Apartment Choice

America on the brink of a second civil war is a timely concept that only got timelier last November, and gritty action-thriller "Bushwick" exploits that frightening "what if" scenario from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. Even if the low-budget execution is uneven at times, there's enough snap to the filmmaking, and enough raw power in the premise, to make for solid B- movie excitement . A surprisingly potent performance from professional wrestler (and "Guardians of the Galaxy" co-star) Dave Bautista should add to the appeal for a young male audience . While Bautista will surely be central to any marketing campaign, the focus of the movie is grad student Lucy (Brittany Snow), who becomes our avatar into a disconcerting alternate universe in which the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick is under military invasion. After witnessing her boyfriend's brutal death just outside an abandoned subway station , Lucy makes her way through streets littered w...

Some say the East Village is dead, Manhattan has been murdered, and New York City has lost its soul. Some say that if you stand in the right place and squint hard enough, it can almost seem like the old city is still alive. Jeremiah Moss likes to think of the city as a crime scene, which he is investigating for clues, searching for the cause of death. In his new book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul , Moss sets out to chronicle what, exactly, has gone wrong with New York, where greed, hypergentrification, and government policies have conspired to kill off the unique character of dozens of neighborhoods. “I want it to be a body of evidence—this happened, this happened, this happened. When you lay it all out like that, it’s undeniable,” says Moss during a recent walk around the East Village. “It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the ...