NPR News

Bud Clayman is not the sort of person who typically attracts cameras. Pudgy, with a droning voice and a cackle his own father says makes him sound like a chicken, Clayman harbored dreams of becoming a filmmaker in Los Angeles after college — dreams complicated by his Asperger's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder and depression.

Three decades and several breakdowns later, he's made his first film: a document of his own struggles with mental illness.

From the Department of Inessentiality, Summer Division, comes Men in Black 3, one of those franchises that lost all creative life in the first sequel but keep drawing breath anyway, thanks to an iron lung powered by a half-billion dollars in worldwide grosses.

In the first few minutes of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, the camera tracks horizontally and vertically along the cross-sectioned rooms of a house. It's one of the writer-director's signature visual tics, one that, like many of his techniques, announces his art as something artificial. Anderson isn't breaking the fourth wall, he's eliminating it, literally: all these rooms have only three, in order that we might glimpse the carefully choreographed ballet he has arranged for us inside.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was talking about education policy Thursday in Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, is a frequent stop for presidential candidates. But, amid a campaign likely to focus on a handful of battleground states, some are starting to wonder if Pennsylvania is still a swing state.

At the Universal Bluford Charter School in a largely African-American neighborhood in West Philadelphia, Romney toured a computer lab, helped students with an assignment in language arts class and listened to the kids sing.