1. She's a grieving cop's widow, prone to nymphomania, locked away in a shed behind her parents' home, profoundly damaged—not broken, but close. He's a bipolar basket case who nearly beat a man half to death for showering with his wife, the same wife with whom he obsessively wants to reconcile, even as he rocks back…

With all the great directors out there to choose from—Tarantino, Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson—it's hard to think of many aspiring filmmakers who would look at David O. Russell's career and say, "That's who I want to be." There are auteurs who follow the beat of their own drum, and then there's Russell, who just about…

There are many ways to tell if you've become a popular actress. Your name appears above the title on the poster. You're on the covers of magazines. You get an Oscar nomination. Those are all pretty great things. Then, there are those other ways of finding out that you're popular. These are a lot less fun, such as the…

1. I feel I need to say this out front about The Hunger Games, since I'd never read the young adult book and wasn't quite sure what I was in for: This movie has a lot of on-screen child murders. Now, maybe on the page, this was less jarring, with the whole inherent textual…