Reading a newspaper in January 2006, one feels a tragic sense of
deja vu. Stories of violent insurgencies, military operations and
ceaselessly rising body counts are reported with such regularity
that a person can often find it difficult to distinguish one
day’s news from the last.

Freedom is a subjective concept. Just ask the stars of
“After Innocence.”
The documentary film, which screens at the James Bridges Theater
tonight courtesy of Melnitz Movies, tells the stories of seven men
who were wrongfully imprisoned for years, sometimes even decades,
before their innocence was proven.

This is definitely not your parents’ Woody Allen film.
With “Match Point,” the latest offering from the
filmmaker, Allen has departed from many of the conventions of his
earlier work.

Imagine Miles Davis playing at Schoenberg, Ernest Hemingway
reading his work at Royce, or Michelangelo presenting one of his
masterpieces at the Sculpture Garden, and one gets the idea.

Superheroes just don’t get enough respect.
Recently, a group of friends assembled at my apartment to watch
“Spider-Man 2.” The behavior of my buddies during the
film appalled me: they talked over the movie, answered their cell
phones, and generally disregarded this masterpiece of modern
cinema.

Celebrity activism has long been a part of American culture.
From Jane Fonda’s appearance with the Viet Cong in 1971 to
Kanye West’s televised rant on the president’s
disaffection for black people, the famous have long embraced the
role of aspiring world changer.

Dear Tara Reid,
I was so sorry to hear about the recent cancellation of your E!
television program “Taradise.” While the show ““
in which you traveled the world pursuing both fun and answers to
life’s great questions, often in an inebriated haze ““
was unable to establish itself as a creative or ratings powerhouse,
it provided me with several minutes of viewing pleasure this
summer.

While watching the new film “Capote,” a stellar
account of the struggles and successes experienced by writer Truman
Capote during the composition of his seminal book “In Cold
Blood,” I had two revelations.

At a recent family dinner, I was lamenting the challenge of
writing a weekly entertainment column.
“How about something on “˜Desperate
Housewives’?” my mother suggested.
“Maybe about how women love the show because it portrays
females in control over the men in their lives,” she added,
as my dad continued quietly eating his mashed potatoes.

Sometimes brevity is impossible.
Anyone seeking to summarize Noah Baumbach’s new film,
“The Squid and the Whale,” quickly becomes acquainted
with this fact. Above all, complexity prevails.