David Fincher is (in)famous for his exacting directorial methods on set; stories abound about him putting his actors through multiple takes and working his crew hard to ensure that they get every shot absolutely right. Away from the camera, though, he seems laid back and comfortable, even up for cracking a joke or two (or three or four). While making the rounds for his latest film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which opens in theaters tomorrow), Fincher passed through New York and appeared at a press conference for the Sweden-set thriller, adapted from Stieg Larsson's best-selling book of the same time. He was joined by the movie's stars -- Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as the titular hacker, Lisbeth Salander -- and two supporting players, Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgård. Despite the movie's dark subject matter, all five were in fine spirits, cracking wise about everything from the movie's depiction of Sweden to a difficult stunt that literally left Craig gasping for air.

Joss Whedon has a bad case of cabin fever.

Before Prometheus arrives in theaters tomorrow, let's celebrate the anniversaries of the last two films in the original Alien cycle.

It might have been easier to feel more enthusiastic about American Reunion if this was the first time we had seen Jim, Stifler and the rest of the American Pie crew since the first movie became a breakout hit back in 1999. Thirteen years on, the original holds up quite nicely; dated soundtrack aside (the fact that both "One Week" and "Flagpole Sitta" are blasted without any hint of irony clearly makes it a late '90s period piece), the jokes still land, the characters remain endearing and there's a genuine sweetness beneath the raunch that gives the film heart as well as humor. A sequel to that movie would be most welcome, in the same way that Richard Linklater took his time following up Before Sunrise with Before Sunset. Unfortunately, in between American Pie and American Reunion, the brand name was tarnished by two mostly terrible sequels (2003's American Wedding was particularly dire) and a line of flat-out awful direct-to-DVD spin-offs (which, to be fair, didn't feature any of the original cast, with the exception of Eugene Levy). As a result Reunion arrives in theaters appearing less like a triumphant homecoming than the last gasp of a flatlining franchise.

It's time to start the music. Again.

When it was first announced that David Fincher had signed on to helm an American version of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's absurdly popular crime thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, my chief fear was that the resulting film would be Fincher's Ron Howard movie; i.e., a by-the-book adaptation of a bestseller (The Da Vinci Code, in Howard's case) that put profit first and artistry second. The other wrinkle Fincher faced (which Howard didn't) was that a perfectly serviceable (and quite faithful) film adaptation of Dragon Tattoo already existed -- a 2009 Swedish-language picture directed by Niels Arden Oplev and starring Noomi Rapace as the titular heroine, leather-clad, heavily-pierced hacker extraordinaire, Lisbeth Salander. So unless the Fight Club director was prepared to do some radical re-working of the novel -- thus pissing off its legions of fans -- it seemed as if his prodigious talents were going to be wasted on a project that would, at best, be a straightforward slice of pulp fiction or, at worse, a warmed-over rehash of too-familiar material.

David Fincher returns to the realm of serial killers and the men (and women) that pursue them with The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo, a Hollywood-ized treatment of the first installment in Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy.