For a magazine that prides itself on the many aspects of the movie business it covers, EW hasn’t had much to say over the years concerning the important subject of snacks. Oh, an occasional piece about how much they cost, but few words on their culinary wonderfulness. This needs correcting, because, while some people eat […]

While walking back to my Boston hotel after a surprisingly well-attended Tuesday afternoon showing of Bryan Bertino’s horror thriller The Strangers, I found myself musing on what’s scary and what’s not. Whatever it is, The Strangers had enough of it to do incredibly well at the box office. But what makes such a little film […]

Although at bottom mysterious – like so much of human behavior, especially in tidal matters of the pop cult – it seems to me that good buzz is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. I’ll deal with them by talking about the best book I read this winter, which is almost certainly going to become […]

I’m no fan of videogames; pretty much gave them up in the late ’70s or early ’80s, when my kids used to beat me regularly at Pitfall! (hell, they used to beat me at Pong, and back then our youngest wasn’t yet eligible for T-ball, let alone Little League). Sure, I’ve occasionally plugged quarters into […]

I wanted to write a column on Jumper for this magazine, because I really liked it. The critics didn’t, but since I’m not one, that didn’t bother me. But one of the executive producers, Ralph Vicinanza, also happens to be my foreign-rights agent. This, I thought, was a concern my EW editor should address. Said […]

One night during my junior year at college, while high on considerably more than life (it was the ’60s, so sue me), I took it into my head to go – by myself – to an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective playing in the Memorial Union. The film that night was Psycho, which I had seen before…but […]

I write about pop culture for a magazine that deals with American entertainment. Does a presidential campaign belong in a column like that, for a magazine like this? Two months ago, I would have said no. But then came Oprah Winfrey’s decision to actively campaign for Barack Obama. And the writers’ strike. And the completely […]

What did I do during the holidays? Read a good book, of course. It was called In Pale Battalions, by Robert Goddard. Goddard’s British, and his tales of suspense and mystery have recently been reissued in America. I’d never read him. Now I’m glad I did. Set mostly during World War I (but with a […]

Sportscasters! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t shoot ‘em (outside the state of Texas, that is). At a baseball playoff game a couple of years ago, one of them cozied up next to me and asked if I always brought a book with me to baseball games. He seemed to think it was the funniest thing […]

STEPHEN KING’S BEST OF 2007: MOVIES 10. IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH Most of 2007’s political movies failed because they were too angry to be anything but propaganda. This one, about a heartbroken father trying to discover the truth about his son, was tight, involving, and controlled. One of two great Tommy Lee Jones performances […]