Action films meant something. As surely as the film noir communicated anxiety over postwar urban upheaval or as alien-invasion films helped us work out our cold-war agita, the action films of the golden age were a post-’70s, poststagflation collective national fantasy: one in which America was strong, independent, unstoppable and perpetually kicking much butt.

An oral history of Siskel and Ebert.

An interview with the director of this little-seen “masterwork,” finally released in 2011.

You don’t usually see the character in their life. You meet them, and you get to know their life a little bit, and then the big event happens, and that’s what you follow. I always wonder what happens to the guy who gets drawn into a smuggling ring. You know, he’s a regular guy, and he gets drawn into some situation. You always see him getting back into the situation after he’s leaving work, and I wonder what he did all day, while the plot was going on. Or the story focusses on a certain relationship, but you don’t see the person during work, dealing with other people, or during the school day, dealing with other people.

On Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Zona has a subtitle, “A book about a film about a journey to a room,” and that’s a good start—indeed, it’s snappier and more seductive than the start of the actual movie, and you can argue that that start goes on for about 140 minutes, to be followed by the ending.

But the ubiquity, and tyranny, of the Sally-Sleepless-Mail model of romantic comedy is what interests me. Twenty-odd years after Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, the rules established by Nora Ephron remain essentially the same. As distinct from classic romantic comedy, the two lovers don’t have to be chaste; they can sleep with any number of other people, and even with each other, before reaching the final kiss. (Bi-curious exploration remains at the outer edges of rom-com possibility, but it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, violate the rules.)

The tragedy of John Carter is that it may be a folly in terms of how much money it cost relative to what it will make back at the box office. But it at least has the Saturday-afternoon matinee spirit, a vibe similar to that of the much-maligned (unfairly, I must add) 2002 film The Scorpion King, which successfully hitched the considerable charms of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to its faux-mythological chariot.

“The Lorax” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Scary scenes, a bit of naughtiness, nonstop hucksterism.

If you watch the trailer the Academy made to advertise Crystal’s return to the Oscars, the one where Megan Fox and Josh Duhamel from the Transformers movies go to Mongolia Indiana-Jones-style to search for Billy Crystal, the ancient sage of the Oscar telecasts, this last human they have to bring back to digital Hollywood, you will see that the trailer is described on YouTube as “film-like.”

I’m not sure how that term is related to “life-like,” but I think, now, it is. “Film-like” means “the way films used to be” the same way “life-like” means “almost convincingly alive.”

The magic was mechanical. Mixing flat with solid props, painted backdrops and “trick” superimpositions, Georges Méliès’s deliriously complicated sets are filled with moving parts and special incongruities. Like a tableaux designed by Henri Rousseau for Raymond Roussel, the jungle from his 1905 Palace of the Arabian Nights is a crazy assemblage of pasteboard palm trees, sliding panels of foliage, humanoid monkeys, dancing skeletons and a mechanised smoke-breathing dragon. Recognising the charm of the magician’s world, the poet Apollinaire wrote: “M Méliès and I are in the same business – we lend enchantment to vulgar material.” In the case of Méliès, that vulgar material could be construed as the motion picture machine.

The documentary filmmaker has become America’s most surprising and provocative public intellectual.