Raylan Givens, the U.S. marshal who first appeared in Leonard's short story "Fire in the Hole" and has since become the hero of the FX series "Justified" (which started its third season on Jan. 17; the first two are available on DVD), occupies the center of Leonard's new "Raylan," essentially a couple of long short stories woven loosely into a novel. Leonard's Raylan is a bit more upfront about his appetites than he is in Timothy Olyphant's wittily underplayed portrayal of the character in the series. He's still no chatterbox, though.

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Further reports on the story are sure to observe that the entire episode might have been plucked from the movies. This is incorrect. Plucked from films, yes. The story is half-ready for the art house. Strip the tale of glamour, remove any potential for excitement and you've not only got a greenlight, but guaranteed analysis in Cineaste, and a panel accompanying the New York opening consisting of Naomi Klein, a New York University expert on the Middle East, and any film critic dextrous enough to use "hegemony" in a sentence.

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You could argue that Haynes, being black himself, had a built-in kinship to the black sons and daughters of Lowndes County. But seen from the midst of our current national division, one that's less dramatic though perhaps just as poisonous as the divisions of the '60s, it's hard not to read Haynes' faith that he could reach his students -- not to overwhelm them or argue them down but, in Branch's exquisitely chosen word, "to harmonize" -- as a belief in the transformative power of discourse, a belief that America, both right and left, has largely abandoned.

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To describe country music as a place where living greats have become ghosts is to describe it as having betrayed its past, probably the most damning thing you could say about a genre that claims to have such respect for tradition.

I stopped listening to contemporary country music a few years back. I was tired of the anonymity of the songwriting, of arrangements that sounded like some postmodern representation of country instead of music itself. And the music that sprang up in opposition, alt-country, was usually about as much fun as sitting bare-ass naked on a splintery bench. The alt-country artists sounded as if any expression of pleasure was a sellout. If mainstream country had become the equivalent of a shiny new SUV, alt-country was a dirty window with dead flies littering the sill. A choice between that shopping-mall dominatrix Shania Twain or Lucinda Williams' wallflower moping was no choice at all.

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The most overt, dramatic and controversial example of this struggle was Ray Charles' switch from the R&B he recorded at Atlantic Records to the orchestrated pop, country music, show tunes and Beatles covers he recorded when he made the lucrative move to ABC Records in 1959. Though, if you have the ears to hear, what comes through is consistency. There is just as much soul in Charles' string-laden "Moonlight in Vermont" as in the guttural exhortations of "I Got a Woman." Which is not to say everything he did was equally great, but that Charles' career exposed the narrow ways in which we decide what constitutes "authenticity." It was inevitable that Charles, who truly deserves the overworked appellation "genius," wouldn't be content with one color on the musical palette and would try to encompass as much of American popular music as he could.

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The pickings are even slimmer at the movies.

The foreign stars Hollywood has traditionally welcomed have been overwhelmingly white Europeans or some variety of Anglo-Saxon. That has remained true since silent movies, even as the cinemas of other countries have produced their own stars. No region of the world has produced more charismatic screen personalities in the last 20 or so years than Asia, and due to bad distribution of foreign films and Hollywood's passing them over, almost none of those stars are widely known here. Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh all have received second-class treatment in Hollywood. And while Zhang Ziyi, who dazzles in "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" (and does her best acting yet in Wong Kar-Wai's upcoming "2046"), is filming "Memoirs of a Geisha" for "Chicago" director Rob Marshall, Hollywood's more typical use of her is the meager supporting bit she had in "Rush Hour 2." Tony Leung and Andy Lau are so charismatic and commanding in "Infernal Affairs" (dumped into theaters here by Miramax) you'd expect a Hollywood that retains any sense of what constitutes star power to be beating down their doors. Instead, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio will take over their roles in Martin Scorsese's planned American remake.

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Now let's allow things to get curiouser and curiouser.

Despite this writer's farcical conclusion, historians of World War II, men who have spent their professional lives studying and documenting the war, still insist on the soundness of his research. It is possible, they say, to draw faulty conclusions from solid fact-finding. They do not bother themselves with the obvious question of how good the quality of any research can be if it can be used to support what is patently false. One historian says he and his colleagues should be able to admit the view of those with whom they may not be "intellectually akin."

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Humanist filmmakers have long favored making movies about children and old people, believing that how we treat the most vulnerable among us is a measure of our own humanity. Akira reminds you of the children who have populated the films of Vittorio De Sica or Satyajit Ray, and, more unexpectedly, of the elderly Carlo Battisti in the title role of De Sica's "Umberto D." Unlike Umberto, Akira does not hide his predicament from others because of pride: Having been separated from his younger brother and sisters when the family attempted to get public assistance, he is determined to keep them all together.

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That such an event could happen merely four years after the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition in favor of the Mississippi delegates who were chosen via a system that prevented blacks from voting, is a mark of how far and how fast the civil rights movement had come. That it could be so little noticed is a measure of how quickly the movement was being eclipsed by Vietnam.

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For instance, it's predictable that we'll hear how the five acting nominations given to four black actors represent a real leap forward for African-Americans in the industry. If only someone would explain how Jamie Foxx gets a supporting actor nomination for a movie ("Collateral") in which he starred, or how the academy managed to ignore all the actresses in "Ray." ("Which Desperate Housewife will get a Golden Globe" generated more ink than will "Why were Regina King, Sharon Warren and Kerry Washington passed over.")

Among the more creative pundits this year is Ted Baehr who, his publicists tell us, is chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and host of "an annual gala film awards extravaganza known as the 'Christian Oscars'. " (Appearing this year, Pat Boone, Guy and Ralna, the Oral Roberts Dancers, and a special tribute to "A Man Called Peter.") Baehr has rated four of the five best picture nominees -- "The Aviator," "Finding Neverland," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Sideways" -- to see how they align with the all important "values voters." (Apparently "Ray" is too far outside the pale to even discuss.)

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I came fairly late to Murakami (and still haven't caught up) because I confess to being one of those readers who, hearing that a novel contains elements of fantasy and the surreal, imagine something that's impossibly arch while straining to inspire wonder. Even those of us who are turned off by the drabness of much contemporary realist fiction don't particularly want to read books about spouses that become pets, or goldfish who are really the Buddha, or gardens that contain entrances to subway stations.

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There are a couple of neat images later on, too: a deadly Sapphic kiss between Elektra and a villain whose touch causes the living to wither and die (the kiss takes place in a forest as green leaves fall off trees and create a shower of black around them); and an eagle tattoo that comes to life, leaving its bearer's chest.

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I first tried watching "Alias" when it premiered in the fall of 2001. I was looking for something like the mod, gadget-laden spy movies and TV shows I loved as a kid. Despite the moments when the show was what I expected it to be -- Sydney on some mission strutting into a club/hotel/casino in whole runway seasons' worth of chic outfits -- "Alias" struck me as pedestrian. Too little gadgetry and too much family and workplace drama. That's exactly the point.

To treat "Alias" as if it were about nothing other than Garner's costume changes, or as though it were some spy-girl fantasy for comic-sated fanboy geeks, is to miss the wit and emotion and twisty narrative pleasure it offers.

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The compilation of the 10-best list is the hardest chore of the year, not because it isn't a pleasure to look back on the movies that were the most delightful or affecting but because the final list never feels as definitive as it should. The things we love about movies are far too slippery for lists. Javier Bardem's face, so beautifully chiseled and yet a thorny argument against the tyranny of joie de vivre, in "The Sea Inside," for example: It's a face that could constitute a whole category in itself.

No character made me laugh harder than Edna Mode, the dictatorial fashion designer in "The Incredibles" -- as actors, cartoon characters get no respect. And a picture like Catherine Breillat's "Anatomy of Hell," flawed and difficult, has lingered with me longer than other movies I've seen that I love and admire more. How do you explain that? You don't. You simply make a list, which is, at best, a valiant attempt to fold the greatest number of intangibles into a measly handful of discrete, numbered items.

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Following Oliver into the hotel bar, the manager of the Mille Collines, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), congratulates the colonel on how well he has protected the refugees while awaiting the international forces. What Paul doesn't know, and what Colonel Oliver has to break to him, is that the forces are there only to provide safe passage out of Rwanda for Europeans. They will do nothing to stop the slaughter or aid the Tutsis. The scene that follows between Cheadle and Nolte is so emotionally violent that it takes you a few seconds to register that you're hearing what you're hearing.

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That invisibility isn't lost on Annie's daughter, the now grown Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). Sarah Jane is light-skinned enough to pass for white, and that's just what she does. She tells her mother that she doesn't want the only boys she meets to be "busboys, cooks, chauffeurs." Implicitly, she's telling Annie that she wants something better than to be a maid like her. All Sarah Jane finds is a job dancing at a sleazy nightclub -- but at least, she reasons, it's her choice, not a destiny she never asked for.

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Bardem spends almost all of his performance in Alejandro Amenábar's fine new film "The Sea Inside" ("Mar Adentro") in bed. He's playing the Galician Ramón Semprado, paralyzed from the neck down in a swimming accident as a young man, who badgered the Spanish government for 30 years to win the legal right to commit suicide. It's as if Bardem has chosen the role as an acting test, to see if he can retain his expressiveness while severely restricting his physical resources, and without bathing Ramón in the false saintly nobility that many actors in a part like this would seize on as a fast track to awards.

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Sometimes Hornby and the Believer butt heads. He writes in one column that he and the magazine's editors reach an agreement "that if it looks like I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name." Listed at the top of that column are "Unnamed Literary Novel" and "Unnamed Work of Nonfiction." In the magazine's debut issue, Julavits wrote an essay arguing that most book criticism is too snarky and negative, and Hornby has more or less been instructed to avoid negative reviews.

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