• David Foster Wallace is the much-celebrated author of the one thousand-page plus novel “Infinite Jest.” Not an easy read. But then, neither is “Ulysses,” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” George Perec’s “Life: a User’s Manual” nor any number of boundary-blowing, epoch-making masterpieces that we crack open from time to time and know we will read some day. “Infinite Jest” I’d already given up on and picked up again several times.

  • Amy (Amy Schumer) is a single girl living the life in Manhattan. Well-trained into shunning monogamy by her offensive, lovable father (Colin Quinn) who a couple of decades ago abandoned Amy, her sister Kim and their mother, she works at a sleazy men’s magazine by day and is into some serious bed-hopping at night. She uses men as one does tissues, rumpling them into a ball and tossing them in a corner when she’s done.

  • Alan Turing was a complex man, a mathematical genius who broke the seemingly unbreakable Enigma code through which the Nazis conducted their war on Europe with encrypted messages. Before that he was a highly gifted student at a public school, years marked by endless bullying and the awakening of homosexual tendencies. At a very young age, he becomes a Fellow at Cambridge University where he produces a number

  • The public has been relatively kind to director Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” though this recounting of an extraordinary moment in our country’s march toward civil rights is bloated and inaccurate. Which may explain, rather than some anti African-American conspiracy, why it was spurned for the Academy Awards nomination. Martin Luther King, here played superbly by David Oyelowo, is the closest anyone in contemporary times comes to

  • A no-fail winning combination in film would be great actors+great director+good story. You think ? Not necessarily. Hollywood dustbins are filled with disappointing films made according to this very combination. Still, Tim Burton bringing together Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz in a true tale involving a kitsch painter and a charming con artist, with the backdrop of fifties and sixties San Francisco, the lure is irresistible. And the rewards many.

  • Dan Gilroy’s first feature film, “Night Crawler,” is a rare treat, a perfect thriller, a soufflé that rises as it should and keeps its superlatively fluffy texture from minute one to minute 117. But you stand warned, this film about a sleazy, nasty loser-drifter who has watched one too many TED talk about how to be wildly successful will not be as easy to digest. Jake Gyllenhaal, skinny, driven, with the smile a rattlesnake would have if it could

  • It would be ungracious to deny that David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” lengthy as it is, whizzes past, keeping us highly entertained throughout. I haven’t read the book on which it is based so I don’t know if the structural change that has apparently caused an uproar is for the better or not. Anyway, both book and screenplay are by the same author so she’s entitled to doing what she wants with either.