Movies & TV
Julia’s Anti-Valentine’s Movies
August 19, 2026Ah, Valentine’s Day. In elementary school, we were forced to address valentines to everyone in class...
Fiction Reviews
A Dark Matter by Peter Straub
August 18, 2026Novelist Lee Harwell is having breakfast at his favorite Chicago diner when a hostile homeless guy...
Movies
William Bibbiani’s Top Three Unconventional Romances for Valentine’s Day
August 18, 2026Or maybe you’re just like me, single on the most romantic night of the year, drowning...
Movies
Many Criterion DVDs Going Out of Print: A Lamentation
August 18, 2026Criterion, you are the Pixar of DVD distributors. Every film you release is guaranteed to be...
Movies
A CLR EXCLUSIVE Interview… with CLR Film Critic Julia Rhodes!
August 18, 2026Hello everybody, and welcome to the Fourth Wall, in which we California Literary Review film critics...
Movies
William Bibbiani interviews writer/producer/director Mick Garris!
August 17, 2026Today, as you may have noticed, is a day of many, many interviews. In addition to...
Movies
How to fake your way out of seeing this year’s Oscar nominees!
August 17, 2026No, you don’t have to watch The Blind Side. I’ve got your back. This year, for...
Movies
Welcome to The Fourth Wall, a New CLR Movie Blog
August 17, 2026We're excited about our first blog, The Fourth Wall which will provide a less formal and...
Fiction Reviews
The Last Reader by David Toscana
August 17, 2026The stream-of-consciousness style and lack of quotation marks seen here is indicative of the entire novel....
Movies
Introducing…William Bibbiani!
August 16, 2026While Snowmageddon, Part One raged around us here on the east coast, the amazing and talented...
Video Games
Video Game Review: Dark Void
August 16, 2026The bad guys are alien robot Nazis (effectively combining every faceless antagonist in videogame history), Will...
Movies
Movie Review: Legion
August 16, 2026According to the script, God has lost faith in humanity, ostensibly because he grew “tired of...
Movies
Movie Review: From Paris With Love
August 16, 2026Structural difficulties, failed attempts at levity and below-par action sequences would be bad enough, but sadly...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Michelangelo: A Tormented Life by Antonio Forcellino
August 16, 2026Before dawn on the morning of February 18 a group of Florentines entered the church stealthily...
Movies
Movie Review: The Lovely Bones
August 16, 2026The novel opens with a striking, abrupt proclamation: “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first...
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Fables: The Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 by Bill Willingham
August 15, 2026But without a doubt, it’s the series that he began seven years ago, Fables, that has...
Fiction Reviews
Small Wars by Sadie Jones
August 15, 2026The conflict becomes a war in which, “…there was no truth. It was a nothing, laughable...
Fiction Reviews
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
August 15, 2026Oliver won’t socialize. He won’t even speak. He simply spends his days wrapped in his obsession,...
Video Games
Video Game Review: Bayonetta
August 15, 2026She also wears glasses, which may pass for originality these days but is thematically appropriate because...
Art
Portraiture Now: Communities at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
August 15, 2026The astonishing amount of detail, the tremendous amount of work that went into crafting the tiny...
Art & Design
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
August 10, 2026Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Non-Fiction Reviews
In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder
August 5, 2026Orson had become so famous for his villainous role as Harry Lime in The Third Man...
Art & Design
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
August 7, 2026The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Art
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery, London
July 27, 2026Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and...
Art & Design
Tim Burton at MoMA
August 11, 2026Predictably, Tim Burton is already a wildly popular show. As throngs of families, film buffs and...
Movies
Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
August 8, 2026Comedian Mo’Nique, best known for urban comedies like Phat Girlz and Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, gives...
History
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
August 3, 2026Never perhaps has there been such a masterful account of the man’s failures—and successes—in this country’s...
Biography
Marlee Matlin: Bold Moves and Few Regrets
July 22, 2026"I worry about nothing except doing work that I like and that I look at as...
Art & Design
The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
August 1, 2026And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased...
Fiction Reviews
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
July 31, 2026But, as we see in the terrifying drawings of his radiologist father giving him neck adjustments—“kkrraackk,”...
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