rosenbaum followed dave kehr as the main film critic for "chicago reader" until 2008. he is the author of many books on film, including "film: the front line 1983" (1983), "placing movies: the practice of film criticism" (1995), "moving places: a life at the movies" (1980; reprint 1995), "movies as politics" (1997) and "essential cinema" (2004). his most popular work is "movie wars: how hollywood and the media limit what movies we can see" (2002). he has also written the best-known analysis of jim jarmusch's film "dead man"; the volume includes recorded interviews with jarmusch; the book places the film in the acid western subgenre. he edited "this is orson welles" (1992) by welles and peter bogdanovich, a collection of interviews and other materials relating to welles, and was consultant on both the re-editing of welles's "touch of evil" released in 1998, based on a lengthy memo written by welles to universal pictures in the 1950s, and the 2018 posthumous completion of welles's "the other side of the wind".