There’s a historical romance I’m looking for. I can only remember some parts of it. I read it in the early ’90s.
It starts out where this girl is with her father in this field (United …

Never have I been so delighted to break a review screener in half as instructed. Les Miserables is everything I mean when I say I hate musicals: loud, obvious, sincere, leaden, fucking goddamn endless. Every …

Even with searching through the Vine and TN, I’m at a loss over this: my sister’s cat keeps defecating (and possibly peeing) on a corner of the dining room rug. Now that a small table …

Angels, prepare to receive among you my little friend. Please make him welcome with people food, especially Kix, because he likes to chase them, and lettuce, because I still don’t know why, but I know …

(or, “Hitchcock Completism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be”)
Frenzy is adequate. It’s not great; it’s not quite good, even. Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film is miles better than the stillbirth that preceded it in his …

I’m hoping you can help me track down a book I loved as a kid so I can give it to my nieces. It was a collection of fairy tales (predominantly European), set up so …

Or, “Time to hack this pile of Christmas books down to a manageable size.” It’s a fiction/true crime/pop culture fest…with some overlaps there (Bourdain is the first and last things; Spungen is the last two …

On The Blotter, I talked about the ambiguity of Zodiac‘s ending with Matt Zoller Seitz and Mike D’Angelo, and reviewed an excellent Jack the Ripper book. (Coming soon: a “compleat Betty Broderick” line-up from me and …

How do you push yourself into having sex if your body/gut instinct doesn’t necessarily want to? I know from reading previous columns that you’re normally a fan of “getting it over with” with a good-enough …

I wonder what I missed; I didn’t have a strong reaction to Zero Dark Thirty either way. I didn’t think the depiction of torture was fetishistic, or cynical, or too much or too little (I …