When it was released in 1995, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery was hailed as a technical marvel. It was the sequel to 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, but while that game was one of Sierra's last VGA adventure games for DOS, The Beast Within was...

1991's Castle of Dr. Brain is one of my favorite video games of all time. From the very first screen, the game wears its style on its sleeve, as lightning strikes a 256-color castle shaped like a mad scientist's head, playing a MIDI version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue...

Bong Joon-ho's recent monster movie The Host was greeted with plaudits normally reserved for a master of the French New Wave, with an average Metacritic score of 85. It had a budget of $11,000,000, quite high for a non-American film, and special effects from Weta Digital, the New Zealand...

I've already written that I think P.M. Dawn is one of the great, underappreciated groups of the 1990's. They're nearly 20 years removed from their only #1 hit, "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss," which sampled "True" by Spandau Ballet and rode in from left field with new age...

Atul Gawande is a doctor who writes for the New Yorker. Or perhaps, at this point in his career, he's a journalist who also happens to be a doctor. He joins an illustrious history of physicians in print, from Maimonides to Anton Chekhov, and he writes in very clear,...

Jennet Conant's recent book The Irregulars is the perfect Washington summer read: it's a breezy society tale about British spying on America before and during World War II, which Franklin Roosevelt tacitly approved, by a ragtag group of future literary stars, including Ian Fleming and his friend Roald Dahl.

Dahl...

I recently read Ariel Sabar's memoir My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which was published last year. It begins with a story about going to Israel to find a man who knew his father's family, and being rudely confronted at the door:...

Christy Marx was one of their developers, and she made two terrific games for them, Conquests of Camelot (rating: 75) and Conquests of the Longbow (rating: 90). Jane Jensen was another, and she cowrote King's Quest 6 (rating: 93) and the Gabriel Knight series. The first in the...

Jennifer 8. Lee's recent book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a bit like her subject matter: slightly enjoyable, but mostly bland, trite, and unworthy of the meal it evokes. The book is presented as an inquiry into the identity of Chinese food in America, but she unnecessarily mixes uninteresting passages...

Spike Jonze had a pretty impeccable record, from directing Christopher Walken's triumphal dance in the video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," to producing MTV's transcendently stupid pain-porn Jackass, to his magnificent collaborations with Charlie Kaufman on Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Nothing about that remotely suggests that he...

You probably didn't see Ong-Bak 2, the prequel to spectacular 2003 film that introduced American audiences to muay thai, the Thai national martial art. Filmed in an almost distractingly slick style, with slow-motion replays of its hero's most eye-popping stunts, it made a star of Tony Jaa and a minor...

Grant Heslov's movie The Men Who Stare At Goats is a good premise stuck in a mess of a movie. Based on a stranger-than-fiction book about paranormal research within the U.S. military, it should be a black comedy about the lengths to which our army will go to kill people....

I'm a fan of Nathan Rabin -- really, of all the critics at The Onion AV Club. There's no source I trust more, not because I always agree but because I know exactly where they stand. In 500 words of praise or pan, I can get an exact, nearly...

Christy Marx isn't a household name, but she's a writer who's had success in nearly every medium. Among her more popular works were the 1980s television show Jem & the Holograms and two point-and-click adventure games for Sierra On-Line in the early 1990s, but a glance at her IMDB and...

Judd Apatow's new movie, Funny People, is more ambitious and less successful than his previous films, the easy-to-digest and massively popular romantic comedies The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Funny People is a sort of message movie, a take on the classic story about a dying man trying...

His strong falsetto and iconic dancing made Michael Jackson the best-selling singer of all time, the self-described "King of Pop" who bought the Beatles catalogue and married Elvis Presley's daughter. But he spent his last years in arrears, reclusivity, court cases, and tabloid headlines. He died at the age of...

Seth Gordon is a young documentarian, director of King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a very entertaining documentary about Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, two men in pursuit of the all-time record for the original "Donkey Kong" arcarde game. It grossed less than $1 million in theaters, but achieved...

Paul Masvidal has been playing metal for a long time. Coming out of the Florida metal community, he played with the seminal death metal band Death, and he and his childhood friend Sean Reinert founded the band Cynic way back in the late 1980s. After one landmark album, 1994's Focus,...

The band Psychostick is somewhat devoted to metal, and seriously devoted to food. Their latest album, Sandwich, released on May 5, has about as many food songs than Weird Al Yankovic's Food Album and Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food combined. As the band explains on "Too Many...

For nearly three years, I was a weekly customer of the Hunan Palace Chinese buffet one block from where I work. Week in, week out, I would sit in a booth with a book, they would bring me a Diet Coke and a fork, and I would have my...