New York

Fresh Air's film critic reviews Cloverfield, a disaster film featuring a monster that attacks Manhattan; the nightmare is captured by shaky Blair Witch-style camerawork.

Four years after Sex and the City's TV finale, Carrie Bradshaw and her posse return — a little older, a little more settled, but with Cosmos still in hand. If you loved the TV show, the movie will fly by; if you hated it, brace yourself.

Adam Sandler's all-potent Israeli hero is a Biblical warrior, a sex god, and a take-no-prisoners hair-burner with a Paul Mitchell fetish. Juvenile he may be — but there's something mesmerizing about him, too.

With plenty of nods to The Great Gatsby Joseph O'Neill's Netherland explores dreams and ambition in post-Sept. 11 New York City. Maureen Corrigan calls the novel "marvelous."

Martinis, misogyny and men behaving badly: AMC's drama series remembers an era's excesses in stunning style. The setting: a Manhattan ad agency, circa 1960. The first season has just been released on DVD.

Fresh Air's film critic reviews Jonathan Levine's film — a comedy, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Peck, about a drug dealer, his shrink and the difficulty they both have growing up.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews Mad Men, the drama about advertising execs during the Kennedy years. Season two of the Emmy-nominated series begins on Sunday night on AMC.

As a journalist, John Darnton spent 40 years at The New York Times. As a novelist, he writes colorful mysteries. His newest murder yarn, set in a big-city newsroom that seems awfully familiar: Black and White and Dead All Over.

Theodore Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review, died Aug. 8 of complications from pneumonia. He was 79. An influential man in the publishing world, Solotaroff helped writers like Philip Roth achieve recognition.

The film version of John Patrick Shanley play is a heavy slab of dramaturgy: It's dark, somber, yet unbelievably intense. Even on screen, it has the compressed quality of great theater.

James Bobin is the co-creator and director of HBO's series Flight Of The Conchords. He has been nominated for eight Emmys since 2003 for his work on Conchords and Da Ali G Show.

The Newsweek journalist writes that the NYPD has become one of the world's best intelligence-gathering operations; his book Securing the City explores New York City's creation of an elite counter-terror force.

Rock historian Ed Ward explains how New York City's Tin Pan Alley songwriters coped with changing times in the 1960s.

Gay rights activist Rodger McFarlane was involved in the earliest efforts to combat the transmission of AIDS during the 1980s. McFarlane, who was 54, died May 15. According to his bother, the cause of death was suicide.

Recently issued in paperback, Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland emerged to immediate acclaim in 2008, and many critics — including Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan — placed it on a footing with The Great Gatsby.

The Mad Ones is the tale of real-life gangsters Larry, Albert "Kid Blast" and "Crazy" Joe Gallo — a Mafia clan that inspired Bob Dylan's "Joey" and were a major inspiration for The Godfather.

Colin Beavan, the protagonist of the documentary No Impact Man, spends a year living "eco-effectively" — eating only locally grown foods and, eventually, forgoing electricity and toilet paper. Critic David Edelstein calls the film a "21st-century climate-change comedy of manners."

It was in 1967, on her first day in New York, that 20-year-old aspiring poet Patti Smith met fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Their friendship, romance and creative collaboration began on that day and lasted until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.

Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are back for a Middle Eastern adventure in Sex and the City 2. Critic David Edelstein says the film is an "all-out drag school with arch one-liners and product placements -- and almost no emotional heft."