Movies

Light It Up: Director Baz Luhrmann (right, with stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan on the set of The Great Gatsby) brought a lush visual sensibility to a tale whose tone not everyone thinks of as epic.

Arts

At The Movies, A Swirl Of Style And Substance

5:41pm May 14, 2013

by Bob Mondello

Special effects date back to the dawn of film, but with today's tools moviemakers can put pretty much anything on-screen — which has NPR film critic Bob Mondello thinking about how movie style affects movie substance.

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Director Noah Baumbach has made a name for himself with films such as The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding.

Arts

Gerwig, Baumbach Poke At Post-College Pangs

2:33pm May 14, 2013

In Frances Ha, a 27-year-old (Greta Gerwig) navigates New York City — and the transition from prolonged adolescence to proper adulthood. Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script; they join Fresh Air's Terry Gross to talk about the project.

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A scene from Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 film, My Neighbor Totoro.

Arts

The Movie Mark McKinney Has 'Seen A Million Times'

6:51pm May 12, 2013

by Lily Percy

Writer-comedian Mark McKinney could watch Hayao Miyazaki's anime film My Neighbor Totoro a million times. "It still makes me laugh, it still makes me smile," he says.

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Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star in Baz Lurhmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby — but the new film's music is so bold it may as well be a character, too.

Music & Culture

'It Led Us On A Journey': The Musical World Of 'The Great Gatsby'

9:47am May 11, 2013

by NPR Staff

In overseeing the new film's soundtrack, music supervisor Anton Monsted says he hoped to create a "sliding door" effect between the Jazz Age and the hip-hop era.

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A young Sarah Polley and her actor father, Michael Polley, on a long-ago day; the photo is one of many family memories that surface in Stories We Tell, a superb meditation on dramatizing memory from the director of Away from Her.

Arts

Polley's 'Stories': A Family Saga Strikingly Spun

5:58am May 11, 2013

by Bob Mondello

A director's film memoir of her theatrical family is transformed by surprising discoveries about her parents' past — and her own heritage. Sarah Polley's film becomes a superb meditation on how we dramatize memory. (Recommended)

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Medusa from 1981's Clash of the Titans is among legendary animator Ray Harryhausen's many creations.

Arts

Remembering Monster-Maker Ray Harryhausen

2:19pm May 09, 2013

The legendary Hollywood FX man died Tuesday at age 92. Known for creating the monsters in such films as Mighty Joe Young and Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen spoke with Fresh Air in 2003 about studying animals in nature to create the monsters of our imaginations.

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Parvati and Saleem (Shriya Saran and Satya Bhabha), born in tandem at the birth of independent India, are at the center of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. Thirty years after the book's publication, filmmaker Deepa Mehta has committed the story

Arts

An Epic Of India Gets A Canvas Its Own Size

6:54am May 09, 2013

by Bilal Qureshi

Midnight's Children, from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Deepa Mehta, is a sweeping big-screen adaptation of Salman Rushdie's great novel of modern Indian history. NPR's Bilal Qureshi talks to the two storytellers about their collaboration on the project.

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In the new film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani-British actor Riz Ahmed plays Changez, a self-described "lover of America" who moves back to Pakistan to educate activists.

Arts

Riz Ahmed: Shifting Across Identities And Roles

3:32pm May 07, 2013

by Bilal Qureshi

Both as the lead character in the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist and in his life outside the cinema, British actor Riz Ahmed navigates many identities.

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Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) is a 12-minute film that employs one of the first known uses of the cinematic "cut."

Arts

Scorsese Talks 'The Language Of Cinema'

2:34pm May 07, 2013

In a talk he titled "Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema," the famed director spoke passionately about the history of cinema and the films that stoked his love for the medium.

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Laura Linney and Alan Alda star in The Big C, now in its fourth season on Showtime. Linney took on the role not long before her own father died of cancer.

Arts

Linney Mines 'The Big C' For Serious Laughs

3:20pm May 06, 2013

On Showtime's dark comedy series, Laura Linney plays a terminally ill cancer patient. The actress's own father died from lung cancer while the series was being made; her mother was a cancer nurse when Linney was young. These experiences, she says, inform her performance.

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