Interviewing an Academy Award-nominated director could be daunting, but when the director is Jason Reitman, it’s anything but. At the age of 32, Reitman has already written and directed three feature films and several shorts, and has garnered the respect of the film industry.

It’s been a great season for television. With numerous hits such as “Flash Forward,” “Glee” and “Community,” television is looking up.

Few things excite me as much as the dawn of awards season, which is quickly approaching, though seasonal coffee flavors like gingerbread do come close. The onslaught of award-worthy films is both overwhelming and exhilarating. Because there are so many “good” films coming out in the next few weeks, I’ve narrowed it down to the five that have me squealing in excitement.

Just as a painter possesses the intuition to create the perfect brush stroke, so too does a chef use his talent to make braised pig’s head with the same level of refinement. St. Louis’s own Gerard Craft is such an artist, whose work can be seen at his restaurants Niche and Taste by Niche in Benton Park.

A shallow blonde aspiring model dies in a car crash with a truck full of grapefruits. Then in heaven, she learns she’s a “zero,” having done no good deeds and no bad deeds.

As reality programming comes to dominate the television arena, requisite stereotypes of characters have emerged. It seems that every show has a few main staples that no good reality show […]

If ever a person embodied the words “endearing misanthrope,” that person would be Larry David. To quote the master himself, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is “pritty, pritty, prit-ty good.” Larry David created the show and stars as a fictionalized version of himself.

The philosopher Herbert Spencer once remarked that marriage is “a word which should be pronounced ‘mirage.’” In the new film “Couples Retreat,” marriage is certainly portrayed as if it were a distant mirage. This new comedy reunites much of the cast of the 2006 flick “The Break-Up.” Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman and Jon Favreau come together again to play best friends, with Peter Billingsley, who plays their other friend in “The Break-Up,” directing them in this film.

Dear Bliss, Maggie Mayhem, Smashley Simpson, Rosa Sparks, Bloody Holly and the rest of the Hurl Scouts,

When a woman undergoes drastic plastic and reconstructive surgery in order to resemble a chicken and enter a reality TV ice-skating contest, you take notice. This and several other absurdist premises are the focal points of a new exhibit of prints by St. Louis-based printmaker Tom Huck in the exhibit “The Rebellious Tradition of Printmaking” at the St. Louis Art Museum.