American cartoonist Nina Paley has one of the hottest indie movies around, Sita Sings the Blues (rating: 86), her animated retelling of the classic Hindi story called the Ramayana, set to the jazz songs of 1920's torch singer Annette Hanshaw. Released for free on the internet in 2008,...

Whenever someone other than Disney wanted to make a Disney-like animated movie, they usually came to Don Bluth. After a long career at Disney, beginning with work on Sleeping Beauty (rating: 90) in 1959, in the late '70s, he made a series of movies with all the Disney design principles,...

Popular nonfiction is a tricky beast. It's one thing for someone to write a memoir, or a long-form investigation that the journalist-author has personally researched and reported. But it's hard to boil down complex science into readable prose for laypeople that omits the jargon, math, and much of the...

John Carpenter just might be the best filmmaker of the 1980s. With 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 (rating: 85), and 1978's Halloween, Carpenter began an astonishingly productive decade, establishing himself as perhaps the best thriller director and best horror director in Hollywood. The list of hits over the next 10...

Cartoonist Nina Paley has a distinctive style in her strips, whether she's drawing couples or cats: round, expressive faces with easy, honest smiles and occasionally painful comeuppances. Paley has a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of sarcasm or snark. She spent six years making Sita...

As movie premises go, it's hard to top a post-apocalyptic action movie. Every scene and setpiece is a perfect empty canvas for a lunatic art department to create a frightening, barely recognizable vision of our world, to tell a story with burnt-out rubble of how humanity destroyed itself, as we...

I criticized the Korean monster flick The Host as a movie that understood its genre but didn't add much of its own. The same can be said of Howard McCain's 2008 movie Outlander, which takes an unbeatable premise -- Beowulf with intersteller alien monsters playing the part of...

Compared to the frequent horrors of the past decade, the comparatively tranquil 1990s are increasingly an object of nostalgia for Generations X and Y, the subject of fluff TV and movies like "I Love the '90s!" and "The Wackness." It was born in victory and ended in absurdity --...

Like James Cameron, Peter Jackson has reached the point in his career where he can make just about whatever he pleases. Coming off of King Kong (rating: 85) and the failed negotiations for him to direct The Hobbit, this project seemed like a strange sideways turn: a bestselling book about...

As a geneticist and a Jew, David Goldstein is, as he writes, well-positioned to study the genetic history of his people. But his book, Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, is a much more modest undertaking, a slim volume of six chapters and 119 pages. He summarizes research...

Michael Cera is as Michael Cera does. He's got to be one of the youngest actors to become so well-known for playing exactly one character as to be typecast to play himself. In the past six years, he's gone from obscurity to a household name to backlash. In "Arrested Development,"...

So the vampire thing is still going strong, for better and for worse. Along with the Twilight movies, recent years have seen such diverse fare as Sweden's Let the Right One In (rating: 46), Will Smith's I Am Legend (rating: 70), and of course the HBO show True Blood. It's...

As revolutionary as Monty Python was, they never could figure out how to finish a sketch properly. Their best sketches and their worst sketches, and their best and worst movies, shared this common thread. Whether it was a movie or film, the ending was invariably surreal and either unrelated to...

Robert Satloff's book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands tells an important story, that of the effect of the Holocaust on Jews in Arab lands, but it is, as he admits in the introduction: "Not the comprehensive account... It is part history, part...

I love dark beers. But it goes without saying that they're not all created equal. I recently called Southern Tier's Iniquity Black "the blackest beer I know," not just in terms of color but also in purity of emotion. And I stand by that, even though tonight I...

The sweeter, darker and heavier a food or drink, the likelier it is to be described as sinful. With dessert, the terminology of transgression is so overused that it's become nearly synonomous with sugar. With beer, the same often applies to high-alcohol dark beers, like Weyerbacher's magnificent imperial stouts...

Guy Ritchie has been on a nearly decade-long losing streak, with three flops in three tries after 2001's Snatch. But he managed to convince Joel Silver to give him $90 million to make a blockbuster all the same. It's also his first theatrical film for which he didn't write the...

John Heidenry's "The Gashouse Gang" is a nice homage to a team and era, but it's caught between genres. Heidenry, a St. Louis native and longtime Cardinals fan, clearly has a personal connection to the 1934 championship team, but he removes himself from the narrative. On the other hand, he's...

With all of the notoriety of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (ratings: 80, 58, and 62), it's easy to forget some of the other pop culture buccaneers who kept the lights of booty and plunder alive during the modern era. Frankly, few did it better than Guybrush Threepwood, protagonist...

Lee Gutkind's 2007 book Almost Human: Making Robots Think offers an optimistic view of the world of robotics: no, robots will not revolt against their human masters any time soon, mostly because nothing in the field of robotics ever seems to work the way it's supposed to, if at all,...