
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
To browse the stacks at the New York Public Library is to take a walk on the mild side. But as of March 15, when The Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center opened its Lou Reed Archive, that’s changed. The archive comprises over 600 hours of live recordings, demos and interviews of the…
Alison Klayman is an accomplished and decorated documentarian. Her filmography includes the award-winning “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (2012), which followed the titular Chinese activist and artist, and “Take Your Pills” (2018), an expose on Adderall addiction. But none of her ambitious and intimate films could prepare her for her latest subject. In “The Brink,” which…
With the acquisition of Lucasfilm, the multi-billion dollar handshake that forged the Marvel-Disney partnership and an incipient deal with Fox, Mickey Mouse owns almost every brand worth having. This mass cultural monopolization has its benefits. For the first time in anyone’s lifetime a film could now, without breach of current copyright law, show stormtroopers from…
Like his characters, David Mamet lacks a filter. The celebrated playwright feels the near-constant urge to opine on issues that don’t require his input. Race relations. “Brain-Dead Liberals” . Sexual abuse in Hollywood. Now Mamet is tackling the scandal du jour: A $25 million college admissions bribery plot uncovered by the FBI and revealed in…
Yesterday, during rehearsals for Theater Wit’s production of Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” a drama about parents’ bullheaded efforts to get their child into his college of choice, the news broke among the cast and creative team. A wide-ranging sting operation conducted by federal authorities led to the indictment of 50 people —- including the actresses Felicity…
In his latest nonsensical Twitter tirade, Trump lamented how complicated airplane design is getting. Apropos of nothing, the Leader of the Free World spewed the following forth onto the internet: Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time…
Edie Rubinowitz had seen it in her office hours for the last two years. “Dreamers — or undocumented DACA recipients — had a kind of horrible alienation,” Rubinowitz, the Acting Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Theatre at Northeastern Illinois University told the Forward. “They’d say ‘I shouldn’t be in…
Captain Marvel is the first female lead of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Her movie is the first female-fronted film to break $400 million in its opening weekend. Is she also the first Zionist superhero of the MCU? There’s no real way to make this argument without spoiling one of the major reveals of “Captain…
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