Current owner Jay Pearsall "said he was paying $18,000 a month in rent for Murder Ink and another store, Ivy's Books & Curiosities, and couldn't afford a 5 percent increase expected in March. Competition from huge bookstore chains and online sellers didn't help." more ›

This year's competition jury has three Americans: Novelist Edwidge Danticat, Kathleen Turner, and Quentin Tarantino, who is the chair and has already been on a Cannes panel about piracy: "I would be a liar if I was to say, across the board, no piracy." more ›

Pico Iyer's essay about how Hollywood has been slowly steering away from Hollywood endings mentions recent films like Cold Mountain, Lost in Translation, House of Sand and Fog, and Mystic River as having darker or less resolved endings. But, as Iyer acknowledges, the tradition can be seen with Gone with the Wind or Casablanca. Which made Gothamist wonder what are the endings that linger more: Seeing Vincent Vega walk end Pulp Fiction alive (versus dead, had the film run sequentially) or James Stewart, left alone, the woman he loves dying twice, at the end of Vertigo? Hannibal Lecter getting away at the end of The Silence of the Lambs or Thelma and Louise getting away but not quite? Dorothy back at the farm in the Wizard of Oz or most anything Ingmar Bergman makes? For what it's worth, Gothamist loves seeing Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant get together in a romantic comedy as much as we love seeing Woody Allen and Diane Keaton fall apart. more ›

Will third time be a charm for Peter Jackson? Jackson's work for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, along with Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation, Clint Eastwood for Mystic River, Gary Ross for Seabiscuit, and Peter Weir for Master and Commander, is nominated for the Directors' Guild Award. The DGA nominees are very similar to the Golden Globe nominees, except Anthony Minghella was nominated instead of Ross. Guess the Cold Mountain machine doesn't fly with the directors, huh, Miramax (the Daily News is shocked that Minghella was not nominated). What this year's DGA nominees tell us is that Sofia Coppola and the momentum behind Lost in Translation are no joke and that Hollywood loves a well made studio movie like Seabiscuit, even if it's 40 minutes too long. more ›

Tarantino's "Mr. Wolf" is really based on the clean up character played by Jean Reno in Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita; Harvey Keitel actually played this character in the 1993 John Badham directed US remake of LFN, Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda, who would later star in Jackie Brown, directed by Tarantino. more ›

A very cool exhibition of pulp art opens tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum, called Pulp Art: Vamp, Villains, and Victors. The collection is of paintings from the 1920s to 1940s that mostly served as covers for various pulp fiction magazines. The Times had a feature about the only living artist in the collection, Ernest Chiriacka, the "Rembrandt of Third Avenue" who now lives in Great Neck and has a cat named Willow. more ›