The Village Voice and NYT reviews of the New Directors/New Films definitely entice me to see the Greek film Attenberg.
Some NYT video blog interviews.
Sounds like another very weird hit as was the Oscar nominated Dogtooth from last year's fest. Also recommended from last year and just out on DVD is Mia Hansen-Love’s The Father of My Children.

And a couple of gallery shows I forgot to mention:
The New Museum has a long overdue retrospective of Lynda Benglis (thru June 19) though Susan Inglett got there first a year ago. Now showing at Susan's gallery is Marcia Kure's Dressed Up - conceived while conducting research at the Smithsonian Archives as a Smithsonian Artist-Fellow in 2008: "explores symbolic codes of high fashion as imagined by hip-hop avatars and designers of historical haute couture."
Also catching my eye was Days of Hope and Bandages from emerging artist Karen Schiff - Flanagan Gallery (Community College of Rhode Island, Lincoln, Rhode Island). The show's closed but Schiff's fascination with intricate patternation certainly makes her someone to watch - though her work never comes across accurately nor strongly in reproduction. From her press release: "The show is a series of collage-paintings -- and an installation made of the gallery's pedestals -- all covered in pieces of hospital gowns. I began using these curiously textured gowns as a medium in 2009, when I started visiting my parents in hospitals. (They're both doing great now!)

A saving cinematic grace (or is that coup de) for many Manhattan mums this Easter will be Hop from the Despicable Me team - opening world-wide this week. I could happily sit through this film again but I'm guessing the age attention span cut off is around 10 or 11 years old - unless your teenagers have a sense about the irony of their own existence. Not a quality I've ever found very abundant in our young movers/shakers and couch vegetables. There's a nice dinner table conversation line given to the O'Hare family's adopted 10 year-old daughter Alex (Tiffany Espensen): "You only adopted me because Fred was such a disappointment."

Now Fred (James Marsden) is 30 going on a couch potato of 17. His 20 something sister Sam (Kaley Cuoco) coerces him into a job interview lured by a housitting gig at her boss' mansion. Meanwhile in the animation 'Dr. No' Easter egg manufacturing 'Metropolis' beneath the stone statues of Easter Island, the Easter Bunny's (Hugh Laurie) son E.B. (Russell Brand) is shirking his heir-egg apparant-cy and dreams of becoming a drummer.

E.B. does a runner down the rabbit hole winding up outside the Hollywood Playboy mansion hoping for recognition of his 'bunny' status. Instead, he ends up faux convalescing in Fred's house-sit mansion after being run over by his car. The film is directed by Tim Hill of Alvin and the Chipmunks notoriety and there's a large amount of that cloying chirpy human meets CGI character bonhomie can't wait for the bon voyage about everything.
But Hop is all so delightfully silly and the voice animation so droll one just slumps, high on the saccharine ride.

Geeks and wicked 're-mixers' would no doubt prefer Russell Brand's own face beneath the rabbit ears instead of E.B.'s bunny features - a la the final scene in The Fly. And even the brainiest kiddie would be stumped finding any irony (let alone of a religious bent or even the tremor of a rabbit double entendre in the film's 'Have a Happy Easter' message. But hey, if we want our consciousness pricked and our existence on earth affirmed there's always MoMA and New Directors/New Films. Whereas where else but Hop could you coagulate The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Hasselhoff, an Easter Bunny and the fat foreman chick with a shoulder chip Carlos (Hank Azaria)? Oh wait: isn't there a city called New York just like that;)
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