Many are predicting an array of Oscars for "Argo." It's a more deserving film than a lot of recent Best-Picture winners. Count me among its admirers. But don't number among the enthusiasts.

I want to read perspectives and interpretations... not assessments of "I liked it" or "It sucked." When I was a child watching Siskel and Ebert, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down was a suspenseful gimmick; I couldn't wait to see the sparks fly when the critics' thumb-ation of the film put them odds. But it was what they said beyond that, the thought process that inspired the thumb-arization, that affected me. They taught me that people could disagree on a film without one person being Right and the other person being Wrong.

Thousands of dollars, countless hours in committee meetings, and all kinds of consumer testing later... we have a decision. This blog now has a convenient new address.

Do you feel the tremors? Yeah, that's the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie in theaters. In-depth reviews are popping up everywhere. Here are links to some that I've found very helpful.

In celebration of the birthday of the late, great Jim Henson, Comment Magazine has posted a letter I wrote to Jim Henson's ghost...

Seven years ago this week, I met Joss Whedon and the cast of Serenity. Here, in their entirety for the first time, are my transcripts from those conversations.

As we're in a season busy with film festivals, I'm reading reviews of what sound like extremely challenging movies. Some of those reviews sound like the kind of comments that might provoke filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to repeat what he said here...

Five years ago, on September 27, Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" screened for the first time. And a sure-thing Best Actor Oscar-winner came into plain view. Daniel Plainview, to be precise.

The new trailer for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has arrived! What do you think? I first read The Hobbit when I was 7 years old, and moved right on up to The Lord of the Rings at age 8. If you're like me, you'd love to have the thrill of discovering a world as awe-inspiring as that again. And I think we can. We just need to find a way to see Bilbo Baggins, The Shire, the dwarves, Gandalf, Mirkwood Forest, and the Lonely Mountain with new eyes.

Here's the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. But that's just the beginning. Since America will have Lincoln on the mind in the coming weeks, I encourage everyone to read the text of Abraham Lincoln's amazing Second Inaugural Address. Read it out loud. And then, well, the fun's just getting started. Check this out...