We were told in Film History 101 that spectators who first saw the Lumière brothers' 1896 film of a train rushing forward ("Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat") scared the audience, who thought it was going to leap from the screen and hit them. Turns out this didn't really happen. We were also told that it took a long time for audiences to...

Someone once said that death is a punctuation mark in our lives we don't control. (Unless we commit suicide.) Serial murderers and assassins insert it into other lives multiple times. (A bullet, knife, poison–they all insert the period.) I've never liked films or TV shows about hit men. I don't find any humor or irony in the occupation and I refuse to watch them...