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Tom Moon reviews Jill Scott's new CC, Beautifully Human: Words and Sounds Vol. 2. Scott had an incredibly successful debut recording 4 years ago. She has kept a fairly low profile until now. Tom Moon says her new recording is in a tradition of great soul singers writing about the political in personal terms.

Red Lights, the new film from French director Cedric Kahn, is a taut, atmospheric thriller about a husband and wife who think they're going on vacation but are actually about to descend into a chaotic abyss. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has a review.

The Falls, the latest novel from Joyce Carol Oates, is a dark, fast-moving tale that begins with the suicide of a newlywed seminary student who leaps into Niagara Falls. Critic Alan Cheuse has a review.

HBO on Sunday night will begin airing episodes for season three of The Wire, a series about the dueling bureaucracies that govern cops and criminals in Baltimore, set against the backdrop of the drug trade. Variety critic and columnist Brian Lowry has a review.

Alan Cheuse reviews Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernieres. Cheuse says it's a story with numerous richly portrayed characters living in an Anatolian coastal village in the early 1900s.

NPR's Bob Mondello reviews the new film King Arthur. He says the movie falls short because not only does it fail to follow the Arthurian legend, but all the dialogue, action scenes and wardrobe just seem silly.

The second of summer 2004 installments of verse read at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, held every summer at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Conn. This week's featured artist is the Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco. He reads his poem, "Mother Picking Produce."

NPR's Scott Simon talks to Robert Calvert, founder of the World of Massage Museum in Spokane, Wash. Calvert says massage is a longstanding facet of medicine, and his museum has on display thousands of contraptions used over the ages.

Camp Alpha, a U.S. military base in Iraq, was built directly on top of the ancient temple area of Babylon. The base's location was chosen to protect the archeological site from looters. Instead, the base has resulted in damage that some antiquities experts characterize as "horrifying." Hear NPR's Renee Montagne and archeologist John Russell.

A new exhibit in Chicago focuses on a single painting -- Georges Seurat's groundbreaking, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The show features the trial-and-error preparations that led up to Seurat's masterpiece. NPR's Susan Stamberg reports on the exhibition, which opens Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago and runs through Sept. 19.