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“Dying is easy, comedy-that’s hard.”

The world’s truly great cities have their own DNA:  their distinct characters and moods, strengths and weaknesses.  They say London is a masculine town, Paris a feminine one. Is it true? Regardless, it’s fun to debate. For those of you like me, who are unnerved by the sound of crickets, and who crave the energy and color of urban life, here’s a batch of capital titles, and the capitals that inspired them.

With the arrival of Spring and the sense of new beginnings, my contrarian spirit has me thinking about great endings. Great movie endings, to be precise.

As a kid, my favorite screen actor was Spencer Tracy. Like his close friend Bogart, the Ohio-born Tracy was not leading-man handsome, but became a star by projecting a unique and very human quality that viewers could readily access and admire: an everyman’s solidity masking an underlying sensitivity. He was known in Hollywood as the foremost “actor’s actor”— the player other actors measured themselves against. It’s easy to see why.

Not surprisingly, the movies' depiction of women in the workplace has evolved roughly in line with societal changes. There weren’t a lot of female CEOs portrayed in film before the advent of feminism in the 1960s, but there have always been smart, charismatic women in extraordinary professional roles, many of them leadership positions.

Way back in 1964, director Richard Lester singlehandedly pioneered the music video, seamlessly merging pop music and film in the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” And a whole new kind of cinematic expression was born.

Revenge can be sweet, or it can be scary; it can be swift, or long awaited, but it is always gripping to witness. Here, then, is our roundup of some not-so-usual suspects delivering their own big doses of payback.

The camera loves Paris. Even a besieged Paris, or a gloomy Paris is still Paris, with all the history, beauty and artistic vibrancy that makes it among the world’s most cherished cities. So powerful is its identity, Paris is one of the few places that, like New York, is as much a state of mind as an actual place.

Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are almost a genre unto themselves: between live-action and animated features, there are literally hundreds of titles out there. Inevitably, some are pretty bad, others amusingly cheesy.