I cover Baltimore's homegrown moviemaking talents -- Barry Levinson, John Waters and Edward Norton -- as well as visitors like David Fincher, who shot part of "The Social Network" here (Johns Hopkins doubling for Harvard), and the many filmmakers who show up for the Maryland Film Festival, including, recently, Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker") and Rodrigo Garcia ("In Treatment," "Mother and Child"). I also stay on top of the city's theater operations and literary scene, interviewing authors like Taylor Branch ("The Clinton Tapes") and Laura Lippman ("I'd Know You Anywhere"). On my blog, "Mike Sragow Gets Reel," I enjoy a give and take with readers on current and classic movies as well as events like the reopening of Baltimore's legendary movie palace, The Senator.

The movie that made me want to write about movies was Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," which I saw six times in two weeks in 1969. I was the movie critic for Rolling Stone, a movie columnist for Salon, and I have been a regular contributor to the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker since 1989. I have written for every form of newspaper from alternative weeklies like the Boston Phoenix to The New York Times. My essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Film Comment, and the late, lamented The Modern Review. I often write DVD\Blu-ray liner notes for the Criterion Collection. My critical biography "Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master" (Pantheon), about the man who directed "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," was a co-winner of the National Award for Arts Writing in 2008. I edited two volumes of James Agee's fiction, non-fiction and criticism for the Library of America (2005), and "Produced and Abandoned: The National Society of Film Critics Write on the Best Films You've Never Seen" (1990). I have taught movies to undergraduates at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and film journalism to graduate students at UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.