text: Author Stephen King at the Apple Store on Prince Street in New York City (June 3, 2013). (Jim Spellman/WireImage/Getty Images)
  That's Stephen King's term for a particularly enticing opening sentence in a story or essay—a "knock-you-dead first line" that compels you to keep reading. In "Great Hookers I Have Known," King says that an effective hooker-sentence offers readers "the pleasure of instant gratification" (Secret Windows, 2000).
  The opposite of a hooker might be called a chaser—a bore-you-to-death introduction that drives readers away.
  At best, a chaser may hint at delayed gratification. More often it provides little more than an excuse to stop reading.
  Here are 10 examples of such boring or baffling opening lines—chasers that you'll want to avoid when composing your own essays. The examples are in italics, and the explanations are in bold.
  Avoid leads [or ledes] that quote Webster's—"the Jim Belushi of openings," according to Annie Edison in Community. "It accomplishes nothing, but everyone keeps on using it."
  When you gave us this assignment to "describe in detail a place you know well," my first thought was to write about my bedroom closet. . . .
  One dark and stormy night, the ghost of General Oglethorpe grabbed me by the goolies and hurled me down the castle stairs. . . .
  Framed fantastically against the expansive cerulean sky was a soaring wedge of gossiping, gabbling geese, a shimmering cocaine-colored V haloed in sunlight and dusted with the durable dreams of earthbound warriors . . ..
  It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms.* . . .
  Now it's time to take a more positive approach. For examples of fresh and compelling opening lines—that is, some truly good hookers—see these two articles:
  Amazon Prime isn't just for next-day toilet paper anymore: Your subscription includes countless shows (even some of Thrillist's own!) and movies to stream, ranging from recent hits to old-school faves. Here's a slew of options for you, whether you're in the mood for sci-fi, a rom-com, or anything in-between -- the best Amazon movies out of the thousands of Amazon movies.
  This is peak theme-park Steven Spielberg. Working from a witty script co-written by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, Spielberg adapts the elegant, playful imagery of Hergé's beloved Tintin comics into a kinetic, eye-popping animated thrill ride. There's a pirate ship, lost treasure, a fighter plane, and even a cute dog -- and if you don't like any of that, something new will fly into your face a minute later! In 3D! It's Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Angry Birds era. Exhausting, sure, but worth the ride.
  Martin Scorsese's stylish take on Edith Wharton's novel of high society on the East Coast in the late 19th century emphasizes manners, gossip, and perceived slights more than his gangster tales. But there's a still an emotional brutality to this New York story, which unfolds through artfully staged set-pieces and carefully worded conversations. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Newland Archer, a wealthy lawyer who finds himself obsessing over Michelle Pfeiffer's Countess Ellen Olenska when he's supposed to marry Winona Ryder's May Welland, and he gives a performance of startling psychological depth. You feel the passion and desire underneath the surface of every scene.
  Director David Lowery (Pete's Dragon) conceived this dazzling, dreamy meditation on the afterlife during the off-hours on a Disney blockbuster, making the revelations within even more awe-inspiring. After a fatal accident, a musician (Casey Affleck) finds himself as a sheet-draped spirit, wandering the halls of his former home, haunting/longing for his widowed wife (Rooney Mara). With stylistic quirks, enough winks to resist pretension (a scene where Mara devours a pie in one five-minute, uncut take is both tragic and cheeky), and a soundscape culled from the space-time continuum, A Ghost Story connects the dots between romantic love, the places we call home, and time -- a ghost's worst enemy.
  Based on a novella by acclaimed science-fiction writer Ted Chiang, Arrival abandons space operatics and alien super-weapons to tell a first-contact story about the virtues of communication. When a squadron of spacecrafts touches down in remote areas of the globe, the Army enlists a linguist (Amy Adams) to "speak" to the extraterrestrial squids inside. Through code-breaking and conversation, our human heroes learn a little about this highly intelligent species and even more about their emotional capacity. Methodical and chilly, almost to a fault, Arrival delivers one of the biggest twists in recent memory. Like, maybe we Earthlings could learn to get along.
  Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily Gordon adapted their real-life meet cute, and an encounter with illness that landed Emily in the hospital just months afterward, into this moving, melancholy rom-com -- like a Terms of Endearment for the Trainwreck era. Fans of the comedian's stand-up or work as Silicon Valley's Dinesh will go nuts for The Big Sick's steady stream of laughs; one taboo-busting 9/11 joke-for-the-ages had my theater howling. But when the couple's life takes a turn for the worse, and Kumail's Pakistani heritage pressurizes the situation with demands of arranged marriage, Nanjiani's fans will cling to the jokes like a life preserver. Anchored by his sensitive performance, and bolstered by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as Emily's fretting, foulmouthed parents, The Big Sick is a reminder that fate is fickle, self-determination is fickler, and we all deserve a good laugh-cry once in awhile.
  A frenzied commentary on post-Watergate paranoia and a careful examination of how narratives gets constructed, this Brian De Palma thriller will change the way you listen to audio. John Travolta stars as a gifted movie sound effects artist who accidentally records a murder involving a presidential candidate -- or does he? To solve the mystery he keeps going back to the tape, driving himself to the brink of madness in the search for the truth. You'll return to this movie with the same intensity.
  David Lynch's twitchy riff on film noir is the link between our reality and our dreams, each frame zooming in on the drips of suburbia melting into hell. Dennis Hopper deep-breathing into a gas mask doesn't have to make sense, it just does.
  This Western-by-way-of-Cannibal Holocaust offers the aging Kurt Russell a pure hero role. Because there’s nothing like troglodytes with a hunger for human flesh to vindicate the way of the gun. Touting a cannon of a six-shooter and a mustache to match, Russell’s no-bullshit sheriff leads a band of stand-up dudes into enemy territory. The sight of blood and guts and more blood and more guts and so much blood and so many guts doesn’t rattle him. He rides forward, determined, like a true badass.
  Vince Vaughn is a very tall man. Writer and director S. Craig Zahler, the filmmaker behind 2015's brutal cannibal Western Bone Tomahawk, uses the motor-mouthed actor's imposing height as a blunt weapon in Brawl in Cell Block 99, his bone-crushing prison film. As Bradley Thomas, a bald-headed ex-con who gets sent to jail after a series of semi-tragic criminal mishaps, Vaughn fills the frame with his body, occasionally contorting his limbs for comedy but mostly thrusting them at his enemies in the movie's patiently filmed, incredibly graphic action set-pieces. The cinematic violence makes John Wick look like the Teletubbies. At the same time, Zahler invests the story with a depth of feeling rarely seen in such grisly genre fare.
  Robert Towne's Chinatown script is often cited as one of, if not the greatest of all time. (And not just because of that iconic line.) As a struggling private eye, Jack Nicholson dives headfirst into a mystery that turns into a maelstrom of LA corruption. The result is a well-paced noir tale, equal parts frustrating and fascinating, that still lives up to its reputation.
  If you think domestic surveillance is spooky, imagine how it feels for the guy on the other end of the microphone. Starring Gene Hackman in his prime, Francis Ford Coppola's subdued thriller builds paranoia out of an overheard conversation and the lengths to which one private investigator goes to uncover its meaning. Hackman’s Harry Caul can only get so close to his subjects, and Coppola plays by similar rules, making sound as essential to the viewing experience as picture. Wildly influential, this one will have you looking over your shoulder for days.
  Some people will tell you they understand Richard Kelly’s sci-fi coming-of-age tale, but trying to "explain" what Donnie Darko is all about misses the point. A young Jake Gyllenhaal shines as a moody teenager striving to find the meaning behind apocalyptic terrors hitting his suburban hometown, some of which include: a plane crash, a creepy rabbit named Frank, and a lot of pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo about the nature of reality. Putting Donnie Darko on a pedestal is a mistake, but when you take it as a depiction of a young mind struggling to articulate a worldview, this early aughts cult classic is an indie sci-fi masterpiece in its own right.
  Working from Tom Perrotta's acerbic novel, director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor craft the perfect showdown between Reese Witherspoon's overachieving Tracy Flick and Matthew Broderick's string-pulling teacher. As the seemingly low-stakes student council race gets closer and closer, everyone involved is forced to ask those always-pertinent moral questions: How far will I go to win, and what's the point of winning if you lose your sense of self?
  This adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a national service. Most of us didn't catch the playwright's sixth "Pittsburgh Cycle" installment when it debuted on Broadway in 1987, nor did we see Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the acclaimed revival in 2010. Thanks to a commitment by Washington to film Wilson's body of work, the world can now witness this tightly wound examination of African-American life, adapted for film by Wilson himself (he completed the screenplay before his death in 2005). Washington's grasp on theatrical camerawork amplifies the speeches of his ex-Negro League ballplayer Troy. The patriarch is a man and a monster, a character we're all lucky to behold.
  Sean Baker's The Florida Project nuzzles into the swirling, sunny, strapped-for-cash populace of a mauve motel just within orbit of Walt Disney World. His eyes are Moonee, a 6-year-old who adventures through abandoned condos, along strip mall-encrusted highway, and across verdant fields of overgrown brush like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. But as gorgeous as the everything appears -- and The Florida Project looks stunning -- the world around here is falling apart, beginning with her mother, an ex-stripper turning to prostitution. The juxtaposition, and down-to-earth style, reconsiders modern America in the most electrifying way imaginable.
  Cast from the molten barrels of Charles Bronson's many Smith & Wessons, this frenetic '70s throwback plays out as one prolonged shootout. What should be just-another-illegal-gun-deal-by-the-docks between a group of IRA fighters (led by Cillian Murphy), a skeezy arms dealer (Sharlto Copley), and two American representatives for the respective parties (Brie Larson and Armie Hammer) explodes into a firefight when one lower-rung goon accuses another of assaulting his sister at a bar the night prior. Each insult exacerbates the standoff, which director Ben Wheatley orchestrates with wailing bullets, chaotic camerawork, and salvos of clever banter, blurted out as the actors squirm across dirt floors to safety. By the end of Free Fire, limbs are torn through, blood is spilled, and your jaw is on the floor.
  If you're fed up with "young adult dystopia," and equally over the zombie movie, The Girl with All the Gifts is good news. The movie combines both genres into one tasty combo plate that's unexpected at every turn. It's about a group of survivors who accompany a young zombie/human hybrid into the wilderness after their facility is invaded. A weird one, but it's also really quite good.
  In this greasy, cruel thriller from up-and-comers the Safdie brothers, Robert Pattinson stars as Connie, a bank robber who races through Queens to find enough money to bail out his mentally disabled brother, who's locked up for their last botched job. Each suffocating second of Good Time, blistered by the neon backgrounds of Queens, New York and propelled by warped heartbeat of Oneothrix Point Never's synth score, finds Connie evading authorities by tripping into an even stickier situation.
  Green Room is a throaty, thrashing, spit-slinging punk tune belted through an invasion-movie microphone at max volume. It's nasty -- and near-perfect. As a band of 20-something rockstars recklessly defend against a neo-Nazi battalion equipped with machetes, shotguns, and snarling guard dogs, the movie blossoms into a savage coming-of-age tale, an Almost Famous for John Carpenter nuts. Anyone looking for similar mayhem should check out director Jeremy Saulnier's previous movie, the low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir, Blue Ruin, also streaming on Amazon.
  Some movies splash across the screen, others turn scenes into bold brushstrokes. The Handmaiden, an erotic thriller with twists and turns and thrusts aplenty, is Park Chan-wook's drip painting. Set in 1930s Korea, the movie follows Sook-hee, a pickpocket, who slips undercover into the staff of a sheltered heiress, with hopes of luring the deep-pocketed woman into the romantic grasp of her con-man partner in crime. The problem: Sook-hee falls madly, lustfully in love with her target. In The Handmaiden, single, sensual drops -- a prolonged glance, the zipping up of a dress, whispered white lies -- fan out through the entire two-and-a-half-hour narrative into the unexpected. You will not see a craftier movie this year.
  In this a post-apocalyptic nightmare-and-a-half, the horrors of humanity, the strain of chaotic emotions pent up in the name of survival, bleed out through wary eyes and weathered hands. The setup is blockbuster-sized -- reverts mankind to the days of the American Frontier, every sole survivor fights to protect their families and themselves -- but the drama is mano-a-mano. Barricaded in a haunted-house-worthy cabin in the woods, Paul (Edgerton) takes in Will (Abbott) and his family, knowing full well they could threaten his family's existence. All the while, Paul's son, Trevor, battles bloody visions of (or induced by?) the contagion. Shults directs the hell out of every slow-push frame of this psychological thriller, and the less we know, the more confusion feels like a noose around our necks, the scarier his observations become.
  There's something off about Martin (Barry Keoghan), the surviving son of a man who died under the knife of surgeon Steve Murphy (Colin Farrell). At the beginning of spine-tingling Sacred Deer, Steve steps up to be a father figure to Martin, gauche and puzzling and bubbling with darkness. The relationship eventually sours, and it's from there that director Yorgos Lanthimos, known for bitter strains of magical realism, finds footing for an ice-cold rumination on regret and responsibility. Farrell is gifted unprecedented complexity in his Sophie's Choice, Nicole Kidman challenges him with every move, and Keoghan gives a performance that echoes Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. It's a maddening and exhilarating time at the movies.
  The dizzying senior year of high school is the focus of actress Greta Gerwig's first directorial effort, the story of girl named Lady Bird (her given name, in that "it’s given to me, by me") who rebels against everyday Sacramento, California life to obtain whatever it is "freedom" turns out to be. Set in the early 2000s, a time when Dave Matthews' "Crash Into Me" regularly melts hearts, Lady Bird charts a year-in-the-life through precision recreation of shared moments: the arguments with parents, the math quiz meltdowns, the arguments with parents, the life-or-death musical tryouts, the arguments with parents, the fleeting first-time sexual encounters that mean everything, and of course, the arguments with parents. (Arrives on Amazon Prime on June 3.)
  This ripe, relationship comedy is set in the 1990s, a time of pay phones, cigarette-friendly bars, floppy disks, and harder-to-keep secrets. The writer-director's characters all have them: a rebellious high school senior (Abby Quinn) flirting with boys and heroin for the first time; her soon-to-be-married sister (Jenny Slate), who questions everything after a hookup with an old flame; their mother (Edie Falco), who works around the clock and takes flak from all involved; and their father (John Turturro), a wannabe playwright who may or not be carrying on a decade-long affair (the discovery of a dirty poetry stash sends the sisters hunting for answers). Like Obvious Child did for cautious millennial daters, Landline surveys and questions the value of steady relationships. The sprawling story tests Slate's dramatic chops (while feeding the former SNL player plenty of comedy gold), delivers newcomer Quinn a breakout role, and gives Robespierre the chance to whisk us around New York City with the cool of Woody Allen or Hal Ashby. Landline could be the set-up for a great television show, but as a movie, it's a daring and decadent slice of life.
  To examine modern love, this baroque, sci-fi rom-com basically splits into two movies: the first is an evisceration of Bachelor-esque monogamy logic, where Colin Farrell's David must find love in 45 days or be turned into an animal (of his choice -- the overlords aren't monsters). The second boots our hero to savage woods, where escaped singles plot terrorist attacks against their romance-obsessed society. Shaded with cool hues and orchestrated like a minor symphony, Farrell and Weisz balance the off-kilter dystopia with vibrant, sexual heat. Outrunning tranquilizer darts never looked so good. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lobster is original, heartfelt, and an awful date movie. Luckily, that's not a factor for greatness.
  Director James Gray's account of explorer Percy Fawcett's lush and perilous journey through the Amazon is the rare film to capture and channel nature's bewitching power. Charlie Hunnam, rousing and physical, stars as Percy, a turn-of-the-20th-century military man who embarks to South America to map Bolivia and cleanse his family name of scandal. Months of starvation, illness, piranha-infested waters, and encounters with natives end with the near-discovery of a hidden, advanced civilization. Gray makes room for court scenes, WWI battles, tender family drama, and a musical score that can stand alone. But in the end, the verdant unknown of Amazonia that has its way with Fawcett and our senses, reflecting a profound component of human nature.
  Clocking in at three hours, this story of a handyman (Casey Affleck) who returns home to care for his late brother's teenage son (Lucas Hedges) is an epic of intimate proportions. Affleck's character begins the movie shattered by grief. With each scene, be it a haunting memory, a hilarious back-and-forth with his nephew, or sudden silence so well-timed you feel the winter air fill your lungs, the actor reconstructs writer and director Kenneth Lonergan's jagged pieces into a recognizable figure. Manchester by the Sea is like a five-season series squeezed into a movie-length runtime, or better, an experiential microcosm strewn across one coastal Massachusetts town. Your tear ducts will be no match for this one.
  George Clooney made a career out of playing gray knights, and his work as the title character in this icy New York thriller might be the pinnacle of his work. Clayton is a super-cynical, debt-ravaged "fixer," stuck doing damage control amid a massive class-action lawsuit. (Think Olivia Pope from Scandal, but somehow more intense.) He also plays poker, drives cars that explode, and does his best impression of Shiva, god of death. Tony Gilroy's Oscar-winning legal drama is addictive fun in that way complex conspiracy yarns can be, and it has a handful of memorable exchanges to boot -- wait till you see the final confrontation with Tilda Swinton.
  Chronicling the boyhood years, teenage stretch, and muted adult life of Chiron, a black gay man making it Miami, this triptych altarpiece is at once hyper-specific and cosmically universal. Jenkins roots each moment in the last; Chiron's desire for a lost lover can't burn in a diner booth over a bottle of wine without his beachside identity crisis years prior, blurred and violent, or encounters from deeper in his past, when glimpses of his mother's drug addiction, or the mentoring acts of her crack supplier, felt like secrets delivered in code. Panging colors, sounds, and the delicate movements of its perfect cast like the notes of a symphony, Moonlight is the real deal, a movie that will only grow and complicate as you wrestle with it.
  Love it or hate it: Those seem to be the only viable opinions when it comes to mother!, director Darren Aronofsky's allegorical take on the Bible and environmentalism. Jennifer Lawrence stars as the titular mother, whose partner (Javier Bardem) doesn't display much regard for her feelings when it comes to, say, allowing houseguests to absolutely trash their home. If infanticide and cannibalism aren't your bag, mother! may not be for you, but at the very least it's a daring attempt at reimagining the Western religious canon.
  David Lynch intended to follow up his cult-favorite TV show Twin Peaks with an even dreamier series. That never happened, but the ditched pilot served as the basis for Mulholland Drive, a gorgeous, interpretable, mind-bending movie -- effin' art, man -- that draws from 100 years of Hollywood tropes. Naomi Watts plays an aspiring actress who befriends an amnesiac (Laura Harring). There are musical interludes, sexual encounters, and loads of non sequiturs. The flavor of mystery is baked into it all, but you're better off luxuriating in this surreal bath than scrutinizing the plot.
  Before they terrified you with Paranormal Activity 3 and 4, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman made the social media paranoia doc Catfish, an essential document of pre-Tinder online dating. Their new movie Nerve, an Emma Roberts- and Dave Franco-starring techno-thriller about a deadly mobile-gaming app, splits the difference between visceral scares and sly social commentary. It's the rare movie that attempts to mimic the aesthetics of the internet -- emojis, text messages, Skype -- and mostly gets the details of the Pokémon Go era right while still providing old-fashioned scares.
  Jake Gyllenhaal gives a career-best performance in this nocturnal noir, playing the haunted, single-minded Lou Bloom, a scavenger of human suffering whose motives are as twisted and opaque as the seedy LA underworld he inhabits. That's news media for you! Be warned: if you’re planning a trip to sunny California, writer-director Dan Gilroy's pitch-black satire will make you see the City of Angels in a whole new light.
  William Carlos Williams described his epic poem Paterson as an attempt to mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city." Jarmusch's latest, which follows a guy named Paterson (Driver) who drives a bus around the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and writes poetry like his hero William Carlos Williams during his breaks, strives for similar observation. Very little happens in Paterson (the movie), though within its trials of everyday life, even the slightest tremble of Earth feels cataclysmic (a broken-down bus prompts many to wonder if it'll blow up into a fireball). Jarmusch finds poetry in the murmurs of a Thursday night bar crowd and the bouncing vistas out a bus window. Paterson (the man) senses it too, though a world urging him to publish, cash in, brand tests his eye. In Paterson, Jarmusch has art on the brain, and he makes some in the process.
  Recent boxing movies like Southpaw, Bleed for This, and Hands of Stone have often felt like male actor vanity projects, well-funded attempts to get super swole for the poster and nothing more. In more ways than one, the gravely serious thespians who star in these films are chasing the lead of Robert De Niro in director Martin Scorsese's boxing classic, but they often fail to notice what sets this acclaimed boxing tale apart: Jake LaMotta is not cool. He's pathetic. Ugly. Despicable. A fool. But we keep watching because of the depth of humanity De Niro, Scorsese, and writer Paul Schrader bring to the material. We keep watching because it's impossible to look away.
  You had to feel for the people tasked with remaking Paul Verhoeven's violent, vicious police story. He didn't just get it right the first time -- Verhoeven was the Clarence Boddicker to his Alex Murphy of a movie, shooting until it was a bloody pulp. RoboCop reaches deranged levels of brutality and gore in its quest to satirize American jurisprudence. ED-209 guns down a room full of executives and we cheer. Murphy is blown to bits and we gasp, until he's reborn with robot parts and takes revenge in equally destructive ways. Verhoeven's shootouts are high caliber, even when they're critical. The beauty of RoboCop: there's a head on its shoulders, even if it's half Hollywood machine.
  You know the songs by the Bee Gees and the iconic white suit, but there's more to this gritty slice of New York nightlife than John Travolta's killer dance moves. The story of tough-talking 19-year-old Tony Manero (Travolta) coming of age while taking the train into Manhattan is darker and heavier than the film's brightly lit poster implies. Saturday Night Fever is a movie bristling with anger, resentment, and the agony of dreams deferred. The baby-faced Travolta brings depth and swagger to Tony's tortured journey. And, yes, the soundtrack is incredible.
  Martin Scorsese spent 20 years developing his adaptation of Shūsaku Endō's novel, the story of two Portuguese Catholic priests who travel to Nagasaki, Japan, to rescue their mentor from religious persecution, and it feels like the minimum time required. Silence is a weathered ark, wrestling with the power and pull of religion from a God's eye view. Sebastião (Andrew Garfield) arrives to Japan to push his scripture. Over his journey, lush, meditative, and bloody, thanks to the Japanese campaign to force Christian priests into apostasy, he will question everything, and beg his savior for guidance. Scorsese asks the Big Questions, making for the most challenging film of the year, beliefs be damned.
  Paul Verhoeven is undoubtedly the master of the sly sci-fi satire. With RoboCop, he laid waste to the police state with wicked, trigger-happy glee. He took on evil corporations with Total Recall. And with Starship Troopers, a bouncy, bloody war picture, he skewered the chest-thumping theatrics of pro-military propaganda, offering up a pitch-perfect parody of the post-9/11 Bush presidency years before troops set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan. Come for the exploding alien guts, but stay for the winking comedy -- or stay for both! Bug guts have their charms, too.
  The uproarious comedy that kicked off Rogen and Evan Goldberg's writing partnership crams more crude sex jokes than anyone ever thought possible into the heartwarming story of inseparable best friends (Michael Cera and Jonah Hill) on the verge of leaving each other to ship off to college. Factor in some killer party scenes, a then-unknown Emma Stone, and high-school horndogs riffing to their hearts' content, and we all want to be McLovin.
  You might think a movie that opens with a suicidal man riding a farting corpse like a Jet Ski wears thin after the fourth or fifth flatulence gag. You would be wrong. Brimming with imagination and expression, the directorial debut of Adult Swim auteurs "The Daniels" wields sophomoric humor to speak to friendship. As Radcliffe's dead body springs back to life -- through karate-chopping, water-vomiting, and wind-breaking -- he becomes the id to Dano's struggling everyman, who is also lost in the woods. If your childhood backyard adventures took the shape of The Revenant, it would look something like Swiss Army Man, and be pure bliss.
  Paul Thomas Anderson found modern American greed in the pages of Upton Sinclair's depression-era novel, Oil!. Daniel Day-Lewis found the role of a lifetime behind the bushy mustache of Daniel Plainview, thunderous entrepreneur. Paul Dano found his milkshake drunk up. Their discoveries are our reward -- There Will Be Blood is a stark vision of tycoon terror.
  The world needs films like Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. As the director did over a decade ago with The Fifth Element, the French filmmaker imagines a universe filled with wonderful and absurd sights: little critters that poop out marbles, aliens that fish for humans with giant hooks, heroes that dress like they got lost at a Tiësto concert, and a military commander played by jazz fusion legend Herbie Hancock. Like the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending or Alex Proyas's Gods of Egypt, it's an expensive disaster that will inevitably find a cult willing to worship it as the bizarre little marble excreted from a porcupine's butt that it is.
  Four vignettes -- the story of a boy caring for his first pup; Greta Gerwig as a soul-searching, pet-stealing suburbanite; a portrait of a college screenwriting professor; and an elderly dog owner's encounter with the younger generation -- comprise this wickedly comical, existentially provocative look at life with pets. Director Todd Solondz can be a cruel and unusual god to his characters, and while Wiener-Dog shocks, the movie has a fanciful side, sporting dancing-dog videos and plenty of aw-gosh cuddling. Owning a pet is a colossal emotional undertaking. Wiener-Dog is the rare movie that treats it like one.
  Taika Waititi, director of last year's Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok, and Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords co-directed this hysterical, horrifying mockumentary about a group of vampires forced to share a house in Wellington, New Zealand. Life as an immortal bloodsucker isn't all it's cracked up to be -- the living accommodations alone are a nightmare. What We Do in the Shadows explores every possibility with crackling wit.
  Cast against type as a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh college, Michael Douglas gives one of his funniest performances in this adaptation of writer Michael Chabon's poignant campus novel. Though he's not playing an oily rich guy, Douglas still has that sleazy charm, which he uses to manipulate the people around him. Director Curtis Hanson, fresh off the success of L.A. Confidential, makes the academic world of department meetings and cocktail parties come alive with spark and wit.
  You've seen hitman movies, but you've never seen Lynne Ramsay's hitman movie. The Scottish director, who many first discovered with 2002's elliptical nightlife odyssey Morvern Callar, can take a John Wick-ian premise and invest it with new meaning by reframing it from an askew angle. This crime story, adapted from a novella by Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames, is about an ex-soldier named Joe (Phoenix) who finds himself tasked with recovering a kidnapped girl amidst a sinister political conspiracy involving human trafficking. What makes it so special? Between Phoenix's muted performance, Jonny Greenwood's string-drenched score, and Ramsay's expressive jump-cuts, every image crackles with energy, style, and possibility. It's a death-obsessed movie vibrating with life.
  David Fincher's period drama is for obsessives. In telling the story of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who captured the public imagination by sending letters and puzzles to the Bay Area press, the famously meticulous director zeroes in on the cops, journalists, and amateur code-breakers who made identifying the criminal their life's work. With Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-turned-gumshoe Robert Graysmith at the center, and Robert Downey Jr.'s barfly reporter Paul Avery stumbling around the margins, the film stretches across time and space, becoming a rich study of how people search for meaning in life. Zodiac is a procedural thriller that makes digging through old manilla folders feel like a cosmic quest.
  If there's such thing as an epistolary movie, 20th Century Women is it. Touring 1970s Santa Barbara through a living flipbook, Mills's semi-autobiographical film transcends documentation with a cast of wayward souls and Jamie (Zumann), an impressionable young teenager. Bening plays his mother, and the matriarch of a ragtag family, who gather together for safety, dance to music when the moment strikes, and teach Jamie the important lesson of What Women Want, which ranges from feminist theory to love-making techniques. The kid soaks it up like a sponge. Through Mills's caring direction, and characters we feel extending infinitely through past and present, so do we.
  Since its first season, HBO's Game of Thrones has preyed on the emotions of its fans, causing them to cry out and howl in anguish at each shocking twist. Watching the show each week can be a fraught emotional experience -- death is often swift and brutal in Westeros -- but it's not exactly easy on the actors either. According to Entertainment Weekly's new cover story, which offers a few mild hints at what's to come in the final season, actor Kit Harington, who plays the show's sword-wielding (and direwolf-loving) hero Jon Snow, "wept" not once, but twice when reading the script and learning the fate of his character.
  Were they happy or sad tears? It's hard to say -- the article keeps spoilers to a minimum -- but it does note that Harington had not read the script when the cast assembled for the first table read at the production offices in Belfast. (Others, like Emilia Clarke, rushed home to read the password-protected scripts the second they appeared in their inboxes.) Instead, Harington discovered what awaited Jon Snow as the script was read aloud. "What’s the point of reading it to myself in my own head when I can listen to people do it and find out with my friends?" Harington explains in the article.
  Fair enough! The 31-year-old actor wouldn't reveal what made him cry the first time, but apparently the second time was when he reached the last page of episode 6, the finale of the entire series he's worked on since it debuted in 2011. "Every season, you read at the end of the last script 'End of Season 1,' or 'End of Season 2,'" he says. "This read 'End of Game of Thrones.'"
  Harington was not the only cast member moved by the end of the series. In EW's piece, Sophie Turner describes reading the scripts as "completely overwhelming” and says it left her feeling "numb." Similarly, Lena Headey, who plays the sinister Cersei Lannister, described the experience of filming the final season as leaving her with "a great sense of grief."
  What exactly could make all of them so stressed out? Again, the article is light on spoilers, but it does note that there was a 55-day night shoot for a (presumably) climatic battle. (For some context, Season 6's "Battle of the Bastards" required a 25-day shoot.) "It’s brutal," says Peter Dinklage in the article. "It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park."
  Then again, as exciting and grueling as the epic action sequences on Game of Thrones can be, the most moving parts of the show tend to be smaller character moments. In the piece, EW writer James Hibberd, who visited the set in Belfast, describes arriving on set and being "stunned" and "freaked out." Specifically, he notes, "There are characters in the finale that I did not expect."
  Could Sean Bean be back as some sort of exposition-delivering ghost figure? Is this the Lady Stoneheart reveal some fans have clamored for? Did Grey Wind return from wolf heaven? We're going to have to wait until 2019 to find out exactly how it shakes out. If Kit Harington's tears are any indication, start investing in new boxes of tissues now.
  Tonight SoCo getaway Hotel St Cecilia hosts a one-off dinner to raise funds for The Culinary Trust's collegiate cooking scholarships. The mystery menu's prepped by Uchi's Tyson Cole, Holly Smith of Washington's lauded Northern-Ital Cafe Juanita, and Brad
  *Kirtan experience with Tejase band memebers Ann Casapini and Denise DeLuca performing the mantra that has inspired Stephanie’s life purpose
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