In this 17-minute video essay from Jonathan Hertzberg, he compiles scenes of the New York City subway in movies mostly from the 1970s and the 1980s. Though this is an account of the subterranean railway's presence in mainly fiction films, it shows a glimpse of a grimy and violent past. As the subway trundles through these two pre-Giuliani decades, it hosts a variety of gangs, purse-snatchers, tough cops, harassers, jaunty graffiti, drug-pushers, and zombie-eyed post partiers. Hertzberg has simply titled his short film Dirty Old New York Subway.

Olivier Assayas' dreamy French flick Something in the Air opens in a high school courtyard "not far from Paris," where dozens of teenagers are milling around, dressed in cropped or shaggily over-long 1970's fashions. The next scene shows them launching themselves in protest on the streets and subsequently fleeing some vicious police brutality. In his film, Assayas has captured an almost ineffable energy of both youth and revolution—in which everything is simultaneously exciting and insufferably stalled.

Sometimes you see a dated movie about old-school technology, and you're like: "Oh, haha, people were so easily impressed." This short film totally looks like that, but it's actually the opposite of that.*

“Don’t you think you’re awfully close to me, Shane?” asks Broadway legend Elaine Stritch of one of the cameramen who’s filming her documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. He pulls back immediately while she riffs in her sagging baritone, “This isn’t a skin commercial.”

"You don't sound like the ones on Bravo," says the blondest, hottest girl in the school, Fawcett (Sasha Pieterse), to the guy she is tying to woo, Tanner (Michael J. Willett). Tanner is freshly out of the closet and the coveted accessory of his school's three most popular girls, to whom he compares "warlords in a Third World country." Tanner is the titular G.B.F. – gay best friend — of Jawbreaker director Darren Stein's latest movie of high-school clique absurdity. Tanner is one of the most specific gay teens I've ever seen portrayed on screen.

Some spoilers follow.

In New York magazine's review of Admission, David Edelstein says of Paul Rudd, "Everybody doesn't like somebody, but nobody doesn't like Paul Rudd." In Prince Avalanche, Rudd attempts to cast off his universal affability. Rudd's Alvin is characterized by dismissive, elitist, self-conscious, and annoying tics. He says things like, "reap the rewards of solitude." He sits backwards in a chair when dispensing advice. Rudd skillfully delves into the soul of a pretentious, unlikable snob. Or as unlikable as it gets for Paul Rudd, anyway.

Remember that children's book "Go the Fuck to Sleep" that came out a couple years ago? Samuel L. Jackson did a reading of it and Werner Herzog did a reading of it and it was so hot that it literally burned down all the bookshelves and Borders had to declare bankruptcy the company could not afford to rebuild its stores from the smoldering ashes wrought by this instant classic?

Gawker is very excited to host a Q&A with author Salman Rushdie and filmmaker Deepa Mehta. Salman has adapted his classic 1981 novel Midnight's Children into a screenplay and the resulting film, directed by Deepa, will be in select U.S. theaters on April 26. For those who haven't read the book or need a refresher, here is the film's official synopsis:

A Finding Nemo sequel ("Finding Dory") is officially on. The kids who loved the original film are now sullen teens.

Last night at a fundraising gala for the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Amy Pascal appealed to her Hollywood industry colleagues about some specific word choices:

Mountain Fiji, Colonel Ninotchka, Debbie Debutante, Susie Spirit, Spike, Chainsaw and their colleages were underestimated from the start. They were the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (or G.L.O.W.) and for four years that started in 1986 they were a day-glo staple of Saturday morning programming. No one expected them to catch on ("It was almost an infomercial!" recalls one of the wrestlers on the show's rampant product placement) or last as long as they did, but then when it was clear that they had (after 104 episodes), the show's primary backer Meshulam Riklis stopped funding it supposedly because his then-wife, camp icon Pia Zadora, forced him to.

K-11, the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart's mom Jules Stewart, is like a weird nightmare you just woke up from, in which you went to jail, watched someone shit out a balloon full of coke, stared at No.2 pencil-drawn chola eyebrows for way too long, heard someone howl, "I want a jailhouse fuck and I want it now!" while never quite grasping why anyone is doing what they're doing, ever. And did you get buttfucked? It's too fuzzy to be sure. It's the B-est, gayest, longest episode of Oz. It's madness, borderline camp and it seems to be aiming for something as sleazily quotable as Showgirls. It can't touch those debased heights, but any movie featuring an old, effete prisoner shouting, "I ain't leavin' here without my laxative! I'm in pain, god damn it!" either knows what it's doing or at least is wise enough to stay out of its own ridiculous way.

Old grumbles Bloomberg watched what might have been the tenth film he has seen in his life, and he was borderline outraged with all that nonsense that comes before it. The parade of theatrical trailers did not amuse the "easily bored" Mayor.

Deadline reports that Daily Show host Jon Stewart is taking the summer off to make a movie about an Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was imprisoned after appearing in a Daily Show sketch. For eight of his 12 weeks off, Stewart will be replaced by regular John Oliver.

The fish slide around the deck, mouths gaping, eyes about to pop. The POV dips from blurry water to above the surface, and every time we rise the screech of gulls hovering above the sea is more voluminous, a bigger shock. A thick, golden chain pierces the infinite darkness. Skates are elevated, their wings hacked off with a machete, their bodies discarded. Heaving nets give birth to a haul of sea life in an extended plop. Sea spray glistens against the night. A yellow light offsets the blue-black sky and highlights the chunky, red blood, and it's hard to recall a time when the primary color palette has seemed more menacing.

Somewhere in Stoker's gorgeous heap of near-absurd imagery, jaw-dropping transitions, domestic melodrama, and suggestive narrative half-threads is a metaphor for the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook. In staggers, loops and layers, Stoker's story follows the passage into adulthood of India Stoker (gangled by Mia Wasikowska, whose obsessive performance warrants obsession) while wondering, in an elliptical and inconclusive sort of way, if she is innately evil.

Performance artist, visionary, and grandmother of performance art Marina Abramovic has decided to make a film about performance artist, visionary, and grandfather of blogs James Franco.

The members of TVTV (Top Value Television), the 1970s guerrilla video group I cofounded, were among the first to exploit the then brand-new portable video camera. We took them to big events and turned the cameras away from the spectacle and on to the people; almost no one had seen one before, and there were no rules about how to use them, or act in front of them—not even among Oscar nominees like Mike Douglas, Jack Nicholson and Lily Tomlin, all of whom were captured by the group in 1976 for TVTV Goes the Oscars.

Alien-acid queen, movie-crit staple and star of the infamous 1970 flop Myra Breckinridge Rex Reed describes Identity Thief star Melissa McCarthy as "tractor-sized," "humongous" and a "female hippo" in his Observer review of Seth Gordon's probable hit, which opens this weekend. These words are uncivil and the product of an intolerant mindset that's a huge problem in our culture. No one deserves to be referred to as such, especially not in such a public forum. Rex Reed is an asshole.