California

A reissue of four of the detective writer's 1950s novels excavates the dark depths of California's suburban decay. Maureen Corrigan praises Macdonald's "psychological depth" and "penetrating vision."

Ann Packer's new novel, The Children's Crusade, opens in California, on a scene that's so bedrock American, it's borderline corny.

Oliver Stone's new film Savages is a violent thriller starring Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson as pot growers caught up in a Mexican drug war. Critic David Edelstein says the movie is deeper and more complicated than Stone's famously bloody Natural Born Killers.

In Karen Thompson Walker's first book, climate change makes the Earth's rotation go more and more sluggish, but this melancholy page-turner is more than just a disaster plot.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews "sideways".

Ken Tucker reviews the home video of "Gates of Heaven," the documentary on pet cemeteries by Erroll Morris.

While some reviewers think River's Edge could become the Blue Valentine of 1987, film critic Stephen Schiff says the film suffers from a weak message and poor casting.