The American Jewish Story Through Cinema, the latest book from author/scholar Eric A. Goldman, is a difficult work to evaluate, primarily because Goldman is quite proficient in one sense (contextualizing the development and production of American Jewish stories/films within Hollywood cinema) and wholly deficient in another (offering a critical lens from which to form nuanced considerations). When presented with these problems, the deficiencies inevitably outweigh the proficiencies, because even the adept historicizing is tainted by a sense that what's being presented merely gets at the surface of these complex issues. Moreover, Goldman has written an academic book that's constructed in such a basic, often needlessly explanatory manner, that one cannot help conclude his ultimate aim is less an appeal to academics seeking a thorough, methodologically rigorous framework, than a more biographically inclined reader, whose interest lies purely in the historical context within which the chosen films of study were produced.

Just like many of his fellow countrymen, including compatriot Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has been forced to ply his trade outside his homeland's borders under threat of government intervention. Whatever the logistics, however, Farhadi's latest domestic drama, The Past, while produced in France, is a seamless translation of both his stylistic and thematic sensibilities. Farhadi arrived on an international level with 2011's A Separation, a typically knotty character study which netted awards all the way from festivals to the Academy. He'd done similar, equally compelling work prior to his breakthrough (2009's About Elly stands as arguably his strongest film), but with an increased eye on Middle Eastern cinema in the wake of Kiarostami's Certified Copy and the jailing of the more radical, uncompromising Jafar Panahi, coupled with the film's heart-tugging narrative, A Separation arrived at an opportune time for his country's rise to international cinematic prominence. The Past parlays this goodwill with even more wide-reaching potential, extending Farhadi's streak of strong work while cementing him as one of world cinema's most universal storytellers.

Web sensation "Kai, the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker" has been arrested for murder.

Richard Brody talks Frances Ha and the pursuit of happiness.

Assessing American Idol's waning dominance after a mild season-12 showdown.

The Guardian reviews Cannes selection and Sundance favorite Fruitvale Station.

In other Cannes news, $1 million worth of red-carpet jewelry was stolen from a hotel room.

The New York Post buyouts are focusing on "loyal soldiers" and "highest paid."

Immediately upon picking up a copy of Maria San Filippo's The B Word, one can't help but be skeptical of its survey-suggestive subtitle: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television. Too often these sorts of book-length inquiries result in thin reasoning, a lack of sufficient theoretical foundation, and become, essentially, a cataloguing of film titles or scenes that help affirm the author's central thesis. This brand of indexical scholarship is tired and, aside from a resource, ultimately worthless in terms of further explicating the trends and nuances of a given subject. Perhaps that's why San Filippo's book is a joy to actually read and not just glean information from. Much like Daisuke Miyao did with The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lightning and Japanese Cinema, released earlier this year, San Filippo structures her scholarship with storytelling sensibilities; the analysis is provocative and wholly considerate of its area of study, but also proceeds with a glee and determination that produces new, exciting avenues for future study within queer theory.

As such, San Filippo consistently relies on case studies to elucidate these viewpoints, but does so anchored under a few precise and playful lines of inquiry. For example, the book's opening introduces San Filippo's term "bi-textuality," which involves the "negotiation of unfamiliar terrain by way of a familiar route," and helps to enliven the book's predominant thesis—that bisexual sensibilities are present in many mainstream American films, not just in terms of content but also marketing strategies—by way of wordplay. The term's creation helps found exactly the ways in which San Filippo wishes to proceed and affirms that she's looking for far more than merely instances of latent bisexuality; more compellingly, she demonstrates "the ways in which bisexuality is already present, if obscured—hidden in plain sight—by modes of representation and reading confined within monosexual logic." The films/shows under examination are wide-ranging; even the staunchest of post-structuralists would have to raise an eyebrow at the book's mentions of Pandora's Box (1929) and A Shot at Love (2007-2009) in the same sentence! Yet, San Filippo is no fraud when it comes to effectively juxtaposing these kinds of texts. Whereas a lesser author might offer such a comparison to feign cosmopolitan interests, San Filippo's deft navigation of how these texts do interact with one another borders on remarkable, in expressing macrocosmic cultural sensibilities as it relates to bisexual representations, both explicit and implied.

From the opening moments of Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin, something strange is afoot—and not just the unexpected flourish of violence which punctuates the first scene. The opening titles announce the film as a co-production between Jia's Xstream Pictures and the Shanghai Film Group, marking this as the Chinese iconoclast's first studio film in a career of independent productions. Prior to his great 2004 film The World, his work wasn't sanctioned by the Chinese government, so pointed was the critique of his homeland. Since that time, Jia has spent time working in both the documentary form (Dong; I Wish I Knew) and through something approaching both documentary and narrative cinema (Still Life; 24 City), effectively—almost imperceptibly—combining devices from each in an effort at constructing an altogether new hybrid. In some ways, then, A Touch of Sin feels like the film many may have expected to follow something like The World. In every other conceivable way, however, Jia's latest represents new, uncharted stylistic frontier, one littered gunplay, knife fights—even an explosion.

[Editor's Note: Poster Lab is your regular dose of movie poster dissection, wherein the House examines the pluses, minuses, and in-betweens of the poster design(s) for a buzzworthy film.]

Since the film is so anticipated as both adaptation and buzzy ensemble piece, the poster for August: Osage County would have been an event no matter what it looked like. Directed by TV vet John Wells, who made his feature film debut with The Company Men, this dark comedy marks the first-ever onscreen pairing of Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, who play Violet and Barbara Watson, the mother and daughter who lead the clan in Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize-winning tale. All who know the play know the importance of the work's vast cast, and such is the major selling point here.

Stacked high like an actorly steeple are names both established and up-and-coming: Streep, Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis, (the great) Margo Martindale, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham, and more. It's a very tempting mix, and despite the overly genial, all's-well-that-end's-well nature of the trailer, it helps to know that Letts has penned the screenplay too, and hopefully hasn't watered his work down to Hollywoodized dysfunction (lord knows no one needs another The Family Stone). Presumably, Letts's script also holds the promise of avoiding the trap of multi-character dramedies, which serially fail to develop individual personalities amid the crowd. It's a grating trend that couldn't be better visualized here, and let's hope the packed-house symbolism reflects the film's ability to overcome it.

Ricky Gervais says he's still the same run-of-the-mill comic genius he's always been.

Steven Spielberg admits to not being familiar with all those up for the Palme d'Or.

Which is probably why he claimed to dislike black actors to get out of jury duty.

James Franco gives us a few impressions of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

Why pot smokers are skinnier.

Sofia Coppola's fascination with the young and over-privileged reaches a logical plateau with The Bling Ring, a hyperaware consideration of celebrity intrigue and idolization. Based on the semi-recent wave of burglaries perpetrated by a group of high school kids on the unsuspecting gossip-rag regulars residing in the Hollywood Hills, the film depicts, with an alternately implicating and critical eye, the rise and fall of adolescent naïveté and entitlement. It's a subject that Coppola has spent much of her career dramatizing across various milieus, from the suburban daydreams of The Virgin Suicides to the ornate, 18th-century re-imaginings of Marie Antoinette to the Los Angeles summertime sprawl of Somewhere. She's remained in the City of Angels for her latest, but this is anything but a tale of wayward cherubs. Fueled by the very lifestyle they're nonchalantly pillaging, this band of smalltime crooks have learned that actions rarely have consequences, and spend the entire film putting this theory, propagated and sustained by the media, to the fullest possible test.

Jack's Back reminded me of the late Roger Ebert's oft-quoted saying "it's not what a film is about, but how it's about it." With plot ideas from jarringly different sources, the film should seem indecisive about its intentions. But writer-director Rowdy Harrington clearly knows the clever plan by which all these pieces fall together; his intention isn't transcending the genre so much as toying with the audience's expectations of it. Jack's Back has a serial killer, a murder mystery wherein you immediately see whodunit, a man wrongly accused, memory-inducing hypnosis, and psychically linked twins, one of whom not only is the victim in the aforementioned murder, but also may be the serial killer. There may be too many ingredients, but the pleasure of the film comes from watching how this genre jambalaya cooks.

Nineteen eighty eight has its hands all over the film: moonlight pours through the slats in open blinds, illuminating the smoky interiors of buildings; people have mullets and the remnants of Joisey hair; a dreadful (even by 80's standards) rock song blasts across the opening credits, followed later by a synth-heavy score replete with lonely saxophone solos selling sex. Unlike most '80s slasher movies, the sex stays on the soundtrack, but Jack's Back succumbs to that genre's penchant for the "it's only a dream" sequence. How Harrington handles this familiar trope is the film's biggest and most ingenious surprise.

[Editor's Note: In Body of Work, the House explores the efforts of an exciting, established talent, whose recent choices have yielded a fruitful career surge.]

There's plenty more to Lake Bell than the casual viewer—or gawker—might think. On the big screen (It's Complicated), the small screen (How to Make It in America), and even online (Children's Hospital), the 34-year-old has shown her great gift for angsty comedy, and with things like this 2011 Maxim cover story, she's broadcasted her embrace of being a slinky sex symbol. She's merged both attributes in recent flicks like A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, and in New Girl, on which she briefly guest-starred. But Bell has tackled her share of straight-up drama, too, in projects like the short-lived series Surface, her recurring role on The Practice and Boston Legal, and, now, the girls-gone-primal survivor thriller Black Rock, which co-stars Kate Bosworth and the film's director, Katie Aselton. Highly rugged and often quite brutal, Black Rock sees its trio of female leads do all their own stunts, and suffer a great deal of bumps, cuts and bruises in the process. Was it a thrill for Bell to ditch the giggling and vamping and dive into no-frills combat?

"I mean, hell yes," the actress says, calling in from L.A., "especially because I don't get this opportunity, ever. Well, in Surface I got to do it a little bit, but it's been many years since I've had the opportunity to let out my inner badass. Katie Aselton specifically did not want us to workout, train, or choreograph anything. She really wanted it to be messy, and real, so it felt very real and therefore a little more uncomfortable. In these movies, it takes you out of it sometimes when you see normal civilians all of the sudden rising to the occasion and doing a jiu-jitsu roundhouse kick or something. In order to sell this, we really kinda had to just go for it."