Rosenbaum followed Dave Kehr as the main film critic for "The 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 a consultant on both the 1998 re-editing of Welles's "Touch of Evil" (and based on a lengthy memo written by Welles to Universal Pictures in the 1950s) and the 2018 completion of Welles's "The Other Side of the Wind".