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Slate contributor Mark Jordan Legan sums up what film critics are saying about this weekend's major new movie releases: The Departed, Employee of the Month and The Queen.

Greg Daniels and Mindy Kaling work on the hit NBC series The Office, starring Steve Carrell. Kaling also plays Kelly on the show. Daniels has a history of TV comedy writing. He has worked on Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld and The Simpsons. Kaling had a role in Carrell's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and appeared on an episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

In American fiction, TV and film, suburbia has long stood as shorthand for repression. It's a place of "wide lawns and narrow minds," as Earnest Hemingway put it. But representations of the suburbs have taken on a different shape of late.

Alan Cheuse reviews Half of a Yellow Sun, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel takes place during the Biafran War of the 1960s and follows characters through the turbulent times.

Bass baritone opera star Samuel Ramey has made a career out of playing demonic characters on stage. But he tells Scott Simon that in his early years he listened to the likes of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.

Little Children tracks an affair between a dissatisfied housewife and "the prom king," a stay-at-home dad who avoids studying for the Bar as he visits the playground with his son. Things come to a head when a man sent to jail for exposing himself to children is released and moves into the community.

Infamous tells the story of Truman Capote as he wrote In Cold Blood. If that sounds familiar, it's because a movie about the exact same thing came out a year ago, and it was a better film.

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a decade is an idea-driven film based on a Romanian philosopher's delicate novella. It's about an aged academic who becomes young again when he's struck by lightning.

When the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the ceramic sculpture "The Faun" in 1997, they thought they were getting the work of French master Paul Gauguin. It turns out the sculpture was actually created by English forger Shaun Greenhalgh. Ronald Spencer, a lawyer who specializes in art authentication, decodes the deal.

Fresh Air's book critic looks back at a busy year and selects the books that linger in memory as the calendar page turns. Her favorite fiction included Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires, and Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan.