The New Republic

IF THERE IS A HEAVEN FOR COMIC iconoclasts, Laurence Sterne is leaning out of it, smiling. The film made of his novel Tristram Shandy—more properly, the film instigated by his novel—has caused a stir because it juggles cinematic conventions just as he gamboled with the conventions of the novel.   READ MORE >>

There are a lot of things it would be easy to dislike about Bubble, the latest film by director Steven Soderbergh. The characters are dull, ordinary people who don't do or say anything of consequence until well into the movie. The settings are cramped and unlovely; the digital-video cinematography (by Soderbergh himself under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews), harsh and flat. The movie's rhythms are so ungainly that it frequently seems rhythmless. READ MORE >>

You hear a lot of complaining, and rightly so, about Hollywood's tendency to churn out safe, unimaginative pabulum--the remakes, the sequels, the blow-everything-up movies. Less remarked upon is the opposite problem: The studios' inability (or unwillingness) to make B+ movies, competent, mid-sized genre films that are formulaic in the good sense. There was a time when Hollywood excelled at producing such solid but unexceptional fare--Westerns are the classic example--but no longer. READ MORE >>

Holy Terror By Terry Eagleton (Oxford University Press, 148 pp., $22) Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism By Robert A. Pape (University of Chicago Press, 335 pp., $25.95) READ MORE >>

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success By Rodney Stark (Random House, 304 pp., $25.95) "Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect," concludes Rodney Stark in his new book, "most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls." I had always known that Jesus Christ was a pretty important person, but I had not quite realized that were it not for him, there would be no one to buy Rodney Stark's books. READ MORE >>

The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 By John Yoo(University of Chicago Press, 366 pp., $29) READ MORE >>

To understand the phenomenal popularity of the Food Nework's "Iron Chef," you have to understand the phenomenal popularity of "sous vide." Sous vide, which is French for "under vacuum" or "in a vacuum," is a culinary technique in which food is cooked in hermetically sealed clear-plastic bags at very low temperatures that allow a chef to keep his eye on precise details of the cooking process. READ MORE >>

Grizzly Man, the most extraordinary documentary of 2005 (yes, better than the penguins), tells the story of a gifted man caught in the grip of a reckless certainty who ventures into a moral wilderness and almost loses sight of his humanity. I refer, of course, to the film's director, Werner Herzog. READ MORE >>

Serenity, writer/director Joss Whedon's exuberant space opera, opens with one nod to the power of love and closes with another, the first concerning a brother's affection for his sister and the second, a captain's for his spaceship. (Tellingly, the latter is, if anything, more touching.) The two scenes form an apt pair of bookends because, to the extent this can ever be said of a major Hollywood release, Serenity is a product of love--that of fans of "Firefly," the cancelled TV series from which the film was spun off, of the cast, and most of all of Whedon himself. READ MORE >>

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard Paul McCartney READ MORE >>