The parkour scenes are, in fact, awesome.

Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer—swift, funny, filled with actual stunts instead of digitized mayhem, and primed at a moment's notice for megaton ass-kicking. Set in 2010 Paris, it fuses Escape From New York's futuristic city-as-prison concept with Assault on Precinct 13's bristling political subtext, as an undercover cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a convict (David Belle) battle their way through a walled-in underclass banlieue searching for a massive "clean bomb." The plot is mostly straight-to-video silliness, except for a final kicker that feeds off the real-life unrest seething in Paris's strife-torn suburbs. But Belle—a master of parkour, the French extreme sport/martial art devoted to the casual hurdling of physical obstacles—brings an exhilarating athleticism to the many chases and fights. I'd trade all of M:i:III's 126 minutes for one 1.7-second shot of Belle hurtling himself in a single motion through a locked door's transom.

District B13 | Review

Only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened by the calling analysis program.

Information Please

In The King, Gael García Bernal plays a sailor named Elvis who shakes the moral foundations of an upstanding Texas town. And Presley themes aside, it's one of the most original movies ever made about religion in America.

The King | THE CRITIC: GQ

Movies in Piedmont Park.

See Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Screen on the Green, in Atlanta

The village's era as a party haven is over.

It's being replaced by high-rises, condos and a vision of Peachtree Road that could transform Buckhead into a place where people will live, work and walk.

Buckhead Rising

Porter Goss is not the only person responsible for the agency's lamentable state, though he certainly contributed to it. The media, with a few exceptions, continues to miss the story behind his disastrous tenure at the spy agency.

Gosslings, Bacon, and a Kobe Beef Cow (Harpers.org)

From changes to sixth- and seventh-grade social-science textbooks used in California, proposed by religious organizations and scholars. Last fall the California Curriculum Commission reviewed a total of 684 suggested changes and tentatively approved 499.

The Choosy People (Harpers.org)

Many of us, of course, have spent hours at the movies relishing violence and explosions as entertainment. In the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” we see explosions in which real people die, and the sequence comes as a kick in the gut.

The Cult of the Suicide Bomber | The New Yorker

Do people have a fundamental right to genetically and biotechnologically enhance their bodies and brains? That question was central to the "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights" (HETHR) Conference held over the Memorial Day weekend at Stanford University's Law School. The conference was sponsored by the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences along with a number of technoprogressive groups including the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, geneforum, and ExtraLife.

Is genetic modification of people moral?

Last week an exhilarating and perplexing mixture of visionaries, philosophers, transhumanists, legal scholars, and technophiles along with some crackpots and naysayers gathered for a two day meeting at Stanford University's Law School to ponder the future of human enhancement and posthumanity. The occasion was the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) conference. HETHR featured lectures ranging from sober discussions of the parental rights and the consent of the unborn and future generations, to the use of steroids and gene enhancement in sports and constitutional rights to enhancements, to uplifting animals to human level intelligence and uploading our personalities and memories into computer networks.

Uplifting animals and the rapture of the nerds