Jennie Yabroff

Steve Carell is stepping into the kinds of roles that made Tom Hanks famous.

After years in prison, Stacey Lannert explains why the man who abused her had to be stopped.

When Danish director Susanne Bier delivered her acceptance speech at this year's Golden Globe Awards, she left the audience speechless. Literally. Accepting her award for best foreign-language film from Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson, Bier nervously joked that her movie features "people who speak like they have potatoes shoved down their throats." Dead silence. After several awkward seconds, the director hastily wrapped up her speech.

Chelsea Handler isn't just a trash-talking comic. She's a bestselling author, talk-show host, and money machine.

In "Wretches & Jabberers," we see Chammi, a Sri Lankan man with autism, typing that it is "killingly hard to figure out" why he sometimes can't control his body.

Four new friends sit around a table at an outdoor café in Helsinki, typing on handheld devices. Shyly, Tracy sends Henna a message asking if she might like to visit him. Avoiding eye contact, Henna types back that she will need to ask her mother. The scene could be that of any group of teenagers, awkward and bashful, more comfortable texting than engaging in face-to-face conversation. The difference is that the typists range from young adults to middle-aged. And all of them are autistic.

Proust had his madeleine. The yoga writer has her cobbler's pose.

You would think a movie inspired by the true-ish story of gulag escapees who walked from Siberia to India would be, if nothing else, emotionally exhausting. But 'The Way Back' is a placid, almost pleasant film, so reluctant to offend that it fails to engage.

Tom and Gerri are happily married. How you take that statement—with a disinterested shrug or a disbelieving sneer—probably predicts how you'll react to this utterly ordinary, yet quite extraordinary film.

The film, based on the true story of a Texas con man who escaped from jail four times to be with the man he loved, can't decide whether it's a jaunty farce or a serious character study.

Increasingly, nudity has become a self-congratulatory indication of European-style seriousness, an interruption of the narrative to remind the audience we are watching A Work of Art.

"The Essential New York Times Cookbook," a nearly 1,000-page, bright-red doorstop, proves that when it comes to what we eat, there's no such thing as invention, merely reinterpretation.

Yosef Woldemariam came to America from Ethiopia by way of Sudan, first walking through war-ravaged villages to a port town, then stowing away on a ship in a packing crate.

Everything is perfect in Annie and Darren's marriage, except they can't remember the last time they had sex. Rather than questioning whether their union is in fact as flawless as they think, they conclude that sex with other people will be the key to marital bliss. In a way, they're right: the destabilizing effect of discussing the proposition, in a joking/not joking way, instantly spices up the relationship. What happens next? You'll have to see "The Freebie" to find out.

The movie "Howl" opens in black and white with a bespectacled poet adjusting his glasses and preparing to read. In the audience, college kids drink wine from glass jugs and blow cigarette smoke dramatically skyward. The poet begins. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

'The Romantics' is a very pretty movie that has no idea how silly it is. As a portrait of a group of Ivy League pals coming together for a wedding straight out of WASP heaven, it could not be more appealing: the clothes, the sets, and even the mist-shrouded landscape are J.Crew-perfect.

When it comes to forgery scandals, this one is the grandma of them all.

So far, critics have been careful to review "Freedom" and not Franzen, almost uniformly praising the novel without letting their feelings about the seemingly insufferably self-important writer color their views. Will readers be as generous?

Film is a visual medium, and the best directors exploit it to tell their stories with an economy of words. But with several recent movies, including the new "Eat Pray Love," the art of dramatization has been jettisoned in favor of hyperverbalization.

"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" opens this week, but apparently you needn't have seen the film to take part in the debate online: is this a movie for everyone, or is it just for audiences roughly the same age as the characters in it?

The new movie tells the tale of one woman's jaunt to the Middle East—with, of course, a spicy local named Tareq serving as her requisite Middle Eastern chaperone. But isn't Clarkson too fearless to be playing the ninny-esque lady abroad?

Watch just a few seconds of the footage the major news outlets ran nearly nonstop in the weeks following Pat Tillman's death and you'll get a crash course in Mythmaking 101.

Many first-time memoirists are motivated by self-serving desires: to make the world notice them or to make the world like them. Neither can be said of Bill Clegg or Darin Strauss. Both were already successful—Clegg as a literary agent, Strauss as a novelist—when they decided to write memoirs. Rather than polishing their images, their books explore the darkest moments of the writers' lives.

A new documentary about the founder of "Playboy" confuses a dirty mind with an open one.

With themes including incest, pedophilia, and suicide, Todd Solondz's films aren't exactly the kind you give "two enthusiastic thumbs up" to. So what does it say about someone who not only likes his movies but also likes his least sympathetic character most of all?

In her reviews, Pauline Kael can come across as a bit of a bully and a snob—you imagine her voice as either shouting or cackling with derision. Which is why it's such a treat—and a shock—to celebrate the 30th anniversary of her essay "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers" by watching this 1982 conversation between Kael and Canadian interviewer Brian Linehan.

The movie is called "Dinner for Schmucks", so naturally the climax happens at a dinner. Steve Carell plays Barry, a schmo (yes, you need "Joys of Yiddish" to read this story) who makes dioramas featuring dead, but cute, mice.

Parenthood—the condition, not the TV show—sucks. Or so everyone keeps saying.

It's unclear if the trailer for Gary Shteyngart's 'Super Sad True Love Story' will sell any more books than any of the straightfaced, acoustic-guitar-backed trailers that have come to define the genre, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to watch.

Jack Rebney is a very angry man. At least he was a very angry man during the two sweltering August weeks 22 years ago when he tried to film a promotional video for Winnebago motor homes. Unbeknownst to him at the time, his crew kept the camera rolling for his outbursts and edited together a short video of his explosions.