Craig Seligman

The Coen Brothers’ remarkable “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a conjuring act of near-magical conviction, an ode to the artistic spirit that’s as uncompromising as the troubled genius it chronicles.

In “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell delves into important ideas about power and accomplishment. He contends that children faced with difficult obstacles, such as dyslexia or the loss of a parent, often develop skills that make them successes later in life.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jon Martello is a neatnik who arranges his life around family, church, gym and sex. He gets a lot of sex. But he prefers porn.

Three world premieres, all American made, anchor a main slate of 36 high-profile features at the 51st edition of the New York Film Festival, which begins tomorrow.

“Prisoners,” the masterful suspense thriller that will send Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve to Hollywood’s upper ranks, is proof positive that genre filmmaking can tackle the unlikeliest, most unpalatable subjects.

Four Americans storm Normandy in Luc Besson’s dark comedy “The Family,” with only a bit less bloodshed than the last time around.

Thomas Pynchon opens his Manhattan- set novel “Bleeding Edge” on the first day of spring, 2001. So you know what’s coming.

Cantor Fitzgerald LP Chief Executive Howard Lutnick settles some scores -- mostly without tears -- in Danielle Gardner’s “Out of the Clear Blue Sky.”

“Passion,” really? How about “Cold Calculation”?

Wong Kar Wai’s martial-arts romance “The Grandmaster” is a long series of fights, exquisitely choreographed and hypnotically shot in snow, in watery courtyards under heavy rain (which brings Pina Bausch to mind), in beautiful rooms that are beautifully destroyed.

Hollywood might someday design a sleek, prestige biopic worthy of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

In 2006, Marisha Pessl arrived on the scene fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus, with “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” a showy first novel stuffed with literary references and written in the voice of a smart, bookish 16-year-old, which she had down.