Here, as always, a Hayder plot that seems straightforward is masterfully skewed. In Bath, England, Lorne Wood, a privileged teenage beauty, is found horribly murdered beside a canal. Detective Inspector Zoe Benedict is led, by instinct as much as evidence, to suspect a connection to the sex trade and Internet pornography, a realm that Hayder evokes in all its dankness. “[M]ost of the time they’re doing it because it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day,” one avuncular pornographer tells Zoe of his “models.” Less benign are fetishistic practices “all about humiliating the woman.” As one jaded dame explains, this is what sells “by the shedload … Makes you wonder about human nature, don’t it?”

Zoe doesn’t wonder anymore. She has seen too much. And she has secrets of her own. But that is another story, one of a handful that Hayder expertly steers on parallel tracks as she shunts the murder investigation forward, then makes it stall or veer, all the while heightening our sense of dread. While Zoe courts danger by revisiting her past and pursuing Lorne’s likely killer, Zoe’s estranged sister, Sally, becomes the housekeeper for a nouveau-squire who exudes criminality and violence. Divorced, somewhat clueless, and mother to teenage Millie, Sally has little choice. She does, however, have a shady lover who reveals that Sally’s employer is involved with the Ministry of Defense, the UN mission in Kosovo, and sex trafficking.

These are filaments that flicker at the periphery of our anxious vision while Zoe and Sally demand our attention. Especially Zoe, who, like many female Hayder protagonists, is both wounded and feral. Slumped in a toilet cubicle, for example, her own blood dripping onto the floor, she resolves to “…take some time off work…. Sleep rough and drink Guinness out of the can.” Fueled by desperation more than courage, Zoe is as startling as the cinematic action scenes that Hayder so expertly stages. Shocks intensify — a nail gun comes into play, a body is dismembered, foul sex committed — while the tidal pull of Hayder’s intersecting narratives churns up tangled evidence that could incriminate Sally’s vile employer, a local drug dealer or a lovesick teenager. Toward the end, the sisters traverse moonlit farmland — “Two lonely figures casting long blue shadows…feet shushing the dead corn” — to confront Lorne’s killer and the final horror. Which is not, of course, the end at all.

The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

This “may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed,” according to Troy. Because Woodrell’s books may be almost universally praised, but they are genre fiction, and genre fiction is too trashy for presidents to read. “Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called ‘my little cheap thrills outlet.’” Even Bill Clinton knew better than to tell people he read books with crimes in them! (Can you imagine if Barack Obama was found to be hiding the fact that he read crime fiction? IMPEACHMENT.)

Also one of the novels is by an Israeli author, but it is by an Israeli author who criticizes Israeli policy, proving once again that Obama is no friend of Israel. “[R]eading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East,” says Troy, and he should know, because he is the one using it to attempt to score an insane political point.

The best part (noted by Matt Yglesias) is when Troy asks why this bookstore’s online store doesn’t list horrible books written by National Review contributors as “in stock.”

Obama, like other Democratic presidents, has tended to read mainly liberal books, although he could stand to gain some insight from conservative ones. There could be many reasons for his selection bias, but buying his books at the “legendary” Bunch of Grapes probably is not helping matters. While I have never had the pleasure of shopping there, the store’s website highlights a variety of its offerings, with nary a conservative work. There may be some on the shelves there somewhere, but they are probably not staring Obama in the face when he visits the store.

According to the results of my completely unscientific survey of Bunch of Grapes’s website, Laura Ingraham’s Of Thee I Zing, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and Mark Steyn’s After America were listed as available for online ordering. Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which appeared as an Obama book selection twice, in 2008 and 2009, was listed as “In Stock.” This is not meant as a criticism of the bookseller; Bunch of Grapes is running a business, and they need to cater to the liberal crowd at Martha’s Vineyard in order to bring in customers. At the same time, if Obama wants to diversify his reading selections, Bunch of Grapes may not be the place to go.

Why would Bunch of Grapes stock Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” a novel Aimee Bender called “truly memorable” and “remarkable,” when they could stock Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” a book that the American Conservative says “reads less like an extended argument than as a catalogue of conservative intellectual clichés, often irrelevant to the supposed point of the book”? Liberal bias, that’s why. Liberal fascist bias.

Anyway, the president is “out of touch” and “in a bubble” because he can read, according to a conservative intellectual, at a “think tank.”

Christie however, is quite a looker, though I see where Martin saw the female knight in her: The actress is 6’3.

Martin revealed the meaning of his riddle later that night:

As for my clues … Christie played in a music video called DAMARIS, which includes a song about Isabelle, the She-Wolf of France (wife of King Edward II, for the history nerds out there), and played in Shakespeare’s CYMBELINE at the Barbican theatre. She also posed for Australian photographed Polly Borland for a show called “Bunny.”

She also appears in the recent Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassas, though I did not use that one in my clues.

Here’s Gwendoline in action, in a (very) short NOMAD film called “Ourhouse.”

Oh yeah, she’s going to be great.

An earlier announcement has pegged “The Tudors” actress Natalie Dormer to play 16-year-old Margaery Tyrell.

In the first sentence above, I’m referring to a recent kerfuffle among film critics that began with a New York Times Magazine article by Dan Kois and continued with responses by Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott and numerous others (including yours truly). This included various allegations of crimes against art and totalitarian groupthink, along with unhelpful discussion of the meaning of the word “boring.” Thankfully, the schism that was conjured up between intolerable art-house snobs and lightweight slaves of Hollywood is mostly imaginary. Hardly anyone who cares about cinema only likes one kind of movie, or judges every movie by the same standard. Right now, I’m suggesting that you should catch “Aurora” (with the parenthesis that it’s not going to be everybody’s cup of bitter Romanian coffee), and I’d say almost the same thing, with slightly more apologetic eye-rolling, about “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

Still, that debate provided an interesting background for “Aurora,” which I found to be a gritty, atmospheric and nerve-wracking work that powerfully evokes the disordered mental condition and depressed surroundings of its middle-aged protagonist (played by Puiu himself). I totally get that the idea of watching a three-hour film in Romanian is daunting, but once I adjusted to Puiu’s rhythms I was fully engaged. That said, if you go in expecting a conventional mode of narrative and explication, where every scene advances us further into the plot in some specific way, and you understand who all the people are and how they relate to each other, then this movie will frustrate you and drive you completely freakin’ nuts.

As in the film that made Puiu’s international reputation, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the narrative of “Aurora” is turned upside-down, or maybe inside out. The earlier movie tells us what’s going to happen in the title, and then we don’t, in fact, witness the death of Dante Lazarescu, only the entirely ordinary day full of quarreling neighbors and distracted nurses and mechanical malfunctions that’s going to be the last one of his life. Instead of the intense subjectivity of most movies, where the hero’s trials and tribulations become the focus of heightened and artificial drama, Puiu pulls back to a more objective view, reminding us that momentous events in the real world don’t come with a pulsing soundtrack or a temporary suspension of the universal tendency toward entropy.

Puiu’s character in “Aurora,” who we eventually learn is named Viorel, may be having a worse day than Mr. Lazarescu, if that’s possible. A taciturn and nearly affectless fellow of 40 or so, he skulks through the streets of Bucharest, by car and by bus and on foot, with a haunted look in his eyes. Viorel appears to be a family man, at least in the deceptively calm opening scene, but things have evidently gone wrong somehow (and trust me, it’s not worth trying to figure it out). He appears to be following a blond woman (not his wife) with small children, although we don’t know who they are; he has fragmentary conversations we can’t hear or can’t understand; he acquires a shotgun and some ammunition and spends some time considering suicide before deciding on, shall we say, a more extroverted path. But the startling eruptions of violence in “Aurora” are momentary, and occur either outside the frame or deep in the middle distance. They emerge from a life full of other things: Even as Viorel is noticeably sliding into insanity, he haggles with movers, stands in line at the deli, collects some ironed shirts from his mother, has a testy exchange with his stepfather and a cordial one with a neighbor over water damage accidentally caused by an enthusiastic kid in the bathtub.

Puiu’s films belong to a recognizable tradition of Eastern European social comedy, and depict post-Communist Romania as a place where everybody feels aggrieved at everybody else and where nothing can ever happen without a great deal of pointless argument and defensive grumpery. In a way, that’s the joke of the film, that even a guy going on a killing spree has to navigate the tremendous hassle of Romanian society, and that nobody much cares. I don’t think Puiu is blaming Romania’s depressed and contentious national mood for Viorel’s crimes, exactly; Americans are all too aware that this sort of thing can happen anywhere. Mordant, anti-psychological and masterfully shot (by Viorel Sergovici), “Aurora” is both a mystery and a mysterious accomplishment. It may demand multiple viewings, both to understand a bit more about what’s going on and also, if you get me, to figure out what the hell is going on.

“Aurora” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and will open Aug. 27 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass., with other cities and dates (and home-video release) to follow.

In her May obituary, the Los Angeles Times described Clark as “a copper tycoon’s daughter with a taste for exquisite French dolls, baronial homes and solitude;” the New York Times labelled her “the last link to New York’s Gilded Age” — a relic from “the city’s glory days of Astors, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts.” Clark had been raised in a different world, and (or so the papers implied) she seemed to have stayed there, isolating herself from the twenty-first century and its inhabitants.

Indeed, Clark might have died in relative obscurity (as much obscurity as someone worth $400 million can achieve, at least) had it not been for several MSNBC features published last year, including one that questioned the motives of those who cared for the heiress, asking provocatively: “Who protects an old lady who secluded herself from the world, limiting her life to a single room, playing dress-up with her dolls and watching cartoons?” The piece ignited interest in Huguette, ensuring that plenty of eyes would be trained on her estate in the instance of her demise.

Now that Clark has died, questions about her estate and vast personal holdings are finally being answered. The heiress’ will was released this week — you can read the entire document here (pdf), courtesy of the New York Post — and it has some interesting bequests.

Part of Clark’s immense estate will be used to start a new fund, the Bellosguardo Foundation, “for the primary purpose of fostering and promoting the Arts.” The showpiece of the foundation will be Bellosguardo itself: Clark’s grand California home, set on 23 acres and reportedly worth $100 million. The property will be made into a museum — filled with art (including paintings by Renoir and John Singer Sargent), musical instruments (including a Stradivarius), and rare books, all moved west from Clark’s kingly 42-room Fifth Avenue apartments. Clark herself had apparently not visited Bellosguardo “for at least 50 years” before her death; now, the house will likely attract large crowds.

Not all of Clark’s art will go to the California estate, however; a $25 million Monet — one of the “Water Lilies” paintings — has been left to Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery, which already has a wing named after Clark’s senator father (and owns his 775-piece art collection).

As to the people who will personally profit from Clark’s will — including, prominently, the heiress’ longtime nurse — The Atlantic Wire has assembled a handy cheat sheet. Clark left nothing to her relatives, whom her attorney, Wallace Bock, says she “knowingly and assiduously avoided” over the years.

One million dollars will be split between Bock himself and Clark’s accountant, Irving Kamsler, both of whom fell under suspicion for mismanagement of Clark’s wealth when last year’s MSNBC report was released. “The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating how Mr. Bock and Mr. Kamsler have handled Mrs. Clark’s money, according to a person briefed on the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.