We think we know books, and the imposing entrance of the New York Public Library reminds us of their weighty and solemn importance. In the great traditions of the West, the book is a foundation upon which mighty edifices of knowledge are constructed. But if you pass through the lobby to the library’s main exhibition hall and gallery, something else is revealed.

They aspire not to disclose the timeless, but to discern the transient, to clasp the texture of experience — a passing moment, an instant’s glimpse, a sensation as compressed and meticulously evoked as a haiku.

In so many of the ehon, when the evanescent is carefully contemplated, something timeless is revealed.

Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan

About 20 percent of the audience of “Lost” has gone missing since last year, even though the show has suffered no discernible decline in quality.

Idiosyncratic and Personal, PC Edges TV

Even at Lynch's most fractured, in films like "Lost Highway," there's a sense that if you could somehow reach bottom, you'd find truth, some primal series of events that kaleidoscoped out of recognition in the telling. There's no bottom to "Inland Empire," at least not one that we discern after one viewing.

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"Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit."

'Inland Empire' | The IFC Blog

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a fascinating piece of Cuisinart filmmaking that brings together all the leading elements of gangster films in this young century.

The plot is so ingenious that one wonders why it took more than seven decades of crime movies for someone to come up with it.

Vera Farmiga is excellent in a secondary role in this film.

The Departed | At the Movies

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan.

Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual images joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published.

One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs

“People were constantly asking for my advice: ‘Tell me what five albums I should buy now,’ or ‘Tell me what are the five best heavy metal albums of all time,’ ” Mr. Scaruffi said. “Eventually you get tired of answering the same question, and you prepare a list. Then the list becomes many lists.”

“Probably my biggest ambition would be to write a history of knowledge,” he said. “Something that packages all of my interests together: literature, science, philosophy, politics — whatever.”

The Greatest Web Site of All Time

AFTER making a pair of successful documentaries about grunge rock (“Hype”) and hip-hop D.J.’s (“Scratch”), Doug Pray was approached to direct a movie about yet another subculture: graffiti artists. He wasn’t interested.

Then he met one.

Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody

For those of us raised on beat-heavy pop, rhythm and blues, and rock, Mr. Reich’s infectiously rhythmic music was a path into “serious music,” a realm that might have once felt closed. Among Mr. Reich’s legions of fans must be many a rock, funk or hard-core devotee who came upon works like “Drumming,” or “Music for 18 Musicians” — two of his best known and most hypnotic percussion epics — and found themselves somehow changed.

Steve Reich’s Fascinating Rhythm

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch “The Wire,” unless, that is, he was already writing for it.

Television You Can’t Put Down

At this year's Cannes film festival, one of the more ardently argued questions had to do with the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, whose performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s "Volver" was one of the festival's high points. The movie was widely beloved -- so much so that at the closing ceremonies its two prizes, for Mr. Almodóvar's screenplay and for its remarkable ensemble of actresses, seemed almost disappointing -- and Ms. Cruz in particular had no shortage of admirers.

In "Volver" Pedro Almodóvar has transformed Penélope Cruz into a melodramatic heroine.

Few were inclined to dispute the wit or dexterity of her acting, which steers "Volver" from screwball to weepie and back again with intoxicating verve. But many viewers -- not all of them low-minded, lecherous types by any means -- noticed that her usually sparrowlike figure seemed fuller than usual, especially around the hips.

Had Mr. Almodóvar padded his star's skirt? One source, connected with the film's American distributor, was sure he had. Another, who had encountered Ms. Cruz at a party, swore that what we had seen on the screen was there, as it were, in the flesh.

American audiences, accustomed to speculating about the authenticity of various movie-star body parts, will have a chance to assess this issue when "Volver" is released in the United States on Nov. 3. (It will also be the centerpiece, on Oct. 7 and 8, of the New York Film Festival.) But there is no doubt that, with or without cushioning, Ms. Cruz reveals a new dimension in this film, and that Mr. Almodóvar, who created it in part as a showcase for her talents, has provided her with her most substantial role to date.

From Everygirl to Everywoman: Penélope Cruz's Journey