Pop Culture Round Up: May 1 - May 21

Studios hit with homevideo slump

Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)

'Rewired' Generations Small But Savvy

Uncommon Act of Design: The Secret of Getting Kids to Eat Veggies? Move the Salad Bar

Dempster Highway to serve as movie backdrop

A special report on television: The lazy medium

The Complete Metropolis

Computer Software Decodes Emotions Over the Phone

Twitter: No matter what Hollywood thinks, it's totally uncool for kids

Survey - critics still crucial to theatre

Mom returns Gossip Girl series books she kept off library shelves for almost two years

Gossip Girl Producers Reveal Details on Next Season’s Trip to Paris

3-D Abounds, but What’s the Frenzy Really About?

Director Tim Burton gets seaweed namesake

Mozart doesn't make you smarter: study

Reclaiming Roles: Actors Play Beyond Disabilities

Downey vs. Rourke: A Tale of Two Comebacks

A better world at 40% off

Ladies as gentlemen: the cross-dressing women of Edwardian musical theatre

Brontes get an action makeover

An Online Game to Entice the Movie Audience

It came from "Metropolis": The legacy of a classic

David Lynch’s new film for Christian Dior

The secret to creativity

Orson Welles' tarnished legacy

Poetry In Allen Ginsberg's Photography

Fish Tank (2009)

Andrea Arnold's sophomore feature Fish Tank is a wondrous little bubble of a film: with only a handful of characters and locations, you can feel the way Mia's (Katie Jarvis) life is crashing down on her even as it expands.

A would-be dancer, she hides out in a empty nearby apartment, drinking and coming up with new routines. She's good -- or at least better than her neighbours --, but you can tell she knows that she might not be good enough to make anything of it. Then her mum (Kierston Waering) brings Connor (Michael Fassbender) home, and it's game over. Mia's just beginning to test the power of her sexuality, and you can actually see Fassbender run Connor through mental calisthenics just to figure out how to deal with her.

Something expected happens, then something unexpected. It doesn't exactly go off the rails; Arnold and Jarvis have a firm grip on Mia throughout. But for a quiet, slow moving film like this one (at least four people walked out of the screening I attended, though that may have been the profanity), it doesn't sit well until the final moments. Maybe when getting out is the point, how you get out doesn't matter. B