For fans of public apologies, May has been a good month.

The public apology has established itself as a staple of our national discourse, a required ritual to be endured by anyone caught saying or doing something inappropriate.

Mistakes Were Made

It's like HBO's "Rome", only it's from 1932.

The first film in the collection, "The Sign of the Cross" (1932), is ostensibly a tribute to the early Christian martyrs, though DeMille, of course, spends far less screen time on the suffering of the Christian faithful (stoically embodied by Elissa Landi, with her British stage diction) than with an effeminate, heavily made-up Charles Laughton, as a Nero who dutifully fiddles as Rome burns, and a svelte, seriously underdressed Claudette Colbert, who as the Empress Poppaea takes the required milk bath (and invites a female courtier to strip and join her).

The cross may finally conquer all, but not before a female Christian, selectively draped in plastic ivy, has been staked down in the arena for the delectation of a pack of hungry alligators and one of her sisters has been tied to a post and offered up to an aroused gorilla. These and other scenes — long cut from television versions of the film, but restored here thanks to the fine work of the UCLA Film Archive — have led the film historian Mark A. Viera to describe "The Sign of the Cross" as the single film most responsible for the enforcement of the censorious Production Code in 1934.

A Box of DeMille

Somewhere out there, more elusive than a snow leopard, more vaunted in its imagined cultural oomph than an Oprah book blurb, is the Science Movie.

You know, the film that finally does for science and scientists what "The Godfather" did for crime and what "The West Wing" did for politics, accurately reproducing the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.

...

And so in the movie's conceit, Bergson, like the electron traversing two slits at once, does not have one life, he has many lives, which interfere with one another, like the conflicting versions of a fight on a childhood Thanksgiving told by quarreling cousins.

The result is confusion, a braided arc of love, memory and loss, whose details keep slipping through your fingers. That is to say, it really is a quantum film. But it's not about quantum mechanics, and there is no exam.

In the Quest for Coolness, Science Could Really Use a Vito Corleone

This is the 42-year-old woman police accuse of "operating a house of prostitution at her home" on a manicured cul-de-sac in wealthy Howard County.

The woman with a PhD in sociology, an expertise in women's studies and a former career as a well-regarded college professor.

Britton says she's not guilty and denies the charges. She was framed, she says. It's a clever con job, perpetrated by her second husband.

The House With The Lights On

"We had to make this album," Ms. Maines said. "We could not have gotten past any of this without making this album. Even if nobody ever heard it."

The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up With Them

Most popular Internet communities, like Facebook.com or MySpace .com, measure their success by their ability to attract new members. A notable exception to this rule is aSmallWorld.net, an exclusive online community that is about to get bigger.

The Weinstein Company, the production business started by Bob and Harvey Weinstein after they left Miramax, has invested in aSmallWorld, the company will announce today.

A Weinstein Will Invest in Exclusivity

A black comedy about Dystopia, America, "Southland Tales" opens with a line from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Man" ("This is the way the world ends") and a nuclear bomb exploding above a Fourth of July gathering. What follows is a sprawling, periodically dazzling, often funny pop-and-politics mash-up that finds a porn star (Ms. Gellar's character) united with an action star (Mr. Johnson's) to save a country awash in celebrity culture and neo-conservatism.

Sarah Michelle Gellar as adult film star.

"Volver" stars Penélope Cruz in a performance that may silence those who have doubted her acting ability in the past

Manohla warms to Ms. Cruz, and to the new Almodóvar.

Tales From Cannes Festival

The big picture has been bumped by spot news. Strategic intelligence is the power to know your enemies' intentions. Spot news is what happened last night in Waziristan. Drowned by demands from the White House and the Pentagon for instant information, "intelligence analysts end up being the Wikipedia of Washington," John McLaughlin, the deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, said in an interview.

Langley, We Have a Problem

PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD of Iran wrote a letter to President Bush last weekend — the first formal letter from an Iranian leader to an American president since Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979. The letter has a familiar ring. In tone and structure, it is eerily reminiscent of a letter sent in January 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran's revolution, to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the leader of a collapsing Soviet Union.

This might be of interest to those who blogged about the recent letter.

From Iran, With Something Less Than Love

Kevin Kelly writes about digital libraries for the NYT Magazine.

The technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known.

Scan This Book!