“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dreamlike themselves, open 1947′s Dreams That Money Can Buy. “This is a story of dreams mixed with reality,” the narrator intones. He can say that again.

Writer-Director Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for the gorgeousness of his feature length animations, and storylines that combine indigenous Japanese elements with supernatural whimsy.

On the eve of yet another Superman movie reboot—coming tomorrow with all the usual summer hit fanfare and noise—take a moment before gorging yourself on popcorn and extravagant CGI spectacles to reflect on the character’s enduringly simple origins.

Located in the Montparnasse section of Paris, the Idem studio was originally built by the printer Emile Dufrenoy in 1880, as a space to house his lithographic presses.

Long before Oscar Wilde became a literary celebrity for his most famous work—The Picture of Dorian Gray and plays like Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest—he was a bit of a reality star.

On the list of the most interviewable auteurs in film history, Alfred Hitchcock must rank particularly high. I wouldn’t necessarily want to find myself on the business end of that sardonically stern gaze myself, but when Hitchcock agreed to sit down and talk, he really sat down and talked.

If anyone should ask you how to promote a celebrity fragrance without losing face, click play and whisper, “Like This.”
It helps if the celeb in question is generally acknowledged to be a class act. Imagine a drunken starlet emerging from her limo sans-drawers to stumble through her favorite poem by a 13th century Sufi mystic.

On March 5, 1933, Germany held its last democratic elections until the end of WWII, and the National Socialists gained a plurality in the Reichstag, with 43.9% of the vote and 288 seats. This event paved the way for the Enabling Act later that month, which effectively empowered Hitler as dictator.

Here’s a rare collaboration between the Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen and the Irish supergroup U2. It was staged for the 2005 Lian Lunson documentary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.

There’s a certain irony to Polish animator Piotr Dumala’s innovative style, a stop-motion technique in which he scratches an image into painted plaster, then paints it over again immediately and scratches the next. Called “destructive animation,” Dumala devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.