Talking and texting is strictly verboten in New York City’s indie theaters, as evidenced by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Janeane Garofalo’s no-nonsense PSAs for Alamo Drafthouse. But on Saturday evening, as Spectacle Theater presented highlights from the first season of cult Canadian tv show Cowboy Who?, the commentary was flying fast and furious. More →

Car horns, jackhammers, and bar-hoppers carousing in the night. Many of the city’s familiar sounds have quieted as New Yorkers stay home amidst the coronavirus outbreak, and so have our complaints about them.  More →

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises to more than 47,439 in New York City, people are taking social distancing more seriously. City data shows that in the past three days in Manhattan, a total of 289 complaints regarding social distancing violations were made via 311, with police responding to all of the calls and taking action in one third of the cases. More →

Last week, as the film industry faced a grim new reality of shuttered theaters and a shift to online streaming, some small solace arrived in the form of a New York Times article. Drive-in theaters, the headline read, were experiencing an “unexpected revival” amid the coronavirus epidemic. More →

Last week, Starbucks began offering free coffee to frontline workers, which was an amazing idea — an amazing idea that Leigh Adel-Arnold had already put into action. “It’s fantastic that they’re doing that,” says Leigh, who definitely isn’t competing against Starbucks. “Especially because now there are coffee places on every corner that are closed.” More →

Paola Nagovitch, a journalism student at New York University, received an email on March 9 from the school’s administration about coronavirus-related measures NYU planned to take. The email asked students to take their laptops, books and notebooks with them during spring break. She left New York to her hometown in Puerto Rico that same week thinking she would be able to return at some point to her student residence. However, on March 16 she received another email from the school asking students to be out of their residences “by no later than March 22, and preferably within 48 hours.” That same week Puerto Rico’s governor announced a nationwide lockdown and curfew, discarding any possibility Nagovitch had of returning to New York. More →

“You can really get into the weeds,” said Alexa Karolinski, the co-creator and co-writer of Netflix’s new mini-series Unorthodox. “Like, should she wear something on her head during her wedding? Should he be wearing white socks? Should the shirt be fully buttoned?” Being hyper-specific in dress and in ritual was vital for capturing a tradition-rich community on the margins, and Unorthodox has positioned itself as one of the most ambitiously detailed renderings of the Williamsburg Satmar Hasidic community ever on screen.  More →

As soon as New York confirmed its first case of coronavirus infection, Alice Qin, a sophomore at Barnard College, started considering flying back to China. When Columbia and Barnard moved all of its classes online, Qin booked a direct flight scheduled to depart on March 24. More →

As I strolled over to IFC Film Center earlier this month to watch a screening of dystopian thriller Bacurau, I wondered if anyone would even be there. Or would the theater be as sparsely populated as the Brazilian desert village where the John-Carpenter-esque nouveau western is set? More →