Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again compiled a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Best New Movies

Man of Steel

Superhero movies are a dime a dozen now, but “Man of Steel” takes action fans back to where it all began: Superman. From Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures comes “Man of Steel” starring Henry Cavill in the role of Clark Kent/Superman, with the special visual direction of Zack Snyder. The film opens with the story of Superman’s homeworld, Krypton, and how it was destroyed. Safely evacuated to Earth as an infant, Superman is raised by Kevin Costner in Smallville while coming to grips with extraordinary powers that are not of this world. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and become the symbol of hope for all mankind.

iTunes – $19.99

Red 2

A very safe sequel bet with a cast of friendly, recognizable, and bankable stars, “RED 2” is a breezy romp of global espionage and superhero superspies where the wealth of violence is played for laughs and the sly grins stay firmly planted on the faces of everyone involved. As fans of 2010’s RED will fondly remember, the hero characters are from the AARP generation, which is also what drives the primary conceptual joke and defines the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous. In round two, former secret agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is drawn out of retirement (again) by his former cohort Marvin (John Malkovich, acting Malkovich-crazy and loving it) to service a plot that involves a Cold War-era nuclear bomb hidden in Russia and the international effort to retrieve it.

iTunes – $19.99

Best Kept Secret

This documentary takes you into the lives of students at JFK High School in the middle of a run-down area in Newark, New Jersey. The public school is designed for all types of students with special education needs, ranging from those on the autism spectrum to those with multiple disabilities. Janet Mino has taught her class of young men with autism for four years. When they all graduate in the spring of 2012, they will leave the security of the public school system forever. “Best Kept Secret” follows Mino and her students over the year and a half before graduation. The clock is ticking to find them a place in the adult world – a job or rare placement in a recreational center – so they do not end up where their predecessors have, sitting at home, institutionalized, or on the streets.

iTunes – $12.99

Best New Albums

Blood Orange
“Cupid Deluxe”

Singer, songwriter, and producer Dev Hynes’ follow-up to “Coastal Grooves” is a mix of hazy electronica, treading bass lines, and waves of stirring Prince-inspired vocals. From the stark mid-tempo rapping on “Clipped On” to the blog-buzzing harmonies of “Chamakay,” “Cupid Deluxe” is dimensional, hypnotizing, and amorphous. With contributors ranging from Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek to Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, “Cupid Deluxe” is a distinct and mesmerizing album that proves Hynes is as talented at a soundboard as at a microphone.

iTunes – $7.99

Lady Gaga
“ARTPOP”

Lady Gaga’s music is fueled by wild creativity and artful provocation. With her third studio album, “ARTPOP,” Gaga reunites with Born This Way co-producer Madeon. T.I. Too $hort & Twista work out alongside her with “Jewels N’ Drugs” and R. Kelly can “Do What U Want” in no uncertain terms.

Gaga explains in interviews that she’s seeking “the reverse of Warhol,” where she brings high art to pop music, where once Warhol brought a pop sensibility to high art. Lady can theorize all she wants, but she also knows that it don’t mean a thing it if ain’t got that swing and “ARTPOP” is loaded with hyperactive beats and hyper-caffeinated compositions like “G.U.Y.” (Girl Under You – yhatzee!), “Manicure” and “ArtPop” where even when she’s tributing Versace in “Donatella,” she kinda means herself, too. How much “art” is delivered is debatable, but she’s certainly not shy delivering her truth. Ten of the album’s 15 tracks come with an “explicit” tag. Now outrageousness is something we expect from Lady Gaga.

iTunes – $14.99

Jhene Aiko
“Sail Out”

“Sail Out” is the debut extended play (EP) by American recording artist Jhené Aiko, released through Def Jam Recordings. The trippy RB fueled EP features 7 haunting tracks with special appearance from some of the biggest names in hip-hop, such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Ab-Soul, and Vince Staples.

iTunes – $5.99

Best New Books

“The Essential Calvin And Hobbes”
by Bill Waterson

Bill Watterson hasn’t put out a new “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip in nearly 20 years, but every kids’ favorite troublemakers have made it to iBooks for the first time ever.

The strip follows the richly imaginative adventures of Calvin and his trusty tiger, Hobbes. Whether a poignant look at serious family issues or a round of time-travel (with the aid of a well-labeled cardboard box), “Calvin and Hobbes” will astound and delight you.

Beginning with the day Hobbes sprang into Calvin’s tuna fish trap, the first two Calvin and Hobbes collections, Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under The Bed Is Drooling, are brought together in this treasury. Including black-and-white dailies and color Sundays, “The Essential Calvin and Hobbes” also features an original full-color 16-page story that will transport you back to the very first time you fell in love with Calvin and his stuffed tiger.

iTunes – $12.99

“Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products”

by Leander Kahney

Did I include my boss’ new book in the weekly roundup just because he’s the dude writing my checks? Maybe. It never hurts to get on el jefe’s good side, but Leander’s book is also packed with some of the most insightful Apple revelations about Apple’s design processes since Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” is well worth a read for any Apple fan who wants to know all about the guy who crafted the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Air, and every other major Apple product you’ve fallen in love with over the past two years.

iTunes – $11.99

“Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him”
by David Henry & Joe Henry

Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century,and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic in his lifetime, Pryor’s performances opened up a new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn’t just new—it was unthinkable.

His childhood in Peoria, Illinois, was spent just trying to survive. Yet the culture into which Richard Pryor was born—his mother was a prostitute; his grandmother ran the whorehouse—helped him evolve into one of the most innovative and outspoken performers ever, a man who attracted admiration and anger in equal parts. Both a brilliant comedian and a very astute judge of what he could get away with, Pryor was always pushing the envelope, combining anger and pathos, outrage and humor, into an art form, laying the groundwork for the generations of comedians who followed, including such outstanding performers as Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.

Now, in this groundbreaking and revelatory work, Joe and David Henry bring him to life both as a man and as an artist, providing an in-depth appreciation of his talent and his lasting influence, as well as an insightful examination of the world he lived in and the influences that shaped both his persona and his art.

iTunes – $12.99

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius who answers all your questions about what it’s like to work at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.  

This week our Genius dishes on what it’s like to go through the hiring process at Apple, along with details on the best ways to score a gig working behind the Genius Bar and how to ask out that hot genius you’re crushing on.

If you’ve got a question you want an inside scoop on, send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

What’s the best way to get hired at the Apple Store?

Apple looks for talented individuals who are passionate about helping people enrich their lives through their products and services. They want happy, friendly people who can start up a conversation with anyone. If you’re interested, spiff up your resume and apply for the retail store at apple.com. If you know anyone at the Apple Store you are applying at, ask them to submit a employee referral. If at first you do not succeed, try again. Stores receive a huge amount of applications so it may take a couple tries to get an invite to an open house for an hiring event.

The hiring events usually have a large group of people. While Apple looks people who know their product, they first look for someone who is nice, whether talking to a fellow applicant, a manager, or a disgruntled customer. Participate enthusiastically in all steps of the interview process even if it seems a little cheesy. Make sure to show a passion about providing the best experience in and out of the store for Apple’s customers.

If you get a second interview it will most likely be in a group setting again although smaller. Make sure not to get too boastful of your achievements. If you must brag, mention the successes of your team as a whole. Team players are a must. Show interest in other people’s responses and make it a group activity. Those who are willing to learn and work as a team to provide the best customer experience will make the cut.

How did you deal with the ridiculous and humiliating interview process? Did the lobotomy hurt?

I really needed a job at the time. I talked with someone who had already been through the interview process that gave me a heads up of what to expect. I knew they’d be looking for someone with an attitude that followed the company’s values. I went along with it all and said what I thought they wanted to hear. I even clapped when everyone else clapped.

I had several group interviews and they were pretty tough. You weren’t just on the spot with an interviewer but also with the other applicants listening to your responses. I was glad to be done with it all once I got the job offer. As for the lobotomy, it may have made the core training a little less torturous.

Can you date customers? Any tips on how to ask a Genius out?

Dating customers is against Apple policy. The policy protects both the employee as well as the customer. I have seen customers who come in consistently to get “help” from the same employee multiple times who are definitely interested but this only makes the employee less likely to actually pursue something.

If you are love struck by your technician at the Genius Bar, I suggest the straightforward approach. Ask for a card and give them your number maybe or ask them if you can have their number. Don’t be surprised if they say they can’t contact you, but tell them to call you outside of work. Don’t let a little Apple policy keep you from your love connection, but don’t make them completely say no by coming on to someone while they are at work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onb6Gqtf41Y

I’m a little on the fence about whether Toymail is a genius idea or an error that’ll have your kids talking to mailboxes.

When I opened up the package containing the SlipStopper, there was a little card inside from my contact Mark. It read “Try sticking your iPad mini on a window, great party trick :)”

I don’t go to may parties these days, but I tried it at home and in the office and there reaction was the same both times: amazement — quickly followed by fear.

Sir Jonathan Ive is extremely self-effacing. The only time he says “I” is when he’s talking about the iPhone or iPad. Talking about his work, he replaces “I” with “we.” It’s always about his team, his collaborators, and Apple, the company he works for. For Jony, it’s all about the work.

As senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, the world’s most valuable company, he’s been the world’s leading technology innovator for more than two decades. He’s led the design of a string of iconic products: the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, plus a score of other innovations in between. He’s won every design award under the sun. He’s even been knighted.

In 2011, Sir Jonathan Ive was promoted to Apple’s overall design guru, in charge of both hardware and software. It was a position formerly held by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Jony provides direction and leadership for industrial design, the group primarily responsible for hardware, as well as the human interface software teams. Hardware and software have traditionally been run as separate divisions at Apple. Only one man straddled both groups — Steve Jobs. Jony has stepped into the role that Jobs left with his passing. Tim Cook is CEO, but Jony is Apple’s creative driving force. He’s Apple’s MVP.

You wouldn’t know it if you met him. Born in Chingford, Essex, the 43-year-old Brit is quiet, even shy. He’s super friendly and soft spoken. He is extremely private. Even Apple says it doesn’t know his precise date of birth. He dresses in jeans and T-shirts and always seems to be carrying something in a plastic bag. He speaks softly but he doesn’t look like a wallflower: he’s big and muscular, a legacy of a lifetime working out. He has close-cropped hair, which might make him look menacing if he wasn’t so obviously a nice guy.

Jony is the most celebrated designer of his generation. In 2002, he was named the first Designer of the Year by the Design Museum, which he won again in 2003. That year he was inducted as a member of the Royal Designers for Industry (extremely prestigious). The following year he was given the Royal Society of the Art’s Benjamin Franklin Medal and the BBC named him the “Most Influential Person on British Culture,” beating out JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais.

In 2005, Jony was presented with three Silver Pencils from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD) association, some of the most prestigious awards in the industry. In 2006, he got a fourth, the most Silver Pencils ever awarded to an individual. One Silver Pencil is a career maker; four the mark of an off-the-charts genius. He subsequently got six Black Pencils, more than anyone else, ever. Jony has a record number of D&AD awards; and he got them in a stretch of just 10 years. In 2006, he was made a Commander of the British Empire; and in 2010 he was knighted by Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace. By March 2013, he was named in more than 600 design and utility patents.

In 2011, D&AD bestowed another giant award on Jony: it named Apple’s design team the best design studio of the last 50 years. It was one of the first public recognitions for the group as a whole, and Apple felt the award was important enough to fly the normally reclusive, ultra secretive group en masse to London to receive it — the first time ever.

While racking up awards, he’s helped push Apple’s sales off the charts. In the nearly two decades that Jony has been at Apple, the company has pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies. In 1992, the year he joined Apple as a designer, the company made $530 million profit selling beige computers. In 2012, Apple’s made $41.7 billion profit on $156.5 billion revenue. Yeah, billion!

The company makes gorgeous products that compel customers to camp out overnight and sometimes even riot. AAPL, as it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, currently has a market cap of about $475 billion, making it the biggest company on the planet after the oil giant Exxon.

A lot of this had to do with Steve Jobs of course, the genius who toiled for three decades to bring personal computers to the masses. Jobs always had an eye for talent, launching Apple in 1977 with the hardware genius Steve Wozniak. For the last dozen years, his chief creative partner at Apple was Jony Ive. Jony is a genuinely original thinker. His products are not just the same old things repackaged to look new; they are new. They are products no one could have imagined a few years ago.

We all need a break every once in a while. And nothing can take some of the edge off than a good video game – especially a shooter.

Cult of Mac Deals has assembled a bundle of games that will keep your trigger finger going for hours with The iShooter Gamer Bundle. And it’s at a price that’s tough to beat – just $4.99 – a savings of 81%!

Nothing can touch the Fallout series of role-playing games for post-apocalyptic immersion; the ’50s, atomic-era nostalgia and post-nuclear holocaust loneliness and horror that the games simulate have gained the series a huge and devoted following. But none of it would have been possible without a breakout 1988 computer RPG called Wasteland.

Houseplan — Productivity — Free

In the past, whenever I’ve wanted to change the furniture layout in a room, I’ve broken out the graph paper and made a tiny scale mockup of the space and everything in it. HousePlan is a new app that is designed specifically to keep things like that from happening. First, you place the walls, windows, and doors, and then you can figure out where the furniture goes before you actually have to lift anything. It’s quick and easy to use, and the best part is that you don’t have to wonder if that piece of paper you just threw away is a scrap or your chifferobe.

Houseplan

Its title may sound like a Star Wars-based mockbuster by The Asylum (the studio that brought us Sharknado and Atlantic Rim), but Stellar Wars, a new iOS title out now from developer Liv Games, is actually the followup to 2011’s megapopular Legendary Wars. Only this one takes place in space and stars a bunch of cute robots.

So it’s off to a promising start from that alone.

Once you get over the cute overload from those little guys, though, Stellar Wars reveals itself to be a complex, surprisingly deep melange of a bunch of different game styles that shouldn’t work together, but then they totally do.

Just expect to have to work for it.

Edifier is a lesser-known company with roots in China, and a design lab in Vancouver, British Columbia. While Edifier speakers have seen table time in Apple stores in the past, they seem to be making a bigger push here in the States within the last year or two.

Their latest set is the e25 Luna Eclipse, Bluetooth-equipped speakers stuffed with some trick tech and 74 watts of power per channel — at the upper end for a set of desktop media speakers.

An official Google Play Music app is finally available on iOS, bringing Google’s All Access music streaming service to your iPhone. Users can listen to millions of tracks on demand and enjoy custom radio with no limits, as well as access to the music they’ve uploaded to Google’s cloud-based storage service.

It’s important to keep track of your power consumption on a Macbook Air or Pro, since that will determine how long you can use the thing before you have to plug it in again. Mavericks makes it easy to see the top app or two that uses the most energy on your Mac with a quick Option-Click on the battery menubar icon, letting you know which apps are consuming the most energy.

If you want to know about all the apps running on your Mac, though, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper, using Activity Monitor.

Want to make your Apple TV look like an SNES, Gamecube, NES, or even a big waffle? These decals have you covered.

Remember Apple Tracker, the web app that checked Apple’s inventory in order to help you find new iPhones and iPads in your area? Apple killed it off ahead of the iPad mini Retina launch , but now it’s back… just not on the original site.

Do you remember how last week, the iPad mini with Retina Display was said to have been delayed to November because of LCD burn-in issues with Sharp’s IGZO display panels? It appears the rumor was true, because the iPad mini does have image retention issues.

Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS, there’s a good chance they have broken existing jailbreak techniques with it. If a public jailbreak has already been released, it means your jailbreak has gone away; if a public jailbreak hasn’t yet been released, an update can kill an exploit that will delay a public jailbreak by months.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7.0.4, but did they break the possibility of an iOS 7 jailbreak? Are you safe to update?

Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.

While it isn’t strictly Apple news, I thought I’d let you know about Amazon’s cool new feature for Kindle covers anyway. After all, plenty of us have Kindles to read when we leave out nerd caves and head out into the sunlight, right?

So what has Amazon done that’s worth writing about? Exactly what Apple should do: Covers personalized with your own photos.

It’s hard to describe Curator for iPad as anything other than a digital scrapbook… In a good way. It lets you pull in snippets and content from pretty much anywhere, presenting them in a clean grid layout. If you ever used Evernote to collect a stuff together on one place for a project, you might consider Curator instead.

HopTo is a great version of Microsoft Word for the iPad. And that’s because it is MS Word, up in the cloud, driving a native iPad app. And you know what? If Microsoft just made the exact same app only with the Word part running locally on the iPad, I’d be happy. It really is nice enough to let you forget you’re using Word.

What if you could condense all of the credit, debit, membership, and gift cards in your wallet down to a single card? Companies like Apple and Google have tried to give us digital wallets, but nothing has really caught on. People still feel tied to their physical wallets.

Coin is a new product that became available for preorder today. It looks like a normal credit card at first glance, but Coin is much smarter than your average piece of plastic. A small display and a fancy magnetic strip let you choose from a range of your cards and memberships before paying.

iWork for iCloud is technically still in its beta phase, but Apple pubilished an updated to its suite of productivity apps this afternoon that will certainly make it more appealing for those looking for a Google Docs alternative.

The new iWork for iCloud update includes a number of features that focus on giving users more tools to collaborate with each other – many of which we heard about at Apple’s iPad keynote. The update includes new features for both Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes that come with some of the same features including the ability to see cursors and selections for everyone in a spreadsheet, as well as an option to view a list of collaborators working on a spreadsheet.

Users can access the new features for free over at iCloud.com and will also find a new option to print docs directly from the Tools menu and the ability to organize documents in folders.

Here’s a full list of what’s new:

Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.

In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.

I’m a big fan of Iron Man. I’ll play virtually any game with Iron Man in it, on it, or around it, so naturally I took a swing at Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 tie-in game earlier this year. And it was a bland infinite runner to sit alongside all the other bland infinite runners released for popular film franchises. I wept.

So when I saw that Thor: The Dark World was not an infinite runner, I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, Thor: The Dark World is a top-down dungeon crawler hybrid that allows you to summon Einherjar, or heroes, to help fight alongside you. So you’ll charge through levels tapping every shiny thing and enemy in your path and can strategically call more fighters to the battle to deal with bosses and ranged attacks.

To ease the minds of millions of Americans worried about their health insurance, Obama held a press conference today and admitted that his administration fumbled the launch of Healthcare.gov. Continuing his speech with optimism, Obama then turned to his favorite tech company – Apple – as an example, saying everybody needs to chillax and that buying health insurance won’t ever be as easy as purchasing a song from iTunes.

The Obama Administration has been under heavy fire the last few months thanks to the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and has pulled a couple Apple metaphors out of his hat to cope with the mess.

Obama’s not the only one in Washington looking to Apple for inspiration with the Healtcare.gov mess though. The GOP released a series of attack ads that spoof Apple’s famous “Mac vs. PC” campaign. Take a look: