Gramercy

Long before Americans were lining up for double lattes and no-whip cappuccinos, there was tea -- and teatime. And although New York, home of the double-espresso high, may strike one as an unlikely place for a relaxing afternoon tea, few places appreciate...

GETTING THERE: From LAX, nonstop service to Tokyo is available on Japan Airlines, Northwest, Korean, Singapore and ANA, and connecting service (change of planes) is available on United, American, Air Canada, Continental, EVA, China Airlines, Cathay...

Listening to Billie Holiday, one of the most expressive, vulnerable and visceral vocalists of the 20th century, is much like falling in love. You just can't help yourself. Despite a self-destructive heroin addiction that led to her early death at age...

Friday March 6, 1998      The Coen brothers are not twins but they might as well be. Like many close siblings, writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan share a private cinematic language. The films they make together are self-contained, almost...

Out of a swampy thicket, near the blue waters of Long Island Sound, 200 old men, women and children stepped into the bright sunshine and entered a new world. Hundreds of edgy soldiers, mustered from villages and farms across Connecticut, had finally...

Friday June 12, 1998      When World War II broke out in 1939, Britain revved up its Women's Land Army, founded in 1917 during World War I to recruit young women to take over the plows when farmers went off to the battlefields. Over the years, 100,000...

Friday August 21, 1998      The milk of human kindness does not flow through Neil LaBute's films. Taking the baleful futility of personal relationships as a theme, his is rather a cinema of humiliation, embarrassment and misery, the celluloid...

Friday May 29, 1998      Writer-director Whit Stillman makes wonderfully clever and confident films about insecure young people who are smarter than they are wise. Ferociously verbal types who chat knowledgeably about the propaganda value of language but...

Friday November 6, 1998      Period movies inevitably reflect more about the period in which they're made than the period of their subject, and rarely has that been more evident--or more distracting--than it is with Indian director Shekhar Kapur's...

Friday October 16, 1998      An overhead shot of a Norman Rockwell small-town Main Street opens "Reach the Rock." It is a hot summer night, and no one is in sight until a young man (Alessandro Nivola) appears, breaking off a flagpole in front of a...

Wednesday December 30, 1998      It was a horse named Old Sorrel that brought Pete Calder and Big Boy Matson together in the bleak, northeastern corner of New Mexico that gives "The Hi-Lo Country" its name. So it's fitting that a shot of Pete sitting...

Friday October 1, 1999      It is entirely possible that a movie more unpleasant than "Plunkett & Macleane" will open in the roughly three months prior to the year 2000, but you wouldn't want to put money on it.      Working Title Films, the generally...