Along with my peers, I gripe about the increasing number of superhero films, and I'm sad that so many critics so uncritically use words like franchise, which should be reserved for your local Burger King.

My reaction to 'Sin City' is easily stated. I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. A tad hypocritical? Yes. But sometimes you think, Well, I'll just go to hell.

Ever since the Tim Burton Batman of 1989, it has been de rigueur in movies to focus on the freaky alienation aspect of the superhero's life: This is how talented people make movies for 14-year-olds while retaining their self-respect.

I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

You can feel righteous fury in every frame of The Magdalene Sisters. The movie is both a masterpiece and a holy hell: Watching it, you feel you're being punished for a crime you didn't commit. Which puts you, come to think of it, in the same frame of mind as those poor Magdalene girls.

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.