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Filmmaker Brian De Palma has been making movies and stirring controversy for more than 40 years. His films include Scarface and Casualties of War; his new Redacted retells a true story about a rape and murder committed in Iraq by U.S. soldiers.

Our cultural concierge, Jesse Kornbluth, urges revisiting the 1983 comedy, Local Hero. The soundtrack of this overlooked film – about Scottish villagers who thwart an American oil company's efforts to buy their land — is just as entertaining as the premise.

Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series. It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike. Critic David Bianculli, who's working on the Web himself now at TVWorthWatching.com, has a review.

Novelist Geraldine Brooks, poet Robert Hass, Western essayist William Kittredge: from critic Alan Cheuse, an array of books to keep winter's chill and the ever-earlier dark at bay — at least in the circle of light by the reader's chair.

Fresh Air's TV critic looks at three lavish DVD box sets: David Lynch's deliciously eccentric Twin Peaks, the legendary '90s comedy Seinfeld, and the cult-classic teen drama My So-Called Life.

Jerry Seinfeld's animated comedy centers on an amusing honeybee who talks a lot about nothing, then quits work — whereupon the world gets dreary until he starts up again. It's a fairly personal vision — and a bit of a drone.

Matthew Diffee contributes regularly to the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker. But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and publishes only 20 cartoons in each issue. Diffee's new book, featuring his work and that of other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

"Seduced" at the Barbican Gallery attempts to show 2,500 years of sexuality in world art, and to explore how attitudes about what is erotic art and what is pornography have changed through the ages. It's billed as the most sexually explicit fine-art exhibition ever staged.

Brian de Palma is one of cinema's most hypnotic stylists, a virtuoso who can expand your perception of space, time and motion onscreen. So when he throws away his jazzy technique and goes for rough-hewn and immediate — as in Redacted — it's a major statement.

Fresh Air's critic at large tells us why he loves the high-fashion challenge, a reality-TV staple now in its fourth season on cable's Bravo channel.