Reader’s Corner: ‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State’

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I reviewed the new Jill Lepore book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State for PopMatters:

As this review is written, in what may be remembered as the late pre-Singularity era, the robots are on the march. This is not to say that the automata populating factory floors boil with revolutionary ardor. They are not advancing in great clanking sinister ranks like a battle scene from some space opera or ignored cautionary tale, their hard steel faces implacable and identical. The robots escaping the bounds of human control are instead packets of AI code slipstreaming invisibly through the Byzantine synapses of the global hive electronic mind. Abuzz with eager intent, they are learning, adapting, and planning, but for what exactly is anybody’s guess, including the people who created them…

Reader’s Corner: A History of American Comics

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All this year, Rain Taxi Review of Books has been running a series of articles on the last 250 years of American literature. For their fall 2026 issue, I contributed a (very incomplete) history of the U.S. comic book industry:

When the United States was founded, bound books with text (and occasionally some illustrations) were already a cornerstone of Western civilization. But the comics trade—based largely on brief, serialized, staple-bound booklets targeting youthful audiences with fully illustrated adventure or comedy stories—was largely an American invention. The thin profit margins and constant need for new material created a business marked by frantic pacing, soap-operatic storylines, and the elusive quest to set trends. As the medium developed artistically, it offered instances of rote uniformity and daring experimentation in equal measure, another way comics held the mirror up to the young country’s social and political life—especially in the tumultuous twentieth century…

You can get the print issue here.

Reader’s Corner: ‘Partita’ by Barbara Kingsolver

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I reviewed the new Barbara Kingsolver novel Partita for PopMatters:

Every time an author sets out to write a book, they are in some ways wishing disaster on themselves. A thousand obstacles await, from a tardy Muse failing to spark inspiration to the many interruptions of the real world to the often dissatisfied or disinterested reading public. Then there are those writers who, after somehow coming out the other side of that vale of tears, not only whole but triumphant, have decided: Yes, I’ll do that again; willingly. This is the challenge that awaits Barbara Kingsolver with her new novel, Partita…

Reader’s Corner: Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy

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I wrote about Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy for PopMatters:

Colson Whitehead’s relationship with the crime fiction genre is complicated. Like Jonathan Lethem, another New York-centric writer who came out of less salubrious districts of literature before being accepted into the pantheon, Whitehead has long been one of America’s top-ranked practitioners of critically approved fiction (awards, good speaking gigs, New Yorker appearances). This is what makes his just-concluded “Harlem Trilogy” such a treat and surprise…

Screening Room: ‘Boorman and the Devil’

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I reviewed the new documentary Boorman and the Devil for The Playlist:

The columnist Murray Kempton had a secret for getting a great story: Always go to the loser’s locker room. That was where the real drama was. This is why stories about films that went disastrously wrong will almost always be more compelling than making-of accounts about a classic where everything came together perfectly. There is also more to learn in watching Francis Ford Coppola flail about in “Hearts of Darkness” or “Megadoc” than yet another story about the mastery of “The Godfather.” Witnessing how easy it is for an artist to crash and burn can make the great works resonate as even more rare and precious. “It’s a precarious business,” John Boorman says in David Kittredge’s “Boorman and the Devil,” quoting a producer who once told him that maybe five percent of films succeed. Kittredge’s fraught subject, the making of Boorman’s 1977 misfire “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” was not among that five percent…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘It Ends’

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I reviewed the new horror film It Ends, which opens in theaters this Friday, for Slant Magazine:

Alex Ullom’s directorial debut, It Ends, is a neatly crafted, if somewhat under-imagined, inquiry into a Twilight Zone scenario, with a dash of Buddhist philosophy thrown in for good measure. Given the vogue for elaborate lore, backstories, and endlessly forking possibilities in fantastical films, from Backrooms to the MCU, Ullom shows an admirable preference for storytelling that’s tightly focused in scope and still leaves room for the unknown…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘The Shards’

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I reviewed the new Ryan Murphy FX series adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ last novel The Shards for Slant Magazine:

Set in 1981, Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel The Shards is a metafictional, richly stylized gothic horror take on teen melodrama that takes itself just seriously enough. Things start with Bret himself, played by Igby Rigney, narrating seemingly from his present-day adulthood about a “season of horror” when he was a teenager. Some of his friends survived, he says, “but none of us made it out alive” …

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Every Christopher Nolan Film Ranked

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So what was left to do in preparation for The Odyssey? Go through Christopher Nolan’s entire filmography and assess how they all stack up. While the ranking is definitionally from “worst” to “best,” there really isn’t a bad film in the batch, so all in all a pleasant assignment.

“Every Christopher Nolan Film Ranked” was published at PopMatters today:

 Christopher Nolan’s films pack in audiences, win awards, and leave people excitedly puzzling out their twists and meaning for years. For mainstream audiences and cinephiles, his work provides a vanishingly rare opportunity to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

With the release of Nolan’s 13th, and by most metrics biggest, film, The Odyssey, it’s a good time to review his full body of work. Here are all of Nolan’s 13 features, ranked worst to best…

Screening Room: ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’

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My review of Wham! 10 Days in China ran at The Playlist:

Among the most refreshing aspects of “WHAM! 10 Days in China” is the film’s openness about the mercenary nature of the groundbreaking event it depicts. In 1985, Wham! had become massive stars in the UK, their effervescent catchiness creating an infectious bridge between New Romantic synth and bubblegum pop. But they had not achieved the end goal of every British act, namely, breaking into the U.S. market. Seeking an attention-grabbing stunt, Wham!’s management came up with a high-risk gambit: Become the first Western pop band to play in China…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Backrooms’ is Horror Cinema’s ‘Lost’

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I wrote about the new horror hit Backrooms and a certain TV show whose promise and disappointments it resembles for PopMatters:

To  begin, aside from the required warning that spoilers follow, let us stipulate that what happened in movie theaters in the early summer of 2026 was a good thing for the art and the industry. While jumped-up Disney streaming series and feature-length stuffed toy ad The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau) strained to find an audience, filmgoers and industry-watchers were instead transfixed by a pair of new horror films from 20-something directors. Curry Barker’s haunted-girlfriend screamer, Obsession, looks to be the launchpad for an inventive genre director with plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Although Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is one of the freshest bits of guerrilla weirdness to have taken over the multiplex in a long time, the film’s looseness and sprawl may suggest a relatively shallow fictional universe that undercuts its groundbreaking potential…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Tuner’

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I reviewed Tuner for Slant Magazine:

For his first narrative after a run of smart, propulsive documentaries, among them 2022’s Oscar-winning Navalny, Daniel Roher delivers a propulsive modern noir that might not be especially smart but has an appealing cleverness and lightness of touch. Written by Roher and Robert Ramsey, Tuner’s hook is in its high-concept story design, which is centered on Nikki (Leo Woodall), a New York piano tuner whose boss, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), is also his best friend, surrogate father figure, and unwitting reason for Nikki’s turn to crime…

It opens this weekend. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘In the Grey’

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I reviewed In the Grey for Slant Magazine:

The Guy Ritchie content conveyor belt continues to turn with In the Grey, another largely disposable actioner that starts off as a breezy romp and ends up an overly dense spider’s web of almost arbitrary plot choices punctuated by automatic weapons fire. The comedically dense plot isn’t a problem until Ritchie, who wrote the script, tries to tie it all together into something that makes a bit of sense. He comes close but doesn’t quite deliver, having tossed too many balls in the air to have a remote chance of catching all of them…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Sell Your Story on eBay

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For all those currently bereft of inspiration, here’s a reason to pick up your pen again. The Advanced Fiction Workshop at the University of Arizona is trying out an experiment they’re calling Significant Objects:

Writers purchase an essentially valueless object (less than $5, typically secondhand), write a story or essay or poem about it, and we will auction the object and the writing off on ebay…

Any profits go to a local cat shelter. So win win.

Writer’s Desk: Focus on the First Line

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A bored reader has lots of other things to do. Hook them right away. Do not waste your time, because if you do they will feel you are wasting theirs.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer kicks off with one of the greats:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That has nothing to do with the plot. He is just describing the sky. But the invocation of omnipresent, flickering, slightly decayed and malevolent yet mundane technology establishes everything you need to know about the story that follows.

Gibson himself said:

The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text…

It’s a challenge. You might have the whole piece done but still feel dissatisfied with the opener. Spend the time to get it right.

(h/t Joe Fassler)

TV Room: ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ is a Very Silly DVD

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My review of the new Criterion 4K edition of Monty Python’s Life of Brian ran at PopMatters:

Fittingly, Life of Brian was conceived on a pub crawl. The standard origin story, as told in one of the documentaries on Criterion’s packed special features disc, is that while they were boozing around Amsterdam during the press tour for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle had an idea for a project called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. It stirs the imagination to think of the possibilities that title conjures: a send-up of muscly epics ala Mel Gibson; a glitzy musical packed with song-and-dance numbers; or a down-and-dirty melodrama about an ambitious, slightly schizoid kid from Galilee with a dream…

Speaking of which, the Monty Python FAQ is still available at all your finer book outlets.