In Theaters:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince


At what point did the Harry Potter film franchise become a race against repetition? In J.K. Rowling’s series of popcorn-munching fantasy-lite page-turners, the cycle of familiar events is something that helps power them along. Without the susurrus of new classes, new teachers, school holidays, and the rising and falling of friendships and crushes humming in the foreground, the books would have been lost beneath a crashing din of Rowling’s hyperactive plotting. As fantastical fictionalizing of the dreary retread of school years that march one towards adulthood, the books’ magic was rarely about exploration or discovery, but rather about circling the wagons of home and hearth against the darkness outside. Repetition, in the correct dosage, helped reinforce the sense of normalcy and protection that progressively shriveled from book to darker-hued book...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opened everywhere in the universe and beyond at midnight. By now, everyone in America has apparently already seen it. If for some reason you haven't, you can read the rest of this review at Short Ends & Leader.

In Theaters:
The Way We Get By


With Hollywood dramas doing their best to ignore the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the stream of non-fiction films having dried up to a trickle, films like Aron Gaudet's wrenching The Way We Get By are even more important than they otherwise would be. This isn't to say that Gaudet's documentary has even a hint of an eat-your-broccoli lecture to it—that couldn't be further from the truth. But while watching the film it's hard to escape the sense that one is witnessing a dispatch from a lonely outpost of the forgotten wars...

The Way We Get By opens this week in pretty limited release, but should make its way to DVD soon. It's one of the best documentaries of 2009 so far, and highly deserves being sought out. Read the full review at Film Journal International.

In Books:
Near Death in the Desert

Maybe this sort of thing is just not supposed to be interesting unless somebody’s life is at stake. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why Cecil Kuhne’s riveting new anthology of travel writing, Near Death in the Desert: True Stories of Disaster and Survival, is pitched so directly (at least in terms of title) at the extreme-travel crowd. In fact, this latest entry in Kuhne’s Near Death series—earlier installments were themed around the Arctic, Mountains, and High Seas—doesn’t really have that much to do with disaster, survival, or even courting death, really. What this skillfully curated collection does instead is present a multitude of takes on an even more basic (and frequently more fascinating) struggle: the yawning abyss of cultures...

Near Death in the Desert is in finer bookstores now. Grab a copy before you head off into the wild. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Comics:
Asterios Polyp

A crook-eyed and foppish jerks of jerks, Asterios Polyp is the guy at the university parties whom everybody hates but still self-consciously sidles near to just so they can hear what he’s saying—even if it’ll make them sick the rest of the night. Daredevil and Batman: Year One artist David Mazzucchelli does the amazing in this, his first graphic novel, in not only basing an entire work around such an unctuous creation but actually making him something of a real human being whom one can envision caring about. The result is one of the smartest and most rewarding graphic novels of the year to date...

David Mazzucchelli's grand graphic novel Asterios Polyp should be hitting stores any day now. Check it out. Read the full review at Re:Print.

In Theaters:
Afghan Star


It would have been easy for U.K. journalist and TV producer Havana Marking to turn her feature documentary debut Afghan Star into a weepy, patronizing view of a Third World nation's people rising above their travails by means of song. But Marking's surprisingly astringent film resists such temptations even while following four heartbreakingly brave finalists in the hugely popular "American Idol"-like talent show the film takes its name from, a melodramatic arc if there ever was one...

Afghan Star is playing now in limited release and should be making its way onto DVD in a few months. The full review was published in The Hollywood Reporter.

In Movies:
2009 Silverdocs Documentary Festival


Running from 15 to 22 June, in the shadow of co-sponsor Discovery Channel’s headquarters (the American Film Institute is the other co-sponsor), the 2009 Silverdocs Documentary Festival brought over 120 non-fiction films to Silver Spring, Maryland, just a few metro stops away from downtown D.C. The result was a rewarding and refreshing event, offering classic and independent documentaries and previewing several that will crop up over the next year or two on PBS, HBO, various Discovery outlets, and the occasional brave art-house theater screen...

Full feature coverage of Silverdocs (with images, trailers, and so much more) is up at PopMatters.

In Books:
Let the Great World Spin

The method of Colum McCann’s exciting, maddening new novel Let the Great World Spin is cinematic, like a great deal of modern fiction. The setting is New York, circa 1974, right in the midst of its slide into near-complete dysfunction. The language has a sharp-focus clarity and tendency toward the edit-montage, blocking scenes and downloading them into neatly snapped-off bits.

Here is the book’s first of several narrators, Dublin-born Ciaran, laying out the landscape as he’s being driven through the South Bronx by his younger brother Corrigan, who’s come to the city on the latest stage of his saint-like progression toward self-abnegation and sacrifice...

Let the Great World Spin is available for sale at finer book outlets across the land. You can read the full review at PopMatters.