The most striking thing about actress and rocker Juliette Lewis is that she’s so wonderfully herself, whether she’s calling an audience her own “band of misfits” or describing her affinity for empathy – a trait that shows up in all her onscreen work. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon finishing his eight year starring stint on television’s popular ER series, Anthony Edwards took his wife and children on a trip around the world. While they were visiting Kenya, Edwards went for a jog with a young Masai Warrior named Lettura. Read the rest of this entry »

Vera Farmiga has an astonishing ability to transform herself completely. In the past few years, she’s played a worn-out drug addict, a cop shrink, a depressed young mom, and the carefully coiffed wife of a Nazi Commandant, to name a few. In Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, she stars as a confident frequent flyer who happens to be George Clooney’s leading lady – and has more control over their on-the-run relationship than he does. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Hooper made his first short when he was thirteen. It was twenty five pounds worth of film stock spent chasing a runaway dog. The next year he found his social conscience - or so he says, half joking – tackling World War II (his grandfather was killed as a bomb navigator) and buskers, and by the time he was eighteen he was directing televised short films and winning awards. Read the rest of this entry »

When journalist Rupert Isaacson observed his autistic son’s unusual affinity for horses, he and his wife took five-year-old Rowan to the far reaches of Mongolia to seek the healing help of Shamans who work with horses and spiritually-based cures.   Read the rest of this entry »

The huge box office success (US$ 356 million, if you’re counting) of My Big Fat Greek Wedding made Nia Vardalos one of the few women in Hollywood whose name can green light a movie. In two new movies releasing this summer–My Life In Ruins and I Hate Valentine’s Day, Vardalos emerges as a slimmed down version of the vivacious Greek-American gal with whom audiences have fallen in love. But she’s tired of discussing her weigh, and prefers to comment on her commitment to help women get ahead in moviemaking and the good cause she‘s adopted: adoption of children from foster care. Read the rest of this entry »

Filmmaker Teresa Prata discovered Mia Couto’s “Sleepwalking Land” on a library shelf in Berlin. Prata, just beginning her film studies, was a newcomer to Germany and to cinema.

“You could say I didn’t find the book, the book found me,” says Prata, indicating that Couto’s novel about wartime friendship was an immediate, stay-up-all-night reminder of her own childhood in civil war-torn Mozambique. Read the rest of this entry »

In Rod Lurie’s Nothing but the Truth, a female reporter who writes an article exposing a female CIA agent is thrown in jail for refusing to name her source. This might sound like a fictionalization of old news. It isn’t. At least, not according to Lurie. Read the rest of this entry »

Kate Beckinsale’s latest role – not as Judith Miller’s screen doppelganger but rather as a journalist/mom who happens to find herself in Miller’s lose-lose situation – follows Oscar-worthy work in the tiny indie Snow Angels, marking a departure from the blockbusters for which the actress is best known. Read the rest of this entry »

It might not be possible to review Hounddog without commenting on the controversy – Sundance screenings, committees of concerned parents, online petitions, the list could continue - but I am going to try. The film was written and directed by relative newcomer and genuine talent Deborah Kampmeier. It tells the story of Lewellen, a young girl who lives in a world where fantasy overtakes reality. Read the rest of this entry »