Film

When Confidential magazine launched in 1952, it feasted on the type of juicy gossip that could launch -- or ruin -- a career. Journalist Henry Scott details the rise and fall of the gossip rag in his book, Shocking True Story -- and explains how Hollywood reacted.

Actress Chloe Sevigny is known for her fashion sense, but she doesn't mind wearing a prairie dress for her Golden Globe-winning role as a wife in a polygamous family on HBO's Big Love. Sevigny explains how she prepared to play second wife Nicki Grant -- and remembers her other film roles.

In A Prophet, a young Corsican Arab must earn his place in the hierarchy of a French prison by murdering a fellow inmate. Director Jacques Audiard neither victimizes nor glorifies his protagonist, says critic David Edelstein. The result is a gripping, realistic prison drama.

The new Israeli movie Ajami, shortlisted for an Oscar, is filled with the daily collisions of everyday urban life in the the port city of Jaffa. Movie critic John Powers says that the interesting characters and situations that fill Ajami remind him of the HBO series The Wire.

Ewan McGregor has played a heroin addict in Trainspotting, a young Obi-Wan Kenobi in three Star Wars films, and a poet in Moulin Rouge. In his latest film, Roman Polanski's Ghost Writer, McGregor plays an unnamed writer uncovering a political scandal. He recounts his favorite acting roles — and how he prepared for them.

The new releases Shutter Islandand The Ghost Writer both take places on islands off the coast of the Eastern seaboard. Critic David Edelstein explains how the two movies, made by Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski respectively, are a study in contrasts — in directors, plot, and mood.

Adam Shankman has one of the coolest, most stressful jobs around: He's producing the Oscars. The Hairspray director, who is also a judge on So You Think You Can Dance, joins Fresh Air to dish about seating arrangements and speeches.

Luc Besson's latest action fantasy, From Paris With Love, stars John Travolta as an FBI agent and Jonathan Rhys Myers as a diplomat trying to stop a terrorist attack in Paris. The story moves at warp speed — and it doesn't skimp on thrills.

Yesterday Colin Firth received a Best Actor nomination for his starring role in A Single Man, the Tom Ford adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. Today Firth talks to Terry Gross about playing professor George Falconer, a gay professor navigating Southern California in 1962.

Here's Mel Gibson as a Boston police detective, shambling onto the screen in Edge of Darkness for the first time in nearly a decade — and it's hard for us (and probably harder for him) to shake off that decade's effects.

One of writer-director Mike Judge's favorite themes is American stupidity. His popular animated series Beavis and Butt-Head featured two brainless 15 year-olds obsessed with MTV. His 2007 film, Idiocracy, envisions a not-so-utopian American future in which evolution has bred the intelligence out of humanity. Judge's latest comedy, Extract, now out on DVD, revisits a second favorite subject — the American workplace. Where his cult classic Office Space pitted disgruntled office employees against their incompetent bosses, Extract focuses Judge's satirical eye on management.

There's a basic tension in the true-ish docudrama Extraordinary Measures that lifts it above the formula disease-of-the-week picture. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, a Bristol-Myers Squibb executive with a daughter and son born with the rare Pompe disease, a cousin to muscular dystrophy that fatally weakens muscles — including the biggie, the heart.

Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal join Fresh Air to talk about their film The Hurt Locker. Set in Baghdad, the movie follows the story of three men who are part of the Army's bomb unit, charged with the task of disarming IEDs and other roadside bombs.

David Edelstein reviews "Youth in Revolt."

Stanley Tucci may be a star, but he's still got the protean gifts of a great character actor: He can transform himself for each new role he brings to the screen. You've seen him as a flamboyant art director in The Devil Wears Prada, a stereotypical Italian gangster in The Road To Perdition, a conniving politico in Swing Vote, the impish Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and a neurotic lover in Deconstructing Harry. And if a career like that suggests a certain versatility, Tucci's most recent films particularly highlight his ability to inhabit a range of personalities.

Movies you've heard plenty about (Avatar, Where the Wild Things Are) rub elbows with movies you may have missed (Summer Hours, Everlasting Moments) on our critic's list of the finest big-screen features of 2009. Edelstein joins Terry Gross to talk about the year in pictures.