These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume. In a market dominated by the big chain stores, if a novel doesn't sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim.

"The whole system is set up for impatience."

In 2005, almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the top 20 best-selling books.

... the single most powerful person in American literary publishing. No, not Oprah, but a woman you've probably never heard of: Sessalee Hensley, the one literary fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble.

Promotional Intelligence

Al Gore's presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days.

An Inconvenient Truth

Virgil Wong's multiple careers as an artist and filmmaker, Web Center director, graduate faculty member, and Nia teacher support his on-going investigations in medicine, technology and the human body:

Artist and Filmmaker
Virgil is a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant recipient and a film director whose work has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His installations, net art, films, paintings, drawings, and photographs have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and theatrical venues around the world.

Virgil Wong : Experiments on Art, Medicine, and Technology

Paramount wanted $20,000 for 119 seconds of 'Paper Moon,' " Ms. Sams said. "The studios are so afraid of exploitation that they set boundaries no one will cross. Even after the prices were cut, we were $150,000 in the hole."

Unwilling to pay those fees, IFC's general manager, Evan Shapiro, helped Ms. Sams pursue another, more aggressive, tack, which may point the way for documentarians who want to tap movie iconography without paying studio prices. Its strategy involved some negotiating hardball, backed up by a willingness to fall back on the tricky legal doctrine known as fair use.

No Free Samples for Documentaries: Seeking Film Clips With the Fair-Use Doctrine

Imdb's convergence moment may soon be at hand.

The Needhams live in what he calls their "dream house" about 15 minutes away. It is there that Mr. Needham keeps his prized possession: an ever-growing collection of 7,500 films, mostly DVD's.

From a Small Stream, a Gusher of Movie Facts

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

"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

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 Proposition,” in its morality as well as in its geography, is not just basic but Biblical. Directed by John Hillcoat, it shows humanity striving for a New Testament way of life with a Cain-and-Abel drama on the doorstep. Captain Stanley is married to the pearl-skinned Martha (Emily Watson), who solemnly serves him poached eggs for breakfast and somehow, perhaps from another hemisphere, conjures a Christmas tree. “I’m a very resourceful woman,” she says. Their marriage is one of baffled and perspiring tenderness; even as Stanley tells her to stay in their lonely house, where Tobey (Rodney Boschman), the Aboriginal manservant, prunes red roses in front of a white picket fence, she longs to know more. You look at that fence, and at the ravishing sight of Martha at dusk, book in hand, wandering the all but grassless plain, and you can’t help thinking of the Australian outback as the last redoubt of the Western.

Anthony Lane on The Proposition | The New Yorker