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From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career […]

What may remain obscure, even now, is why people would choose to play D&D, all night, night after night, for years.[4] Why intelligent human beings would find the actions of imaginary fighters, thieves, dwarves, elves, etc., as they move through a space that exists only notionally, and consists more often than not of dimly lit […]

The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really […]

Twenty-three movies in 23 years suggests an already amazing, Woody Allen-like productivity. But Soderbergh has been even more prolific than that number indicates. During the first part of his career, development struggles and the learning curve of a new filmmaker put him on a two-year cycle. His debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, was released in […]

To the writing of his detective stories Raymond Chandler brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which […]

In 1998, a national magazine asked in an article “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” Thirteen years later, you can still buy T-shirts that answer yes. The 46-year-old director has long been treated by cineastes as the macho spawn of Ed Wood—a testosterone-sweating embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood. (Those quotes up there […]

In February 2009, with the threat of Facebook’s growing popularity looming over their company, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the co-founders of Myspace, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. DeWolfe explained that Myspace was more than a social network; it was a portal where people discovered new friends and music and movies—it was practically where […]

Smith now says self-distribution was the goal as far back as the first week of production on “Red State.” “Day four, I was sitting on the set and I realized that it felt like the Little Rascals — everybody was doing it for love, we weren’t gonna get paid. And I thought, We’re gonna pull […]

Google’s Ads Preferences believes I’m a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn’t care about “books & literature” or “people & society.” (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes […]

Until five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of the best-loved and best-paid talents in Hollywood, not to mention one of the town’s few real family men. How to explain the foulmouthed, violent bigotry that has since burst into public view, making him an industry pariah, even as his 26-year marriage imploded? With the help […]