Before you see Moonrise Kingdom this weekend, check out these two films from the movie's co-writers, Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Cabin in the Woods, writer/director Joss Whedon doesn't just create entertainment that can be enjoyed in the moment -- it can also be discussed and analyzed for years after its finished its television or theatrical run. Case in point: Titan Books' newly released Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion, a weighty compendium of short retrospective pieces (every section begins with a "Joss Whedon 101" to the particular work at hand), academic essays and interviews with such collaborators as actor Alexis Denisof and writers Jane Espenson and Tim Minear. Collected by the pop cultural survey site PopMatters, the pieces included in this tome span Whedon's entire career from the small screen to the big screen to the four-color pages of comic books. As with all anthologies, not every entry here is a winner. Some essays cross the line from admiring to flat-out hagiography, while others offer rote summary in place of interesting analysis. But combing through the book, we found five essays that are definitely worth a read. Check out our picks below and click here to order the book for your own personal Whedon library.

Still piecing your mind back together after having it blown by The Cabin in the Woods this weekend? Keep your obsessions about the film alive by picking up the photo-heavy, information-dense tome The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion, from Titan Books. Here are five good reasons to add this to your bookshelf:

With the sci-fi blockbuster John Carter, which opens in theaters on Friday, Pixar wizard Andrew Stanton (who has two Best Animated Feature Oscars to his name, for Finding Nemo and Wall-E) makes the leap from directing cartoon characters to live-action heroes. It's a path that has been followed by a handful of filmmakers, some of whom made the transition seamlessly while others... well, didn't. We'll find out soon whether John Carter will be a one-off for Stanton (pictured here with the movie's star, Taylor Kitsch) or if he'll be adding more live-action features to his filmography. In the meantime, here's what happened to some of his predecessors:

Everyone knows that Tom Selleck was going to be Indiana Jones before his Magnum P.I. commitment passed the fedora and bullwhip along to Harrison Ford instead. But were you also aware that an early draft of the screenplay for the film that would become Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull featured cameos by such characters as Sallah, Willie and Short Round? That's one of the many fun pieces of behind-the-scenes trivia you'll learn in David Hughes's, Tales From Development Hell, which explores the fortunes of some of the greatest movies never made. An updated version of his 2004 tome of the same name, this new edition, which hits stores today, reveals what happened to such high-profile, development hell stranded projects as Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger's medieval epic, Crusade, Darren Aronofsky's gritty Batman reboot Year One and the multiple big-screen versions of Neil Gaiman's beloved Sandman comic. We won't spoil all of the secrets that this enjoyable, well-researched book has to offer, but here are a few choice tidbits sure to whet movie lovers' appetites.

With the new horror movie The Woman in Black, Daniel Radcliffe takes his first big step beyond Harry Potter, the decade-long film franchise that made him a household name. Transitioning from that kind of a long-running and/or hugely popular series to other roles can be an enormous hurdle for an actor. For assistance, Radcliffe can study the career trajectories of the following performers, each of whom left the security of an established franchise -- which, in many cases, rocketed them to stardom -- behind for less familiar standalone projects.

If you only know Joe Carnahan as the director of high-octane action movies like Smokin' Aces and The A-Team, his latest film The Grey, which opens in theaters on Friday, may come as a surprise. This spare, stripped-down survival tale follows a small band of men whose plane crashes deep in the Alaskan wilderness and are forced to battle the elements -- from the harsh weather to hungry wolves -- in order to make it back to civilization. Liam Neeson plays the crew's self-appointed leader, Ottway, who is still carrying the emotional scars caused by the recent passing of his beloved wife. More in the spirit of Grizzly Man than an uplifting man vs. nature story like Alive, The Grey was Carnahan's most challenging shoot, but it resulted in one of his most fully-realized movies. The director spoke with TWoP during a recent trip to New York.

For me at least, the year in film started with a bang in the form of Gregg Araki's crazysexycool apocalyptic collegiate comedy Kaboom and ended with the whimper that was Stephen Daldry's flat, feeble 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. In between those two bookends, 2011 proved a pretty great year for movies, particularly if you thought outside the Hollywood box. After lumbering through a mostly fallow winter, spring and summer, the big movie studios rebounded with a strong fall slate of releases that included the bold new works from veteran filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh among them), star vehicles that actually emphasized brains over brawn (Moneyball, The Descendants) and even a few above-average franchise entries (Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, Paranormal Activity 3). And when Hollywood faltered, the independent and international film industries picked up the slack. If you lived nearby an art house or had access to a video-on-demand service, every month brought a steady stream of terrific titles that ran the gamut of genres, from ultraviolent samurai tales (Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins) to moody Westerns (Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff) to stories of young love in bloom (Andrew Haigh's Weekend). Some years, I struggle to decide which films absolutely deserve a place on my Top Ten list. This year, I struggled to decide which ones I could leave off without too much regret. (That explains, by the way, why my list of Honorable Mentions includes another twenty-odd movies I couldn't bear not to single out.) So without further ado, in one of the best years for movies in some time, here are the best of the best.

Television Without Pity is a voting member of the New York Film Critics Online, an organization of New York-based online critics, which convened yesterday to hand out their annual awards honoring the best in film for 2011. The silent-film homage The Artist proved to be the big winner, going home with three awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. (We weren't alone in giving that film top honors -- The Artist has also been named Best Picture by the New York Film Critics Circle, Boston Society of Film Critics and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics. It's also currently the closest to what resembles a frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar.) NYFCO departed from the mainstream consensus with two less expected picks -- Michael Shannon was named Best Actor for his searing work in Take Shelter, while Joe Cornish picked up Debut Director honors for his terrific alien invasion movie, Attack the Block. For a full list of winners, along with links to our original coverage of those films, click below.

The new indie drama Shame, which opens in limited release on Friday, certainly earns its NC-17 rating, what with the full-frontal nude shots of its leading man and lady (Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan), as well as several prolonged and ultra-revealing sex scenes and its frank depiction of sex addiction. Despite all of this erotically-charged content, the movie itself isn't particularly... well, sexy. That's largely intentional of course, as director Steve McQueen is clearly more interested in stroking moviegoers' intellect than their libidos. The same can't be said of the following movies from the past two decades, all of which were designed for maximum titillation value, but turned out to be about as erotically-challenged as Zooey Deschanel's latest Manic Pixie Dream Girl on New Girl. And we're not talking about soft-core Skinemax titles, which are un-sexy in their own distinct way. These were all studio releases with big (or semi-big) name actors and actresses pretending to get it on for our benefit. Really guys, you shouldn't have. No, seriously... you shouldn't have.