What did you think of Everything is Illuminated? I'm very fond of that book, but it feels like Jonathan Safran Foer was a brief fad and now it's The Thing to look down on him, and I rarely run across other people who've read his books.

Someone always asks where to start with Terry Pratchett any time we review a fantasy book or talk about book recommendations. Here's our column on that subject, which I didn't write but wholeheartedly endorse:

You don't need to take it that literally! We just mean "What have you read of interest in the month since we last asked this question?"

No, "lazy shorthand" is writing off an entire field of human endeavor as pretentious and show-offy. By assuming people only pretend to like poetry in order to make you feel bad, you're revealing much, much more about your own unwillingness to engage and explore honestly than you are about poetry. It's fine to not like…

I got it from Netflix. It's available fairly cheap on Amazon as well, so also presumably other places around the web.

Yeah, the hopping vampire is a well-established Chinese-myth trope that still never fails to look bizarre and silly on film.

The box art for Devil's Dynamite (sic) features a bunch of ninjas blowing up a helicopter with a rocket launcher. Probably needless to say, given the budget, the actual film doesn't feature any helicopters or rocket launchers whatsoever.

To be fair, he has no personality or purpose in the story other than being the Shadow Warrior. I only mentioned his name so it'll be clear who "Alex" is in one of the film clips.

Sorry, that was poorly written. It's on the Illinois border, looking across the Mississippi River. I'll rephrase.

@avclub-72a8ab4748d4707fda159db0088d85de:disqus , it's a violent film, but not hugely gory, particularly by comparison with Thirst or any of the vengeance films. I wouldn't worry about that aspect of it. As to horror, it depends on what bothers her about it — if she can't take suspense and tension, this isn't a good…

It was a big bestseller in book form, but I was thinking more in terms of the musical, which brought it to a much wider audience.

SPOILER: Nope. Park did that with Thirst, and it'd be a mistake to go back to the same well so quickly. I recommend Thirst, but the tone is VERY different from this.

Spoiler Space is now live.

Pretty famously so. The comments on our Oscar recap video, where people complain we aren't yelling at each other enough, make it pretty clear what people expect from us at this point.

Shouldn't ALL movies be done well and with some thought?

I don't want to give it away. Even what I said is giving too much away. The more we respect what a movie does, the less likely we are to make it easy for people to read about it and skip seeing it.

I wrote one, but somehow it didn't get posted. It'll be added shortly.

There was a Spoiler Space, but it didn't get posted. It should be up soon. It doesn't give much away, but I definitely want to have a discussion space for people who've seen the movie. I've been talking about it with fellow critics, and this one has proved really divisive, with some people I respect loathing it as an…

The screenwriter has said he started with Shadow Of A Doubt's premise and then went in a different direction with it. But it's still much more Hitchcock than it is Oldboy or Thirst.

More like, I'd rather people not anticipate the plot, which is very basic, such that even what I described above constitutes a great deal of it. As I say, it's best approached blind and open-minded.