The incident was more than ego-deflating — it was demoralizing. It signified that to the younger generation Macdonald was an unidentified relic of unknown occupation. Talking about himself in the past tense brought him face to face with the erosion of his reputation and name recognition after a swashbuckling career as critic, editor, protester, provocateur and all-around word warrior.

Dwight Macdonald at 100

indie-style films increasingly resemble low-budget versions of studio business, too often leaving the truly independent movie without a home.

as a rule the art-house studios and their peers now tend to seek films with clear marketing elements, as witnessed by the bidding war at the last Sundance festival over the humorous romp "Little Miss Sunshine," which wound up with Fox Searchlight.

That leaves little room for films that don't fit into obvious niches, or that can't be sold to clearly identifiable audiences.

Mr. Norton said he was drawn in particular to the film's questioning of modern life and its unabashed nostalgia for a more rugged past.

"I get heartbroken flying into L.A.," he said. "It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?"

Mr. Norton predicted that it would find its audience: moviegoers who seek substance at the theater. "We wanted to create a western for our crowd, about the westerns we knew and grew up with," he said. "David is committed to raising questions that he doesn't answer, and he leaves you to do the work."

Edward Norton and the Shoot-Out at the Indie Corral

Chekhov put it best. He said every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet, with a hammer, to remind him that not everyone is happy.

The Stuff of Fiction

More than one critic has offered "Cache" as a nifty companion piece to Steven Spielberg's "Munich." The way both films consider personal responsibility makes that true enough. But the recent opus that came to mind was David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a movie also about a man, his family, and the vagaries in his past. Cronenberg turned a commentary on the proverbial sins of the father into an action movie. With his cheesy-satirical smokescreens, however, Cronenberg wanted us to laugh with him. Haneke is determined to haunt us. Maybe Georges's ghosts are ours, too.

Cache (Hidden) Movie Review

It is, as I have said, a small movie, and there will be those who'll think it's little ado about even less. Others will find in it a reminder that everything can change even when nothing seems to be happening. "Duck Season" hits every one of its modest marks and then some. It's the kind of movie to send you out looking at strangers on the street with newfound appreciation and something close to love.

Duck Season (Temporada de patos) Movie Review

Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world. Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction.

Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006

I'm not a musician, but I recently composed and recorded a song. More than that, in a Paul McCartneyesque fit of post-Beatles hubris, I played all the instruments and produced and engineered the entire thing, even though I have no experience producing and engineering anything more complicated than a Bombay martini.

Composing Music Using Apple Computer's GarageBand Software

'The Unbinding,' Slate's serialized 'Net novel' being written and posted 'in real time' by Walter Kirn, raises intriguing possibilities for the future of fiction. But is it a future we really want?

Techno thriller

In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.

So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.

As Costume Dramas Go, Bettie Page's Is Rather Brief

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