After an already strong start, HBO’s Game of Thrones ups the ante with one of its best hours yet. Last week’s premiere was ominous, and while I counted off the characters most clueless to the oncoming storm as the most likely to suffer, I was not expecting this.

Animal Collective’s Dave Portner said his new solo effort, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, was inspired by horror films, like the name implies. The bad news is that if he meant Enter the Slasher Houseto sound scary, he pretty much failed.

Draft Day is a perfectly enjoyable movie with a solid understanding of football and football minds, but tends to lag when focusing on subplots not related to football.

Being about 70% romantic-comedy and 30% quirky underdog sports movie, to call the plot of Cuban Fury predictable would be an understatement.

Two albums deep with pop outfit Chairlift, Caroline Polachek has become one of pop’s go-to girls for upping a song’s seductive power. (See her work with Washed Out, Delorean, and Blood Orange.)

Hateship Loveship is by no means a bad film, but it’s an unfortunately easy one.

Out Among the Stars is a newly unearthed Johnny Cash album, recorded in 1981 and 1984 but for some reason shelved at the time.

Pop and indie rock continue to consume each other as the millennium progresses, and Casey Dienel has positioned White Hinterland uniquely between the two, slowly migrating away from her earlier jazz inclinations (although they certainly still permeate her melodic sensibility and ambitious songwriting).

Writer-director Mike Flanagan milks a setup that sounds like typical, b-movie chaff—a killer mirror, really?—and through clever tricks and smart editing, turns it into one of the scarier American horror flicks we’ve seen in some time.