Paltrow Adds Cookbook to Off-Camera Plate

And its long run could continue for quite a while: USA Today

(NEWSER) - American Idol has dominated the Nielsen ratings for 10 seasons, and its 11th season starts up tonight. Bill Keveney of USA Today rounds up some reasons why this pop culture institution might just go on forever: More»

Modern comedies badly rehash old ideas: Times critic

(NEWSER) - If this is the comeback season for the sitcom, at least one critic wants to go wayyyy back: to Seinfeld, Mary Tyler Moore, and Leave It to Beaver. "Certainly no series introduced this fall is breaking new ground," writes Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times . He concludes that "all television jokes going back to those first flickering black-and-white images fall into one of five categories," which were executed brilliantly in the old days. Today, not so much: More»

Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet star in Steven Soderbergh film

(NEWSER) - Critics applaud Steven Soderbergh’s latest effort, Contagion, a deeply disturbing imagining of a global pandemic that features an all-star cast (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne):

• It’s “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since 9/11, writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post . What’s more, it “takes great pains to present its situations realistically, and includes a lot of intelligent speculation about what sort of political, economic, and ethical questions would be raised by such a disaster.”

But war movies aren't

(NEWSER) - To give your heart a boost, turn on The Hangover—but make sure you avoid Halloween. Movies that make you chuckle are good for your vascular function, while stressful war and horror movies hurt your system, a study finds. Researchers showed bits of funny movies one day and the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan another day. When subjects viewed the comedies, the lining of their vessels expanded. More»

Amazon Prime customers can now access 7K shows, 2K movies

(NEWSER) - Netflix and Hulu beware: Amazon has struck a new blow in the battle for streaming content. A deal with NBCUniversal has added some 1,000 movies and TV shows to the web giant’s streaming library. Alongside a deal with CBS, Amazon now provides its Prime customers—who pay $79 a year for free shipping and other perks—with 7,000 TV shows and 2,000 movies, Mashable reports. Meanwhile, Netflix faces a setback as customers quit over its new pricing plan . More»