Multiple locations
July 16 – August 10
Lunch $24.07, dinner $35
www.nycgo.com/restaurantweek
Been wanting to try that hot, much-buzzed-about restaurant but the price is just a little bit out of hand? Now’s your chance, especially with so many New Yorkers off to the Hamptons and other beach areas, as hundreds of eateries are participating in the twenty-first annual Summer Restaurant Week, which is actually creeping toward Summer Restaurant Month. Running July 16 – August 10, the seasonal promotion offers new foodies and longtime gourmands the opportunity to enjoy $24.07 lunches and $35 dinners at old and new favorites. Advance reservations are strongly suggested for the more popular hot spots, which include the ‘21’ Club, Aureole, B. Smith’s, Barbetta, Beacon, the various Boulud restaurants, Capsouto Frères, Circo, Devi, Esca, and Gotham Bar & Grill, and that’s just at the beginning of the alphabet. Many of the places have their special Restaurant Week menus posted online so you’ll know exactly what’s on tap. But you better book fast.
Two years ago, Japanese auteur Toshiaki Toyoda presented 
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films is an unforgettable voyeuristic thriller starring James Stewart as temporarily wheelchair-bound photojournalist L. B. Jeffries and Grace Kelly as his society-girl friend (and extremely well dressed) Lisa Carol Fremont. Bored out of his mind, Jeffries grabs a pair of binoculars and starts spying on the apartments across the courtyard from him, each one its own television show, including a musical comedy, a lonely romance, an exercise program, and, most ominously, perhaps a murder mystery. Ever the reporter, Jeffries decides to go after the possible killer, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), and he’ll risk his life — and Lisa’s — to find out the truth. Sensational from start to finish, Rear Window works on so many levels, you’ll discover something new every time you watch it. Rear Window is screening July 13-18 at BAM Rose Cinemas, kicking off BAMcinématek’s “Grace Kelly: The Cool Blonde” series, honoring the career of the gorgeous, talented actress who made eleven films between 1951 and 1956 before being swept off her feet by Prince Rainier, starting a family, and building an international reputation that has continued even after she died in a car accident in 1982 at the age of fifty-two. The series also includes such other Kelly classics as High Society, High Noon, To Catch a Thief, and The Country Girl as well as her lesser-known debut, Fourteen Hours.
“What difference does it make — black, white, yellow? They are just kids,” says Olga Nenya in the intriguing documentary Family Portrait in Black and White. Evoking the classic nursery rhyme about an old woman who lives in a shoe, Nenya runs a foster home in the Ukraine suburb of Sumy, where she takes care of as many as twenty-seven children (including four of her own), most of whom are mixed-race boys and girls abandoned by their parents, primarily local women and African men who were studying in Eastern Europe. Because of their heritage, the children are despised by neighbors, the growing, violent neo-Nazi movement, and the government, which gives Nenya very little money but then sends inspectors who decry the living conditions in her house. Canadian filmmaker Julia Ivanova, who wrote, directed, and edited the eighty-five-minute documentary in addition to serving as cinematographer, follows the kids as they do their daily chores, go to school, spend the summer with families in Italy, and look forward to the day when they are old enough to go out on their own, either to be legally adopted or to attend university. For as much as most of them love and respect Nenya, she can be a tough, dominating taskmaster with old-fashioned values who selfishly holds on to her flock even when better opportunities are out there for some of her children. A product of Stalinism, Nenya can be dictatorial, yet she clearly loves and cares deeply about her children; as Ivanova focuses in on Kiril, Roman, Anya, and Andrey, each of whom has serious issues about the way they are being raised, the individual relationships become more and more tense. A multiple-award-winning international festival favorite, Family Portrait in Black and White is a compelling look at racism, value systems, and just what family means in today’s ever-changing society.