theater, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 212-875-5600; 4:30, $30 As polished a film festival as ShowPaper’s is rough, this oned Read more

Yvonne Rainer & Deborah Hay Nov. 18, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw. Dyer & 10th Aves.), 646-731-3200; 7:30, $25  Two of modern dance’s most enduringly creat Read more

The First Ever Miss G Train Pageant Nov. 19, The City Reliquary Museum, 370 Metropolitan Ave. (at Havemeyer St.), Brooklyn, 718-782-4842; 7, Free The G Train starts in Brooklyn and ends in Qu Read more

During La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, director Frederick Wiseman’s leisurely immersion into the rhythms of the POB, the world outside of the company’s grand, historic home is irrelevant. If the company was not seen rehearsing The Nutcracker—along with several premieres and a repertory staple—one would have no idea what time of year it was. Wiseman and his crew roamed the studios, stage, offices, corridors, as well as the rooftop and the catacombs of the venerable Palais Garnier for three months in late 2007. In this eminent documentary filmmaker’s trademark style, the film offers an elegantly edited compilation without any information beyond what we see and hear, as though we too had an open pass to observe behind the scenes. Read more

“Take it off, take it all off!” a hottie in a miniskirt shouted. There were 12 of them, all built rock hard. Were they cheaper by the dozen? Read more

I love Thanksgiving! And hate it. The holiday itself is a wonderful excuse to gather ’round family and friends for a conveniently short amount of time. Just enough hours to get in, reminisce for a day, get a ridiculously sized meal into your gullet and leave before the fam starts to work your nerves. Read more

SOMETIMES ALEXANDER SOKUROV,Werner Herzog and Pedro Almodóvar are ingenious, but their newest releases regress. Sokurov’s gorgeous bullcrap in The Sun is the definition of hagiography. He elegizes Emperor Hirohito’s deposition of his own divinity at the end of WWII as a confrontation between rationality and superstition, poetry and politics, tradition and personal expediency. Sokurov’s usual spiritual mysticism dreamily suggests Hirohito possessed a skeptic’s interest in science and historical fact. Read more Read it in print