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We had no ratings systems back in the days of my youth. The Catholic Church circulated listings to the faithful, but as a young Jewess in America I could go to anything I wanted, as long as my parents approved enough to drive me there and buy my ticket.

In many ways, there was no reason to have movie ratings. The studios agreed to the Hayes code, which uphold certain standards about language, nudity and gruesome violence. Arbitrary, ridiculous standards, but generally understood by the audience.

By the late 1960s, all this fell by the wayside as film, like other popular media, responded to an opening up of the culture and a liberation from repressive societal standards (and instituted some new ones, but that’s another sixty or seventy columns). Filmmakers wanted to show how people really talked and really looked and really acted.

Hence, a rating system. It wasn’t great.

It takes a village—to announce the birth of Kate Middleton and Prince William's baby boy. There was a very elaborate and careful plan that took place to share the exciting news earlier today, and that procedure introduced the world to a number of unfamiliar faces who had a special part in delivering the birth announcement. So who are these people? Here's a who's who guide to all those who had a role in the royal birth. 1. The Doctors: One of the biggest roles played in this event was done by Dr. Marcus Setchell (left), Queen Elizabeth II's former gynecologist, who delivered the Prince of Cambridge, and Dr. Alan Farthing (right), the queen's current gynecologist and...

Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

The big story

A flood of sympathy and tributes greeted the news of the death of writer and director Nora Ephron early on Wednesday morning – very quickly you got the impression that here was someone genuinely liked and admired by her Hollywood peers, and who connected in a very unusual way with the wider world. Possibly because of her own background as a reporter in 60s New York, journalists considered her one of their own, outside the gilded cage rather than cowering inside it. More than that, she inspired a generation of women with her clever, witty take on popular culture and a persistent refusal to be defeated by Hollywood's male-centric culture.

As a film-maker, she was undeniably influential, virtually creating the template for the modern romantic comedy and providing a string of high profile roles for the likes of Meg Ryan,...

Actor Alan Fudge has died at the age of 77.

The prolific TV star passed away on 10 October in Los Angeles after a battle with lung and liver cancer, according to Variety.com.

Canadian screenwriter Graham Yost paid tribute to Fudge, telling the website, "Alan was one of the most generous, kind and caring men I have ever known. Many of the roles he played over the years reflected that side of him. And then there were the roles where he got to go really dark and twisted - those were the roles that made all of us who knew him smile and applaud. He was a great actor and a great man."

Fudge racked up a large number of TV credits in his long-running career, with roles in Man from Atlantis, Eischied, Paper Dolls, and Bodies of Evidence, along with parts in Kojak, Charlie's Angels, Magnum, P.I., Cagney & Lacey, The A-Team, Beverly Hills, 90210, Baywatch, and Dawson's Creek. He also enjoyed a recurring role in family drama series 7th Heaven over eight years.

Fudge's movie roles included parts in Capricorn One and Edward Scissorhands.

He was last seen onscreen in 2009 with guest appearances in Big Love, The Closer and The Office.

There are two good films at Toronto about the same thing: Romance that begins during the last months of life for a person with cancer. I wrote earlier about Gus Van Sant's "Restless," and now here is "50/50" by Jonathan Levine, with a screenplay by Will Reiser that is said to be semi-autobiographical. As a person who has been in love while dealing with cancer, these films inspire introspection, and while I admire them I realize they are to some degree escapism--poised at the "Bargaining" position at the center of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief.

"Restless" stars Henry Hopper as Enoch, a young man obsessed with death, who learns to love life though the love of Annabel, a character played by Mia Wasikowska. She has only months to live and wants to use them to experience a real romance for the first time, not focus on death. "It is,...

Illustrations by Ron Kurniawan

The Boy King: Larry Page served as CEO during Google's startup days. | Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP

How new CEO Larry Page will lead the company he co-founded into the future.

Tarsorrhaphy.

It's not Helen of Troy or the assassination of an archduke, but this spelling-bee-worthy 10-cent word also launched a war, the Great Search Engine War of 2011, between Google and Microsoft. Over the past few years, one of Google's primary technical goals has been to improve its search engine for misspellings of unusual queries. It's relatively easy for Google to figure out that you mean "Obama" when you type "Onama." But what about something that people rarely search for -- and that they rarely spell correctly when they do? For a search scientist, that's the beautiful challenge of tarsorrhaphy, a gruesome-sounding surgical procedure.

When Google's search team figured out how to offer...