George Lucas's genius has always been diversification: back when he was a gifted filmmaker, he was a pioneer of merchandizing, and founded what would become industry-standard effects and sound houses with Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. Lucasfilms' computer animation division later became Pixar. And then, some time...

Not many people remember the 1993 cop movie Boiling Point any more, and it's not too hard to see why. (Tagline: "He's a cop who's reached the... Boiling Point.") It's only 16 years old, but it looks like it was made in the '80s, and its two stars -- Wesley...

Last night, I told a friend of mine that I love Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, and she reacted with surprise: "So you like chick flicks?" I was taken aback, because I love it so much that I don't even think of it that way, but then I realized:...

Harry Gottlieb founded Jellyvision in 1989, and his company burst onto the cultural map with YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, a popular 1995 trivia party game. Now his company's trying to solve your problems, including health care. I asked him a few questions by email.

Jellyvision's still best known...

John Woo is a fine director with an extraordinarily uneven filmography. His success seems to have a lot to do with the quality of his leading man. He came from Hong Kong to international prominence with Chow Yun-Fat as his muse (the Better Tomorrow trilogy; Hard-Boiled, rating: 77; The...

Over the past decade, Dogfish Head has become perhaps the most prominent microbrewery on the East Coast, and almost certainly the most notorious. Their founder and brewmaster, Sam Calagione, is pretty clearly cracked. They favor sweet high-alcohol barleywines, from riffs on Belgian styles, to reconstructions of ancient recipes from...

Dr. Seuss wrote one screenplay in his long career as a writer: the cracked, magical, cult classic 1953 children's movie The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It was a flop on release, and Dr. Seuss reportedly hated it, but it's actually a wonderfully weird, funny, charming musical, and everything I...

Joel Kraemer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds is, like its protagonist, the great 12th-century rabbi and scholar, impressively erudite and maddeningly elusive. Kraemer is a medievalist with a knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Maimonides' native Judeo-Arabic, and he also...

When it was released in 1995, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery was hailed as a technical marvel. It was the sequel to 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, but while that game was one of Sierra's last VGA adventure games for DOS, The Beast Within was...

1991's Castle of Dr. Brain is one of my favorite video games of all time. From the very first screen, the game wears its style on its sleeve, as lightning strikes a 256-color castle shaped like a mad scientist's head, playing a MIDI version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue...

Bong Joon-ho's recent monster movie The Host was greeted with plaudits normally reserved for a master of the French New Wave, with an average Metacritic score of 85. It had a budget of $11,000,000, quite high for a non-American film, and special effects from Weta Digital, the New Zealand...

I've already written that I think P.M. Dawn is one of the great, underappreciated groups of the 1990's. They're nearly 20 years removed from their only #1 hit, "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss," which sampled "True" by Spandau Ballet and rode in from left field with new age...

Atul Gawande is a doctor who writes for the New Yorker. Or perhaps, at this point in his career, he's a journalist who also happens to be a doctor. He joins an illustrious history of physicians in print, from Maimonides to Anton Chekhov, and he writes in very clear,...

Jennet Conant's recent book The Irregulars is the perfect Washington summer read: it's a breezy society tale about British spying on America before and during World War II, which Franklin Roosevelt tacitly approved, by a ragtag group of future literary stars, including Ian Fleming and his friend Roald Dahl.

Dahl...

I recently read Ariel Sabar's memoir My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which was published last year. It begins with a story about going to Israel to find a man who knew his father's family, and being rudely confronted at the door:...

Christy Marx was one of their developers, and she made two terrific games for them, Conquests of Camelot (rating: 75) and Conquests of the Longbow (rating: 90). Jane Jensen was another, and she cowrote King's Quest 6 (rating: 93) and the Gabriel Knight series. The first in the...

Jennifer 8. Lee's recent book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a bit like her subject matter: slightly enjoyable, but mostly bland, trite, and unworthy of the meal it evokes. The book is presented as an inquiry into the identity of Chinese food in America, but she unnecessarily mixes uninteresting passages...

Spike Jonze had a pretty impeccable record, from directing Christopher Walken's triumphal dance in the video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," to producing MTV's transcendently stupid pain-porn Jackass, to his magnificent collaborations with Charlie Kaufman on Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Nothing about that remotely suggests that he...

You probably didn't see Ong-Bak 2, the prequel to spectacular 2003 film that introduced American audiences to muay thai, the Thai national martial art. Filmed in an almost distractingly slick style, with slow-motion replays of its hero's most eye-popping stunts, it made a star of Tony Jaa and a minor...

Grant Heslov's movie The Men Who Stare At Goats is a good premise stuck in a mess of a movie. Based on a stranger-than-fiction book about paranormal research within the U.S. military, it should be a black comedy about the lengths to which our army will go to kill people....