Dante A. Ciampaglia

Nostalgia slop, from AI-generated trash to IP-leveraging franchise flicks, is belched out so regularly our culture practically runs on the stuff. From the outside, Obex, Albert Birney’s lo-fi, black-and-white ‘80s-set 90-minute valentine to pre-Internet culture, might be mistaken for more of the same, albeit in an indie vein, especially with a press pitch that insists the

Kelly Reichardt might be one of our era’s most subversive filmmakers. In this attention-addled age, cinema has gone increasingly loud, increasingly bombastic, increasingly frenetic. And not just in mediocre blockbuster franchise flicks, like Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning or Tron: Ares, where you expect a certain kind of screaming antsyness; it’s found in more ambitious, highbrow films,

This is the third New York Film Festival I’ve attended as a critic, and increasingly I’ve found myself foregoing the marquee titles — this year represented by the likes of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt and Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (and, for some reason, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere) — for the more

Film festivals love to profess their indie bona fides, regardless of how institutional (Tribeca) or industrial (Sundance) they’ve become. (The only exception: Cannes, which absolutely, unapologetically trumpets its status as a glitzy party for superstars and the uber-wealthy.) But a festival that truly embraces the DIY spirit is the New York City Independent Film Festival.

Later this month, Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning, the eighth entry in the series, hits theaters, and it’s teasing in every way that it will be the last big screen adventure for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his venerable team of Impossible Missions Force agents, among them Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg). Or, at

When the Cornelia Street Café announced its closure in 2018 after more than 41 years of operation — due to a crushing rent increase — the loss was acutely felt by the neighborhood and the community of artists who called the café basement stage home. For co-founder and owner Robin Hirsch, though, losing the place

“Baseball isn’t statistics,” legendary New York sports columnist Jimmy Cannon once wrote. “Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second.” I wonder if Tim Bassett, second baseman for Adler’s Paints, had that in mind when he quipped, decades later, “Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?” It’s entirely possible.