“Prisoners” is the most maddening kind of failure: an abrasively portentous thriller that, in spite of its copious flaws, manages to startle the audience a handful of times. Because director Denis Villeneuve regards screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s cut-and-dry kidnapping story as an ultra-serious treatise on torture, and because the superb cast (Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard, Maria

Actors Javier Bardem, Helen Mirren, James Franco, Viola Davis (pictured) and Olympia Dukakis as well as the singer Janis Joplin have been selected by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to get their star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2013. Several hundred candidates had applied to join the long list of artists whose stars are trampled daily by thousands of tourists milling around Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. The list of the 2013

Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's The Help filled me with a wonder similar to that I felt watching—and relishing—Mad Men. There, the three-martini lunch, the 1960 men and women boozing and smoking themselves to death had me aghast. Same here. This was Jackson, Mississipi, fifty years ago? It’s beyond racism, unless racism means considering people so far below you that no one would blink at an African-American maid not being