It's a Straight: Poker Night, reviewed.

Beau Mirchoff has the cheek to try to play a tough-guy lead in Poker Night.

I don't know anything about poker, but I gave writer/director Greg Francis' feature debut Poker Night 2.5 out of a possible five starts for The Dissolve. Which according to this ranking of various hands in poker, makes it the equivalent of a straight.

Sorry about the gross photo. I didn't have many choices.

Won't Someone Please Think of the 'Tweens? The PG-13 at 30.

Amrish Puri rips out the heart of mainstream cinema in 1984's Temple of Doom.

To wrap up The Dissolve's Movie of the Week examination of Joe Dante's Gremlins, Keith Phipps asked me to write a reflection on the PG-13, the lukewarm rating introduced in the summer of 1984 in response to the outcry that greeted the PG-rated Gremlins' violence and darkness, as well as that of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released two weeks earlier. I was honored to oblige.

A surprising, random fact of which I was unaware: Gremlins, a horror comedy and the fourth-highest grossing film of 1984, was released the very same day as that year's second-biggest hit, Ivan Reitman's horror comedy Ghostbusters. That would never happen now, and yet apparently it didn't hurt either of those films back then. Neither of them could out-earn Beverly Hills Cop, however. The fact an R-rated action comedy was the biggest hit of the year is another reminder of how much Hollywood has changed in a generation-and-a-half.

Every Day I Write the Book: Reach Me, reviewed.

Kevin Connelly & Tom Berenger arrange one of those popular public readings of self-help books.

It's no Jack Reacher, this star-studded, tone-deaf ensemble drama. Reviewed for The Dissolve.

Can of Wormholes, or Accretion Discography: My Interview with Kip Thorne, Interstellar Progenitor and Scientific Adviser

Kip Thorne on the set of Interstellar. (Paramount/Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures)

For my day job at Air & Space / Smithsonian, I interviewed Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who with his friend the movie producer Lynda Obst, conceived the film Interstellar back in 2006. Thorne remained closely involved with the picture throughout its writing, production, and editing, and has now published a 324-page companion to the film called The Science of "Interstellar" laying out his scientific rationalization for every aspect of its story -- even the Love Tesseract Wormhole.

DUH: Don't read this interview if you intend to see Interstellar but haven't yet.

And if that's your situation, and you live anywhere in the Washington, DC diaspora, make sure to catch the movie in 70mm IMAX at either the National Air & Space Museum downtown or at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out by Dulles International Airport. I've seen it both this way and in digital IMAX, and the 70mm presentation is more painterly and majestic. It also sounds better, curiously. The muddy sound mix we talked about on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week (based on a digital IMAX screening in Silver Spring, Maryland) was not a problem when I saw the film again at NASM in 70mm.

Raised by Wolves!

Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols' Wolf in 1994. Wolves is not as good.

I wish I could report that Wolves, the silly horror film I review for The Dissolve this week, is an ante-upping James Cameron sequel to Wolf, the Mike Nichols-Elaine May-Jack Nicholson-Michelle Pfeiffer-James Spader expose of lycanthropy in the publishing industry from 20 years ago I'd vaguely wanted to revisit even before this Grantland exegesis ran last summer.

It is not.

The Fault Is Not in Our Stars: Interstellar, reviewed.

Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar

My NPR review of Interstellar, a grand spacefaring epic I saw twice in three days and in which I am inclined to forgive many flaws. I Want to Believe, even if there's a lot of it I just don't.