Ken Kalfus published his first book, 1998's Thirst, at age 44, after years as a professional writer, occasionally publishing stories in various publications, and following his journalist wife to Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Russia, among other places. Most debuts tend to be semi-autobiographical, but this is a collection of short stories,...

Jason Reitman's new movie Up in the Air is a movie that's hard to dislike, though it may be hard to adore. It's glossy and slick, with a smooth but unsatisfied George Clooney (like so many others he's played, from Michael Clayton, rating: 77, to Out of Sight, rating: 95)...

"Nobody is wasting nobody. That is a miracle. And miracles is the way things ought to be." --Cyrus, "The Warriors"

Walter Hill's 1979 film The Warriors is a cult classic, a veteran of innumerable late-night cable showings and movie nights at your older brother's friend's house. It came out in...

There's no question that Allen Barra is one of the best long-form sports journalists working today. (One I'd put near him is L. Jon Wertheim, whose Running the Table, rating: 90, and Blood in the Cage, rating: 79, are among the best books ever written about billiards and mixed martial...

"I'd say that you were the perfect combination of imperfections. I'd say that your nose was just a little too short, your mouth just a little too wide. But yours was a face that a man could see in his dreams for the whole of his life."

This fall, we've seen two very different takes on beloved children's books: Spike Jonze's polarizing take on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are ( rating: 40), and now Wes Anderson's predictably quirky version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's quite possible that the movies would have...

Joachim Neugroschel is a very busy man. Born in Vienna as the son of a Yiddish poet (and a mother forbade the use of Yiddish in the home), he's one of the premier living translators of German into English, and probably the premier living translator of Yiddish literature. Among his...

Just about everyone knows about zombie master George A. Romero, the director who effectively created the standard pop culture image of zombies. I haven't seen much of his stuff: I watched a really poor public domain version of Night of the Living Dead a couple weeks ago, and it didn't...

There's a long tradition of Western murder mysteries set in exotic Eastern countries: Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko novels (set in the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine), James Church's Inspector O novels (set in North Korea), Michael Walters's Nergui novels (set in Mongolia), and John Burdett's Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels (set...

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Grant Heslov's movie adaptation of Jon Ronson's 2004 nonfiction book The Men Who Stare at Goats, a darkly comic look at some of the U.S. Army's paranormal investigations. I saw the movie before reading the book, and was unimpressed: the filmmakers often treated...

George Lucas's genius has always been diversification: back when he was a gifted filmmaker, he was a pioneer of merchandizing, and founded what would become industry-standard effects and sound houses with Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. Lucasfilms' computer animation division later became Pixar. And then, some time...

Not many people remember the 1993 cop movie Boiling Point any more, and it's not too hard to see why. (Tagline: "He's a cop who's reached the... Boiling Point.") It's only 16 years old, but it looks like it was made in the '80s, and its two stars -- Wesley...

Last night, I told a friend of mine that I love Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, and she reacted with surprise: "So you like chick flicks?" I was taken aback, because I love it so much that I don't even think of it that way, but then I realized:...

Harry Gottlieb founded Jellyvision in 1989, and his company burst onto the cultural map with YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, a popular 1995 trivia party game. Now his company's trying to solve your problems, including health care. I asked him a few questions by email.

Jellyvision's still best known...

John Woo is a fine director with an extraordinarily uneven filmography. His success seems to have a lot to do with the quality of his leading man. He came from Hong Kong to international prominence with Chow Yun-Fat as his muse (the Better Tomorrow trilogy; Hard-Boiled, rating: 77; The...

Over the past decade, Dogfish Head has become perhaps the most prominent microbrewery on the East Coast, and almost certainly the most notorious. Their founder and brewmaster, Sam Calagione, is pretty clearly cracked. They favor sweet high-alcohol barleywines, from riffs on Belgian styles, to reconstructions of ancient recipes from...

Dr. Seuss wrote one screenplay in his long career as a writer: the cracked, magical, cult classic 1953 children's movie The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It was a flop on release, and Dr. Seuss reportedly hated it, but it's actually a wonderfully weird, funny, charming musical, and everything I...

Joel Kraemer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds is, like its protagonist, the great 12th-century rabbi and scholar, impressively erudite and maddeningly elusive. Kraemer is a medievalist with a knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Maimonides' native Judeo-Arabic, and he also...

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...