Coming to New York City, I believed it would come to me. In my imagination (no New York newcomer story is complete without some idiotic naiveté, right?), the Manhattanite aura would sweep me from my 100 square-foot room uptown to a ritzy party on the top-floor of a glass-walled skyscraper. We would sip cocktails—Cosmopolitans, probably—and muse how everyone below looked like ants. Read more Read it in print

THEY MAY BE small, but short stories have been getting a lot of ink lately.This year, the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International award both went to short story writers, and masters of the form like John Cheever, Donald Barthelme and Flannery OConnor have all gotten the biographical treatment in 2009. Read more Read it in print

The Eaters is the first zombie stoner horror comedy of all time. To celebrate this groundbreaking cinematic moment, Anthology Film Archives is screening the movie, about a Brooklyn band that attempts an escape to Long Island after zombies take the boroughs, on Aug. 4. New York Press chatted with Katie Carman (director, producer) and Elizabeth Lee (actress, writer, producer) to talk about fusing the searches for blunts and brains. Read more

Documentaries don’t get more compelling than The Cove, a film that plays out more like a thriller than environmental advocacy. The film centers on Ric O’Barry, the trainer for Flipper who has since dedicated his life to freeing Dophins. He joins director Louie Psihoyos in Taiji, a Japanese town where whalers regularly slaughter thousands upon thousands of Dolphins. Some are sold to slave in amusement parks where they live truncated, miserable lives. The rest are herded into a secret cove—the film’s namesake—and clandestinely killed for human consumption, despite their sky-high mercury content. The breadth of this inhumanity, in which the Japanese government is complicit, is astounding. Read more

Popcorn cinema is no longer good at being bad. Self-conscious, stylized flicks like Bruno and Transformers 2 epitomize contemporary film’s inability to kick off its shoes and offer straightforward low-brow enjoyment—what summer moviegoing was all about. For quality cheap thrills, the remedy is a raucous trip to the other side of the globe with Not Quite Hollywood. Read more

If a dramatic action occurs in Lake Tahoe, a film from Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke, you probably won't see it. Take the opening car crash. The car of protagonist Juan, an older adolescent from a fractured family, is never shown slamming into a pole—only heard. Instead, Eimbcke shows Juan scouring for someone to fix the vehicle. The film focuses on the languorous search for an auto shop, and is primarily about results of actions rather than what causes those aftereffects. Read more

With her film Humpday garnering considerable buzz, director Lynn Shelton has become the toast of American indie film. Humpday follows two straight male friends from college who dare each other into ma Read more

It turns out The Princess Diaries may not be such horrible preparation for Shakespeare. Anne Hathaway, starring in the Shakespeare in the Park’s rendition of Twelfth Night (Anne Hathaway was also the name of Shakespeare’s wife, for those interested in cosmic coincidences), was the show’s biggest draw—and greatest potential liability, but she gives an impressive performance as Viola, a shipwrecked aristocrat posing as a male servant. Read more

AMANDA PALMER WAS fresh off a sold-out show for 700 at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea. And author Neil Gaiman, his best-selling novella Coraline having been adapted into a feature film, could have sold just as many tickets on his own. Read more Read it in print

Under Our Skin, the Lyme disease documentary, is a tendentious film primarily interesting to the Lyme community, but its poignancy gives the film a somewhat wider appeal. Read more