The Colbert Report has an occasional segment called"Cheating Death," which is introduced by the image of Stephen facing the hooded figure of Death over a chessboard. That's a reference to the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Colbert, who switches chess pieces while Death is distracted, parodies the role of a knight (Max von Sydow) who puts his soul on the line to save a few lives during a season of plague.

But Bergman wasn't kidding. Most of his 60-some films, from his 1944 screenwriting debut with the schoolroom drama Torment through his swan song Saraband, released in the U.S. in 2005, were about the plague of the modern soul ˜ the demons and doubts, secrets and lies that men and woman evaded but were forced to confront, to their peril. This agonized Swede was a surgeon who operated on himself. He cut into his own fears, analyzed his failings, perhaps sought forgiveness through art. He may never have found...

You've landed in a place where winged humanoids dart and robots roam about sprawling futuristic cities. Have you been teleported to another universe? No, Earthling. You've simply entered the Maison d'Ailleurs, or the House of Elsewhere.

In 1976, French sci-fi buff Pierre Versin donated his collection of tens of thousands of science-fiction books to the Swiss spa town of Yverdon-les-Bains, just north of Lausanne, on the condition that it be made available for public viewing. The result was the launch of Europe's only public science-fiction museum. Since then, the House of Elsewhere has held two or three temporary exhibits a year that explore such staples of the genre as space travel, parallel worlds and alien life forms.

On exhibit until Sept. 23 are Swiss sci-fi artist Christian Lorenz Scheurer's images of imaginary civilizations. His work"helps us discover new realms," says the museum's curator, Patrick Gyger. ...

When Cuba celebrated the 54th anniversary of its communist revolution last week there was a special discovery from its cultural past. [It was an archive of original recordings of scores of top artists like Nat King Cole. Click on the SOURCE link above and scroll to"Cuba's beat goes on."]

Jive-talkin' Petey Greene was Washington, D.C.'s favorite DJ in the late 1960s, an ex-con turned streetwise radio ranter who struck a chord, and a nerve, with his inner-city listeners. He was the antithesis of Dewey Hughes, the WOL-AM station director who put Greene on the air after much badgering, a buttoned-down company man determined to function smoothly in the white world.
Greene, with a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths, was just the controversial boost Hughes' station needed. And Hughes was a steadying influence on randy, self-destructive Greene, at least until he tried to mold him into a Richard Pryor-style superstar.

The fact-based comedy-drama "Talk to Me" follows the men's relationship through mutual suspicion, aggravation, friendship, head-spinning success and crushing disappointment. Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor make a harmonious duet of the leads. "Talk to Me," co-written by Hughes' son Michael Genet, is mostly made up of...

So far, some of the best documentaries about the war in Iraq — “Gunner Palace,” “The War Tapes” and “Iraq in Fragments,” for example — have concentrated less on politics, policy or military strategy than on individual, in-the-moment experiences. As if to balance a climate of argument thick with generalization and position-taking, these films push debate aside in order to bring home the sensory details of daily life for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

“No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s exacting, enraging new film, may signal a shift in emphasis, a move away from the immediacy of cinéma vérité toward overt political argument and historical analysis. Not that these have been scarce over the past few years, as an ever- growing shelf of books can testify. Among Mr. Ferguson’s interview subjects are the authors of some of those books — notably Nir Rosen (“In the Belly of the Green Bird”), James Fallows (“Blind Into Baghdad”) and George Packer (“The Assassins’ Gate”) —...

"Wings of Defeat," a documentary about Japanese kamikaze pilots, comes at a time when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to revise the country's wartime history.

The film, directed by Risa Morimoto, a Japanese-American living in New York, takes a kinder view of kamikazes -- a Japanese word commonly translated as "divine wind" -- typically depicted as fanatics filled with hatred for the United States and ready to die for their god and emperor.

In "Wings of Defeat," the dwindling number of surviving pilots expressed sadness, regret and anger at their leaders, who told them they were fighting madmen who would kill them all.

Ah, summer. Time to venture into the great American outdoors — or at least consider the concept by paying a visit to the New-York Historical Society. Because, as the exhibition “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School” argues, the notion of an American landscape brimming with sacred sites is as much a cultural invention as an accident of nature.

You quickly get the point at the start of the show, where Thomas Cole’s epic series of imaginary landscape paintings, “The Course of Empire,” is displayed directly across from the entrance. Painted from 1833 to 1836, the series has long been considered one of the most crucial works of 19th-century American art (almost rivaling Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s mammoth creation across the street, Central Park).

“Not only do I consider ‘The Course of Empire’ the work of the highest genius this country has ever produced, but I esteem it one of the noblest works of art that has ever been wrought,”...

He may be gone, but John Wayne is not forgotten – especially in Valley Center.

In celebration of the centennial year of his birth, the Valley Center History Museum has a special exhibit for the former resident. The exhibit opens at 1 p.m. Saturday and will be on display through the end of the year. A special guest attending the opening will be Valley Center resident and John Wayne look-alike Stan Deskovick.

The movie star, who went by the name of Duke Morrison, moved to Valley Center in 1940.

“I've read three biographies on him,” said Bob Lerner, Valley Center Museum volunteer. “His real name was Marion Morrison, and the biographies always refer to him as Morrison. As a child he was nicknamed 'Duke' and locally he always went by Duke Morrison.”

Wayne built a house on Pauma Valley Drive east of Cole Grade Road and lived there until 1945.

"Goya's Ghosts" is a decidedly odd film coming from such a prestigious group of filmmakers, which includes writer-director Milos Forman, renowned screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and producer Saul Zaentz.

Its central figure is the great Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco de Goya, in many ways the world's first modern artist. Yet the film displays only passing interest in his art. Its focus instead is on Spain during the horrific period of the Inquisition and Napoleon's conquest, a subject that has its modern-day parallels, but the film never chooses to draw them. Indeed, the story these talented filmmakers tell is a sad, even pathetic tale about tawdry events and cowardly individuals.

The film opened in Europe in November to poor results. Foreign box office stands at $5.9 million, with $2.2 million coming from Spain. "Ghosts" makes its domestic debut Friday in select markets before an expansion August 3. While lavishly produced with...