Steven Hyden’s book on the Strokes, Is This It, is an entertaining and often amusing defence of a band whose importance has always been easier to understand as a cultural phenomenon than as a straightforward commercial success.
Although How Many Roads isn’t an essential Bob Dylan biography, not all books have to be necessary to be effective and rewarding.
Christopher Nolan, today’s most ambitious director, lets us have our cake and eat it too by mixing avant-garde daring and maximalist spectacle.
With his memoir A Screaming Life, Soundgarden’s legendary guitar innovator Kim Thayil pulls back the curtain on his tight-lipped band.
Jeff Beck biography Blow by Blow is designed for everyone who loves music and the many genres Beck explored. Gearheads will love it, too.
Among his many discoveries about the Velvet Underground, Richie Unterberger’s description of unheard tapes will have fans salivating.
Satire meant to critique corporate greed and the dark side of masculinity has instead inspired a new kind of performance identity.
For all its couture fashion and bio-pic fluff, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette is radical in how it echoes Laura Kipnis’ polemic, Against Love.
Rapper Tashera Savage aims to deviate from the crime-ridden mythology of Baltimore’s streets in the upcoming biopic, Thru the Eyes of the Hustler’s Daughter.
Kathleen Spaltro’s biography of Ethel Barrymore explores how her acceptance of her familial fate as a serious actor came at great cost to her creativity.
A film about Palestine does not need to claim neutrality. The trouble is that Palestine 36, despite its force, oversimplifies the complicated history.
Journalist and historian William J. Mann tries to conjure who the “Black Dahlia”, Elizabeth Short, really was, but time is a powerful killer.
