How do we measure the status of a performer's Holy Grail like the Apollo Theater in 2019? Ted Fox and James Otis Smith's beautifully realized, updated graphic novel brings this rich history to life.
In After Certainty, Robert Pasnau constructs a history of knowledge and concludes that most theories of knowledge aren't up to par. But, he says, we can hope.
Paul Crenshaw's This One Will Hurt You, a PopMatters' Pick, is powerful essay collection about life, loss, faith, and natural (and man-made) violence in rural America.
From stone axes to laundry detergent packages, Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh demonstrate how beauty has long guided human behavior. Their lovely book, Beauty explores the evolutionary purpose behind humanity's oldest muse.
Pioneers is an essential gathering of early film treasures that help redefine an era of glorious creativity by women filmmakers and often surprising access to means of production.
In writing about the inability to write, Theodor Kallifatides has produced a book, Another Life, which aches with its own quiet beauties and inspires with its resilient creativity.
Saul Bellow has won many literary awards, including the Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Award. Yet Zachary Leader's thorough work, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, a PopMatters pick, begins with Below asking himself, "Was I a man or was I a jerk?"
As a piece of both cultural history and film history, David Byrne's True Stories takes its place alongside two other films from the mid-'80s that are also steeped in a surrealistic other-worldly place, Repo Man and Blue Velvet.
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War, a sweeping romance, is equally indebted to grand spectacle and the practical compromises of wartime Europe.
Adam McKay's gonzo Dick Cheney biopic satire, Vice, won't be compared to Shakespeare, but it shares the Bard's disinterest in supervillains' motivations.
Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk is a near-perfect success both as a grand statement of solidarity and as a gorgeously wrought, long-overdue story of black life and black love.
