Sometimes you feel bad for movie marketers, tasked with connecting any given film to an audience as large as possible. Take, for example, The American. Judging by the film's trailers and advertisements, it's a fast-paced Euro-stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicte...

On Saturday, August 28, and Sunday, August 29, the inaugural LouFest took place in Forest Park. Under gorgeous, sun-filled skies, eighteen acts performed in front of mellow, appreciative crowds. Below are some highlights from the festival. For setlists, more reviews and photos, go to

The grainy footage shows two snarling pit bulls in a dimly lit barn, staring each other down through a haze of cigarette smoke. Walled in by a makeshift ring of three-foot-high plywood planks, the collarless dogs twitch and wag their tails, expending nervous energy like prizefighters shadowboxing...

Gale Frey holds her 40-pound pit bull as if it were an infant, cradling the dog in her arms and rocking gently back and forth. The docile dog — Sir Reginald Farnsworth the Third — contentedly drops off to sleep.

Seated on a park bench across the street from the Humane Society ...

Anyone who recalls the Black Rep's 2005 staging of Intimate Apparel knows that Lynn Nottage is a playwright of sensitivity and nuance. She cares deeply about the "unsettled souls" of her characters and also about the worlds they inhabit. Somewhere in the recesses of this dramatist dwells a...

Featured Review: Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection The Kemper has arranged this predominantly painterly selection in clockwise fashion, beginning with works in grayscale (Tapies, Burri, Millare) engaged in various ways of tearing and sti...

(Click here to see the full strip.)

Did You Know!?!? Go the Amazing Facts and Beyond blog to further follow the exploits of our trivial hero.

Happily sampling nasty beats and riffs from the Scorsese catalog, the new Aussie crime saga Animal Kingdom begins with a hushed but breath-holding set piece: A gawky lad watches TV on the couch next to his dozing mum . . . until the already-summoned EMTs arrive and the boy calmly tells the...

In 1993, inspired by his second cousin Danny Trejo's work in Desperado, Robert Rodriguez wrote a screenplay around the character of Machete — a stringy-haired, leather-faced, ex-Federale turned down-and-dirty hitman turned violent crusader on behalf of his fellow illegal immigrants. ...

Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky, and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars, and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (a...

Dear Mexican: I'm a naturalized citizen born in Ciudad Juarez (the most dangerous city in the world, thanks to the drug cartels) but I work for la migra. I get a lot of shit from some of my family members because they feel I shouldn't be doing this job. I always tell them that it...