Scientology’s stronghold on Tom Cruise’s dating life.

The elusive director’s early years.

Retro, apocalypticism, and our “culture of disaster.”

A profile of The Wachowskis.

On Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, screenwriters.

A profile of actress Christina Ricci.

A profile of the actress and screenwriter.

The life and films of Werner Herzog.

A self-conscious celebrity profile.

A profile of the Hollywood star-maker behind Vanna White, Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy.

An interview with John Waters.

Real life is seeing and art is looking. If you’re successful, it’s a magic trick: you take one thing, and you put it in here, and it changes in one second, and then you can never look at that thing again the same way. That is what art is to me.

A profile of filmmaker Michael Haneke.

Growing up on B-movies.

The making of Thelma & Louise.

A profile of the hardworking Samuel L. Jackson, whose movies have grossed more than any actor’s ever.

On Marilyn Monroe and the pains of post-war America.

How a lonely, self-taught hacker found his way into the private emails of movie stars – and into the underworld of the celebrity-skin business.

On the trade school’s business model and its founder, a former movie producer named Jerry Sherlock.

An interview with the experimental filmmaker and Hollywood chronicler Kenneth Anger, 85.

The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:

It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.

In 1999, “original superagent” Leigh Steinberg represented 86 NFL athletes. His life today:

At age 63, Steinberg -- for years hailed as the real-life Maguire -- now finds himself a bankrupt, recovering alcoholic, plotting a comeback from the bottom. And before 10 p.m. tonight, as mandated by the California Bar Association, he must show that his urine is clean.

An Iowa dad’s surprisingly short path from commentor to screenwriter.

The strange saga of a 2009 Gary Oldman profile that his manager, Douglas Urbanski, aggressively sought to kill.

"Mr. Heath's motives are dishonest in the least...supposed 'journalism' at its very lowest...while Mr. Heath may find his sloppy reporting cute, in fact it is destructive, and he knows it...his out of context and uninformed pot shots...out of context swipes at me...stretching the most basic rules of journalism...in certain ways has aspects of a thinly disguised hit piece... a hole filled swiss cheese of wrong facts, misleading insinuations, and in general lazy, substandard, agendized non-reporting...again and again Mr. Heath attempts to turn the piece into a political piece...GQ has allowed Heath to go for the cheap shot..."

On the difficult challenges faced by an auteur in Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film economy.

An investigation into the myth of actress Frances Farmer’s lobotomy.