But back to deus ex machina. This is a phrase you will want to study and master, not merely to amaze friends during long bus journeys but because it so perfectly describes what otherwise might take you thousands of words. Imagine a play on a stage. The hero is in a fix. The dragon is breathing fire, his sword is broken, his leg is broken, his spirit is broken, and the playwright's imagination is broken. Suddenly there is the offstage noise of the grinding of gears, and invisible machinery lowers a god onto the stage, who slays the dragon, heals the hero, and fires the playwright. He is the 'god from the machine.'

Philip Kaufman's 'Twisted' walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.

Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from…

Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie i…

'I have this thing for generating character-oriented plots, where you look at a character and say 'What's the worst thing I could do to this guy?' I've found t…

'The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hu…

A lot of my stories end with 'And when I regained consciousness, there was a crowd standing around looking at me.'