Car bomb attacks sweep across Baghdad, killing at least 70.

Beyoncé is expecting baby number two...or is she?

Chinese hackers resume their attacks on U.S. targets.

The 59th annual Drama Desk Awards were announced yesterday.

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis makes its Cannes debut.

Can gay New Yorker Marc Carson's murder have as big an impact as Matthew Shepard's?

The Coen brothers switch gears so often and with such gleeful finesse that their restlessness can no longer qualify as genre-hopping pastiche, if it ever did. At this point they're simply a style unto themselves, a self-sufficient duo with a built in audience, art-house cred, and, when they want to indulge, box-office potential. Inside Llewyn Davis, then, isn't a curveball so much as another stopover on a now-two-decade-plus journey that's taken on noir, slapstick, thriller, western, and everything in between. It's also one of their strongest recent efforts, an alternately world-weary and hilarious ode to a period of relatively recent vintage that's nonetheless cherished as an era of new ideas, free-thinking, and artistic progression.

It's become more and more rare in contemporary cinema for a filmmaker to not only revisit thematic territory, but to essentially re-examine the same basic narrative dynamic from different angles. It's a tack few filmmakers continue to utilize, perhaps to avoid accusations of redundancy, but Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has made the most of his purposefully modest cinematic constructs. Like Father, Like Son, his latest in a long line of unassuming family dramas, is one of his most heartbreaking works yet.

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.