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Movies had an amazing year in the theater and in the home as DVDs had another record year: A preliminary survey of the home video industry shows that DVD sales saw a 65% increase to an estimated total of $8.9 billion last year, compared with $5.4 billion in 2001. Although …

Hard core rap has a bad name – it’s about to get worse: Money laundering and drug dealing on the road are at the heart of a federal probe into hot-rising rap label Murder Inc. – home to such stars as Ashanti and Ja Rule – law-enforcement sources said. A …

Jane Black in Business Week on digital privacy: entertainment industry’s honchos will once again journey to Capitol Hill when Congress convenes a new session later this month to ask lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission for more protection. However, if Hollywood has its way, consumer privacy — not piracy — …

Familiar terrain to regular readers of Blogcritics, but the NY Times’ Amy Harmon takes a reasonable look at the state of digital media regarding copy protection and resultant consumer issues: Lying dormant in virtually every digital cable box in America is technology that can prevent viewers from recording certain programs …

A look at five of 2002's top genre comics.

Though I am 100% certain that regime change in Iraq is our only viable course of action, that does not mean I do not see the physical and moral dangers of American power imposing itself afar. In today’s NY Times Magazine Michael Ignatieff presents the most complete, logical, balanced, informative, …

Cringely, the PBS high-tech scribe, gazes into his crystal ball for 2003 – by his own (somewhat dubious) reckoning, he was 7/10 for 2002. I don’t know much about the computer business stuff he discusses, but I find this prediction perspicacious: 12. Hollywood will come up with another new copy …

This story of Arab-Israeli pornography is tawdry and sad on every level. But the worst element, by far, is the Islamic cultural retardation sanctioning violence against those accused of violating “honor.” This is the 21st century: grow up, mind your own business, do something worthwhile with your life, repect the …

Yesterday would have been J.R.R. Tolkien’s 111th birthday, his “eleventy-first.” Fans celebrated worldwide: It’s a clear sign that a movie has passed from mere entertainment into the realm of cultural phenomenon when it starts spawning theme parties. Such is the case with “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Act two, …

The “Susan Orlean” depicted in Adaptation is a female human who wrote The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession – similarities end there: The movie Adaptation portrays real-life author Susan Orlean in so perversely inaccurate a manner that studio executives were ”terrified” that Orlean might halt the …