Chekhov put it best. He said every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet, with a hammer, to remind him that not everyone is happy.

The Stuff of Fiction

More than one critic has offered "Cache" as a nifty companion piece to Steven Spielberg's "Munich." The way both films consider personal responsibility makes that true enough. But the recent opus that came to mind was David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a movie also about a man, his family, and the vagaries in his past. Cronenberg turned a commentary on the proverbial sins of the father into an action movie. With his cheesy-satirical smokescreens, however, Cronenberg wanted us to laugh with him. Haneke is determined to haunt us. Maybe Georges's ghosts are ours, too.

Cache (Hidden) Movie Review

It is, as I have said, a small movie, and there will be those who'll think it's little ado about even less. Others will find in it a reminder that everything can change even when nothing seems to be happening. "Duck Season" hits every one of its modest marks and then some. It's the kind of movie to send you out looking at strangers on the street with newfound appreciation and something close to love.

Duck Season (Temporada de patos) Movie Review

Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world. Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction.

Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006

I'm not a musician, but I recently composed and recorded a song. More than that, in a Paul McCartneyesque fit of post-Beatles hubris, I played all the instruments and produced and engineered the entire thing, even though I have no experience producing and engineering anything more complicated than a Bombay martini.

Composing Music Using Apple Computer's GarageBand Software

'The Unbinding,' Slate's serialized 'Net novel' being written and posted 'in real time' by Walter Kirn, raises intriguing possibilities for the future of fiction. But is it a future we really want?

Techno thriller

In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.

So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.

As Costume Dramas Go, Bettie Page's Is Rather Brief

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Lawsuit Over 'Brokeback Mountain' Reveals Unease Over Pay for 'Arthouse' Films