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 tech 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, too 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 at all. Their film has all the stylized convolution of The Matrix, but virtually none of the coherence or cerebral stimulation.

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.

"I'm not one of them storybook characters," a charismatic young man assures his girl of the moment. As the plot develops, we watch the girl be seduced and then disillusioned by the man she thought was one-of-a-kind. Her hard lesson captures in microcosm the appeal of adapting John Cassavetes's 1959 film Shadows to the stage, a project taken on two years ago by the ensemble company Hoi Polloi and now in revival at the company's new theatrical home, Jack in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Cassavetes's film, his first, is a barely plotted, hyper-naturalized slice of life in the "shadows" of New York City's jazz scene. The film's credits call it an "improvisation," a typically coy claim by Cassavetes to make his audience feel they've witnessed an authentic experience rather than a carefully crafted representation. (The film was made without a script, and most of the characters were given the same names as their actors, but that doesn't mean the scenes were unplanned.) Bringing the film to theatrical life—scene by scene, line by line, gesture by gesture—is to be wiser than the girl. It is to be charmed but never tricked by those who claim to be "real," but are, in fact, characters from a human imagination.