David Luhrssen

Have you ever been flummoxed by a film? Does David Lynch come to mind? Matthew Strohl’s Hard to Watch is a guide for the perplexed and a call to act. In a world where thousands of options are streaming, should we continue to dip into the trough of easy, mindless slop—or should we seek the hard stuff in films that challenge our perceptions, sensibilities and received ideas?

Timothée Chalamet plays young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, the story of his emergence as a force in music and culture.

Thunderclap Newman was the oddest band, a trio hastily tossed together by The Who’s Pete Townshend in his A&R role for Track Records. He originally intended solo albums for guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, drummer Speedy Keen and pianist Andy Newman but combined disparate musicians into one group. British rock historian Mark Ian Wilkerson pens a fascinating account of the ins and outs of late ‘60s Swinging London and how creative exploration a well as profit oiled the wheels of the music business.

At least as far back as Rhapsody in Blue, composers have combined American vernacular music with European classical traditions to varying results. Harmonica master Corky Siegel has been at it for many years and is better at it than most. He isn’t building unwanted bridges but establishing a genuine interchange.

When old human bones are discovered in UW-Madison’s Bascom Hall, husband-and-wife crime solvers are drawn into the case. Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden, English professor emeriti at Madison, return with another Nora Barnes-Toby Sandler mystery, their fictional academics putting their skills to use on a cold case. Along with real Madison places, the novel names real people (jazz pianist Ben Sidran) and events (1970’s Sterling Hall bombing) which become points of interest for those in the know. Don’t know if Draine and Hinden coinend the term “militant ignorance” to describe a rightwing university regent, but the phrase is widely applicable to the times in which we live.

In the Soviet Union, death or imprisonment were the penalties for openly opposing Lenin. Under his successor, Stalin, even casual friends or distant relatives of

In this documentary, bits of Bogart films intersect with home movies and interviews about the life of one of Hollywood’s enduring actors.

The cast of horror film ‘The Damned’ magnificently convey an unrelenting sense of dread.

Alan Lightman has an unusual dual occupation. He’s a physicist and a novelist, a materialist who sometimes experiences “spiritual” connections with the cosmos. Maybe it’s just that he hasn’t lost the capacity for holding nature in awe. Although he doesn’t believe in miracles, he sees the miraculous in nature.

From 1976 through 1983, a military dictatorship ruled Argentina and clung to power through terror. One of their instruments of fear was the disappearance of thousands of people suspected of leftist sympathies. Among those who fell into their net was a Brazilian musician, Francisco Tenorio.