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Two outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism have penned “Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine,” a slim volume on that well-known dark prince of Danes. Laura Miller deems it as "such a treat:"

The authors — a philosophy professor and a psychoanalyst who are married to each other — claim no special expertise and argue no ironclad theory. They investigate, speculate and propose. “We are outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism,” they write, and the thinkers they have chosen to respond to (Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Jacques Lacan and Nietzsche) are (arguably) peripheral to the field as well. The result is a slim volume on “Hamlet” that this reader found more invigorating than many a more rigorous work. All you need to engage with it is a modest acquaintance with the play and an open mind. Each of the short chapters in “Stay, Illusion!” is a springy diving board poised over a deep pool of thought. Find one you like the looks of, bounce a bit, then plunge in.

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Well, let’s talk about that, shall we? What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women? With “Bridesmaids,” I could more or less understand why many women I respected seized on the film’s release as a feminist moment, and really wanted it to be a hit. (I still didn’t think it was all that great; Leslye Headland’s much-maligned “Bachelorette” was meaner, smarter and funnier.) If Judd Apatow-style, hard-R, bodily-function comedy was where the money was in Hollywood, then the ladies should get to slice some of that cheese on their own terms, and opening up space for female writers, directors and producers to do their work with bigger budgets could only be a good thing.

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Paramount announced Thursday that it is rebooting the "Terminator" franchise and planning for a new trilogy of films, but it's keeping mum on whether Arnold Schwarzenegger would play a role.

Schwarzenegger starred as the title character in the original 1984 movie. It spawned a trilogy that earned more than $1 billion at the box office worldwide.

Paramount says it will release the new "Terminator" in July 2015.

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I’ve heard that Lionsgate and director Francis Lawrence are eyeing Julianne Moore to play the role of President Alma Coin. She is the manipulative politician who figures brightly in the finale as Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) becomes a symbol of rebellion against the autocratic Capitol government. This is likely to happen quickly, and Moore would star in both of the final films, which brings back Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth and the returning cast along with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will be making his first appearance in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," directed by Francis Lawrence, will be released November 22, 2013. "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay" will be filmed in two parts, to be released in 2014 and 2015.

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Fifty years ago — on June 25, 1963 — Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 had its US premiere in New York City. It’s a transparently autobiographical film about a world famous director unable to finish his next film, beset by doubts, anxieties, and nightmares. As the film opens, our hero Guido, Fellini's alter ego, played by Marcello Mastroianni, faces a dilemma that may be familiar to many: What if your deadline arrived, but you had written nothing? What if people came to hear you, but you had nothing to say? What would happen if you ran out of ideas?

Could you get away with creating something about the inability to create, something about your crisis of creativity? About your state of mind, your dreams of glory, your fantasies of perfection, and also about your middle-of-the-night dread? Could you turn your crisis of creativity into your subject?

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If anything, the “war on drugs” has been even worse and even stupider than the “war on terror,” although they’ve become so intimately interconnected in moral, technological and philosophical terms that it’s not like we get to choose. America’s police departments have been increasingly transformed into thousands of high-tech paramilitary squads, just as our overseas military operations have become ever more defined by special-forces ops and targeted assassinations. Seeing cops in middle-size heartland communities driving armored personnel carriers would almost be comical, if it didn’t so often lead to incompetent and illegal home invasions in which the wrong people are arrested, injured or killed. (Wrong-address police break-ins happen several times a week in the United States, according to an attorney seen in the film.)

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A.V. Club reports:

Having apparently determined that no Japanese actors would dare be a part of the Jonathan Liebesman-directed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, presumably given the original text’s importance to the Shinto religion, producer Michael Bay has been forced to make a decision regarding the reboot of a nostalgia property that will potentially upset people, just this one time.

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"Aliens" -- 1986, sequel to "Alien"
The title of James Cameron's follow-up to the Ridley Scott sci-fi film basically says, "if you liked 'Alien,' you'll like 'Aliens' ... because there are more of them."

The Last Exorcism Part II -- 2013, sequel to "The Last Exorcism"
So ... not the Last Exorcism, then?

"Triplets" -- upcoming, sequel to 1988 comedy "Twins"
Here's the rare case where "Twins 2" would have been a better title. Instead, "Triplets," as the title implies, makes the already improbable sibling duo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito even less plausible, adding Eddie Murphy into the genetic mix.

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But there is also a longer and more complicated answer to the question, which is that many people who have long been skeptical about the safety, economic feasibility and ultimate morality of nuclear power are now somewhat willing to consider the argument that, at least in the medium term, we can’t do without it. This is partly also an argument about whether you think the continued development of human society can be separated from the health of the planet as a whole, and about whether people in the developing world have an inherent right to enjoy the energy-guzzling standard of living most of us in the global North take for granted.

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Neil Gaiman's novels are covers between which mythical creatures and beleaguered protagonists live and interact amid supernatural plots often dealing with youth and struggle. The fairy tale-esque character of his modern adult fantasies lightly masks "the intelligible message that can be derived from it," writes Laura Miller.

Gaiman’s first novel for adults in eight years, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” would seem to follow this pattern; most of the action, recounted in the first person, describes the experiences of a nameless 7-year-old boy. But “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” does feel different, and not only because of its framing device. The novel begins and ends with the narrator, now an adult, returning to the English village where he grew up, for a family funeral. (The deceased is never identified, but there are hints it is the man’s father.) We learn that he’s been married and separated, that he is a working artist, that he has grown children. When he looks back on the strange events of his childhood, it is through the mellowed and slightly melancholy lens of middle-age. What the story sacrifices of the sweet, glassy purity of a child’s view, it compensates for with the complex sepia of maturity; it’s the difference between a bright young white wine and a well-aged burgundy.

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In essence, Tobias Lindholm’s film is a corporate thriller, a story of the business world that explores both the backroom deal-making and its effects on ordinary people. In this case, the deal involves ransom negotiations to free the crew of a Danish cargo vessel that’s been commandeered by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. But for buttoned-down CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) back in Copenhagen, the negotiating tactics are no different from the ones he’s just used to drive down the price of a deal with a Japanese partner. As for the pirates themselves, they’re a well-known risk in doing business in that part of the world. Sometimes you have to bribe corrupt officials, sometimes you pay millions to consultants who do nothing, and sometimes you deal with pirates. They are practicing capitalism by other means.

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But that vision of a Middle East beyond bigotry and warfare is in many ways an illusion. That’s the vital and essential delicacy of “The Attack”: Doueiri, himself a child of the Lebanese civil war who grew up to become a cameraman for Quentin Tarantino and now a filmmaker in his own right, believes in the possibility suggested by people like Amin, but also understands its difficulties and pitfalls all too well. He violated both Lebanese law and long-standing Arab custom by making a film in Israel, one that acknowledges that Israelis are human beings rather than monsters, and now the only way his own people will see his film is by way of pirated DVDs and YouTube clips.

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Wood, probably most famous for playing Frodo in "Lord of the Rings," has largely avoided falling into the "child star" trap or being typecast, by looking for roles that keep him on his toes. Since "Lord of the Rings," he's played a serial killer as a supporting role in "Sin City," a young adult on an emotional journey in indie film "Everything Is Illuminated," a supporting role as creepy Patrick in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and the severely depressed, hallucinating Ryan in FX's TV show "Wilfred." Wood talked to Salon about the future of the film industry, his favorite books and what it's like to play the villain.

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