News

Silver opponent admits false endorsement claim
By Josh Rogers
Paul Newell, who is challenging Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, admitted to falsely claiming editorial endorsements from Downtown Express and The Villager.

Richie the Mayor's still there, but Spring Street has changed

The view from a mango tree
By RANIA RICHARDSON
Director Chris Smith has the Sundance Film Festival to thank. Every one of his films made a debut there, including “The Pool,” which garnered a special jury award last year.

Koch on Film
By Ed Koch
“Transsiberian” (+) and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (+)

Truffaut’s anarchic sleeper
By JERRY TALLMER
  In “Breathless” (“A bout de soufflé”), made by 30-year-old Jean-Luc Godard in 1960, there is a fleeting moment when Jean-Paul Belmondo, as a magnetic Parisian nogoodnik named Michel Poccard, stands in front of a poster of Humphrey Bogart and worshipfully murmurs: “Buggee,” his approximation of Bogey.

Under the cover lovers
What topped New Yorkers’ summer reading lists?

The aroma of rising Dough
By SARAH NORRIS
One of the most surprising and touching memoirs I read last year, Mort Zachter’s Dough tells the story of how, at age 36, after taking out a second mortgage to support his family, Zachter discovered a family secret. His uncles, owners of a day-old bread store in the Lower East Side, lived in a decrepit housing project but had secretly managed to make millions of dollars.
Economic woes alight on makeshift stages
By JERRY TALLMER
Crystal Field, the prime mover of Theater for the New City, has been doing summertime street theater in these parts since God knows when – 1976, actually – and now God has come down from above (or wherever) to take part Himself in her bubbling, bouncing 2008 edition.

Transatlantic chase for money and love
By Michael Rymer
Sana Krasikov’s stories may never have a following on Wall Street, but they should. One character in her debut short-story collection, “One More Year” is a former Morgan Stanley quantitative analyst who returns to his native Moscow with the dream of earning millions in Russia’s fledgling mortgage industry; he plans to “pool and repackage cheap loans for investors in one massive turbine of debt and capital.”

Society on stage
By JERRY TALLMER
Joseph Goebbels, who once or more than once declared: “Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver,” would have gone for his gat at least twice if he’d heard super prolific dramatist A.R. Gurney, now 78 years old, talk about two plays he’d written some 20 years apart.