Jimmy So is a former culture editor and deputy books editor at The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter @jimmyso.

Predator

The ‘Sexiest Woman Alive’ plays an otherworldly being who lures men to a dark room with the promise of kiss kiss bang bang. Is there a better metaphor for movie-going?

Fire of My Loins

While you are engineered to fixate on all that naked grunting in 'Nymphomaniac,' you might miss Charlotte Gainsbourg in the most raw and intense performance of the year.

Obsessive-Compulsive Noir

Two detectives and millions of viewers consumed with solving wayward clues in the hunt for a killer—we’re talking about Twin Peaks, of course.

Thin Ice

Turns out, a beloved deaf composer who ‘wrote’ music for the Olympics is neither deaf nor a composer—and his scandal threatens to derail his country’s figure-skating hopes.

Fun and Thrills

Three novels that make for clever and fun reading: from a Lost-like fantasy to a satire of the Irish boom.

The Sorrow and the Pity

Claude Lanzmann, the director of the Holocaust masterpiece Shoah, controversially falls under the spell of a Jewish collaborator of the death camps.

Screening Room

The start of every year brings a swell of great international movies that miss out on being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

A.I.

The interesting question raised by Spike Jonze’s new film, Her, is not whether humans can fall in love with computers,but whether computers would ever have emotions.