It’s no mystery why Stephenie Meyer’s romantic vampire saga, Twilight, gets under the skin of so many young readers — and why the movie, although nowhere near as penetrating, will be the occasion for mass public swoon-a-thons. It’s the biochemistry angle. See, the gorgeous vampire, Edward, is driven mad with desire by the high-school heroine Isabella’s scent. She has just arrived in their remote Pacific Northwest town to live with her chief-of-police father. Edward smells her while they’re peering through a microscope, and his eyes become a feral yellow-black; and she soon loves him hungrily, too, in her ordinary teenage, raging-hormonal way, which is powerful enough. But in this universe, the vampire’s appetites cannot be controlled. One taste of her blood could trigger carnage on an operatic scale.

It’s funny how Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in its sundry languages and cultures gets under the skin of so many writers and filmmakers. Yes, it’s the enticement of easy money, but there’s something even more insidious: the fluky mixture of tackiness and grandiosity; the questions that mischievously drift from history to science to the most ephemeral of pop-culture ephemera; the option to “phone a friend” — who might well let one down with a thud, as friends often do. A cruel god puts fortune just within reach — and just out of it. A sense of divine mockery is at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire, a galvanic coming-of-age saga constructed around the show’s Hindi incarnation. The movie, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), borrows the ingenious premise (but only a few specifics) from the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup: A poor young Muslim, Jamal (Dev Patel), wins millions of rupees on TV and is promptly arrested on the grounds that an ignorant “slumdog” who serves chai to better-paid workers must somehow have cheated. Via flashbacks, Jamal explains to a cop (Irfan Khan) how he knew the right answers — how each question, as if by fate, connected with some event in his violent, tragic life.

Courtesy of Lionsgate

There’s a scene in Oliver Stone’s biopic W. in which President George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) receives the news in a Cabinet meeting that there are no WMDs in Iraq, listens to Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) sputter excuses, and tells them all to dig deeper: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … You can’t get fooled again.” This is, of course, one of the most legendary “Bushisms,” but in life it was blithered at a press conference, and its transplant to a Cabinet meeting doesn’t jibe with what people who’ve met Bush say: that in private he’s in control of his (simpleminded) language, that it’s only before the public and press that he has trouble synthesizing talking points that other people have written for him and that he doesn’t necessarily believe. Stone and the screenwriter, Stanley Weiser, don’t seem to understand the difference between public and private discourse, which is one reason W. skates along the surface. There’s no idiomatic dialogue — it’s all talking points.

Paul Newman has died, damn it. He was the closest thing we've had in a movie star to a saint—and probably he'd say that was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, which as far as I'm concerned is more proof. I'm not just talking about the hundreds of millions he earned for charity with his Newman's Own products, or his persistent but judicious political activism. As an artist, he was self-deprecating, often deeply self-critical; he never assumed we'd love him because he was, you know, Paul Newman. When directors built him pedestals, he worked to earn his place on them. Early in his career, he studied the Method, but he never went in for the fumbly-mumbly self-plumbing that became its hallmark. He always threw his attention onto the other actors—which might be why, opposite him, so many became stars and won awards. Everyone looked brighter in his light.