The Immigrant is the film James Gray has been working toward his entire career. He's established a unique reputation over 20 years and four features. His first three films (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night) dealt largely with a world of criminal activity and frayed family bonds, often times between brothers. Two Lovers followed soon after, betraying the first signs of Gray's thematic maturation. A simple love triangle rendered equal parts beautiful and devastating, the film was both vital and transitional for the filmmaker. His latest, the intimately focused, epically scaled period piece The Immigrant, is, finally, his masterpiece, a classical melodrama of high ambition and fulfilled promise.

The men in Alexander Payne's movies are on a constant journey. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson's Warren experiences late-life enlightenment when he travels cross-country to his daughter's wedding. In Sideways, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church's characters experience an entire midlife crisis as they explore central California's wine country. Most recently, George Clooney's Matt King traveled the Hawaiian islands in an attempt to reconnect with his daughters and reconcile with his seriously injured wife in The Descendants. (You have to go back to Payne's first two features, Citizen Ruth and Election, to find female protagonists who were also seen at difficult crossroads.) In the process, Payne has become one of American cinema's most respected chroniclers of male discontent and awakening. If his latest, Nebraska, doesn't alter the formula, it also does so on a more refreshingly modest scale than that of The Descendants.

[Editor's Note: In Sinful Cinema, the House looks back at so-bad-they're-kinda-good movies that have been forgotten for a reason. You call them guilty pleasures; we call them rightfully buried treasures.]

At the dawn of the 2000s, Warner Bros., Joel Silver, and Village Roadshow Pictures had to do something to keep their Matrix momentum going. So, while waiting for the Wachowski siblings to form and polish their techie triumph's sequels, neither of which would arrive until 2003, the studio bigwigs developed Swordfish, a tacky, brazen knockoff they undoubtedly saw as the next best thing. Even opening, pointlessly, with a familiar, pixelated-screen aesthetic before adjusting to 35mm, this risible techno thriller fires so much aww-shit "coolness" at its viewers that, upon its June 2001 release, few likely realized they were being hit with hollow shells. It's all an unwitting realization of the "misdirection" philosophy so reiterated by cyber-villain Gabriel (John Travolta), who talks about Houdini and Dog Day Afternoon like he's a cultural sage with blonde highlights (also rocking berets and traipsing around his LA-nightclub pad, Gabriel trumps Edna Turnblad as Travolta's gayest role). You see, Swordfish thinks it's one heady affair flecked with nifty booms and stunts, but its ideas are as goofily slim as its action is often needless, and director Dominic Sena and writer Skip Woods seem blissfully blind to it all. Their film has all the stylized convolution of The Matrix, but virtually none of the coherence or cerebral stimuli.

The Boy Scouts of America voted yesterday to lift its ban on gay youth.

In other news, this scout-leader mom is London's hottest hero.

Pope Francis states that performing "good works" is not exclusive to people of faith.

The Coke ad that could destroy all other products, especially Coke.

Amanda Bynes threw a bong out a New York window and got arrested.

Palme d'Awful: The worst films for sale at Cannes, in pictures.

Obama administration admits to killing four Americans in drone strikes.

The president also renews his commitment to closing Guantanamo.

Richard Linklater and Francis Ford Coppola line up their next films.

Presumptuous talking head meets lovely atheist.

Helen Mirren helps grant dying boy's last wish.

Sean Hackett on fighting bullying with movies.

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive arrived at an opportune moment. Coming off a decade where the American genre film devolved into lowest-common-denominator investments and blockbusters ballooned skyward on the backs of sequels and franchises, Refn's modest exercise in crime pastiche and car-chase nostalgia parlayed both the exhaustion of Hollywood's narrative resources and—perhaps more importantly—the gathering mainstream curiosity in independent music's preoccupation with the sound and feel of the 1980s (the film's soundtrack has become one of the most popular word-of-mouth successes of the decade).

Disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner is running for mayor of New York City.

Meanwhile, crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford has "ruined [his] city's reputation for good."

The third annual Critics' Choice TV Award nominations have been announced.

Time's new cover story explores "The Angelina Effect" and the impact of her choice.

Reporting from Cannes, our friend Keith Uhlich calls Behind the Candelabra a masterpiece.

Zach Galifianakis's red-carpet arm candy has been a woman he saved from homelessness.

Both Takashi Miike's muscular chase flick Shield of Straw and Johnnie To's wildly compounded romantic policier Blind Detective make an asset out of their respective pillaging of genre signifiers. That these individual films succeed to varying degrees—in some instances in spite of themselves—matters little in the grand scheme of their creators' narratives: Each have made more original films, more consistently compelling films, and flat-out better films. But there's something oddly compelling about their unique existences as notable entries in what now could be considered prestigious filmographies.

Violent tornado in Oklahoma leaves an unconfirmed number of people dead.

Unbelievable footage of the storm.

Republican Senator Tom Coburn seeks to offset emergency tornado aide.

Remembering the Doors' co-founder and keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

Thousands rallied against recent LGBT-related violence in New York City last night.

Listen to Beyoncé's new single, "Grown Woman."

Orphans has got some major daddy issues. Lyle Kessler's 30-year-old regional theater mainstay is the Field of Dreams of plays: Men go to laugh, whoop it up, and cry, wishing they could get a hug from Papa. The plot, as simple and primal as a fable, serves as a delivery system for sensations: Phillip and Treat have made it out of adolescence all on their own; Mom died and Dad ran off early on, and perhaps as a result, the brothers are mentally and emotionally stunted, respectively. Treat kidnaps Harold, a shady businessman, for ransom; after wriggling free, he stays on to domesticate the wild boys, but trouble follows him to his new home.