Movies

Arts

Tom Cruise's Latest Headed For 'Oblivion'

11:05am April 24, 2013

by David Edelstein

Joseph Kosinski's sci-fi adventure, starring Tom Cruise, is the most incoherent piece of storytelling since John Travolta's Battlefield Earth. It had critic David Edelstein crying, "What? What?" over the din of the explosions.

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The Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin.

Books
Arts

Friedkin, Who Pushed Film Forward, Looks Back

1:08pm April 23, 2013

by Susan Stamberg

In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, the legendary director of films like The Exorcist and The French Connection recounts his journey from a poor Chicago neighborhood to the apex of Hollywood success.

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Robert Redford directs and stars as Jim Grant in The Company You Keep, a film about retired radicals living out nervous lives in hiding.

Arts

Redford: An Entertainer Who Looks To Inform

9:52pm April 22, 2013

by NPR Staff

Oscar-winning director and actor Robert Redford is back in theaters with The Company You Keep, a look at aging American counterculture revolutionaries. He spoke with NPR's Robert Siegel about his career, his passion for journalism and how a thoughtful teacher helped encourage him.

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Photographer Tim Hetherington during an assignment for Vanity Fair Magazine at the Restrepo outpost.

Sebastian Junger: 'Which Way' To Turn After Hetherington's Death

11:53am April 18, 2013

In a new documentary premiering on HBO, the journalist explores the life of his friend, the war photographer Tim Hetherington. The two collaborated on the 2010 documentary Restrepo, and Junger was profoundly changed after Hetherington was killed by shrapnel in Libya in 2011.

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Veteran magician Ricky Jay reveals much about himself in a new documentary on his life of deception. His card-trick techniques? That may be another story.

Arts

Digging Into Ricky Jay's 'Deceptive' Card Tricks

8:37pm April 17, 2013

by Bob Mondello

It's been said that to properly understand a magician, you have to get right on stage and watch how the act is done. NPR's Bob Mondello had that chance once with card whiz Ricky Jay — subject of the new film Deceptive Practice — and has a few words about how the showman works.

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'Central Park Five': Rape, Race And Blame Explored

3:28pm April 16, 2013

by David Bianculli

A documentary airing tonight on PBS tells the story of the five young black and Latino men wrongly convicted of the 1989 assault and rape of a white female jogger in Manhattan's Central Park. Ken Burns made the film with his eldest daughter, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon.

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A single trumpet from a baby elephant at the San Francisco Zoo was used for every single T. Rex roar in Jurassic Park.

Arts

Jurassic Bark: How Sound Design Changed Our Imaginations

8:15pm April 13, 2013

by Becky Sullivan

When Gary Rydstrom recorded and mixed together a set of noises for the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, he never guessed he'd inform our ideas about them for decades to come.

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In director Gilles Bourdos' biopic Renoir, Christa Theret plays Andree Heuschling, who served as a muse for both the aging Impressionist master and his young filmmaker son.

Arts

Painting 'Renoir' In Finely Detailed Strokes

10:59am April 11, 2013

by Susan Stamberg

The biopic Renoir plots the final years of the impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and creating the film's sumptuous imagery took a special eye for detail. NPR's Susan Stamberg explores the inspirations behind the film.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is one of five celebrity directors taking part in a Canon-sponsored experiment called Project Imaginat10n. His short film, the inspiration for which was crowdsourced via the Internet and social media, focuses on familial loss

Arts

Crowdsourcing Creativity At The Cinema

9:00pm April 09, 2013

by Laura Sydell

The Canon-sponsored Project Imaginat10n used social media to crowdsource images and ideas to produce five short films. It's an idea director Ron Howard says other artists would be foolish to ignore.

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Shaz (Toni Collette), a hotheaded stranger new to the Australian town of Dolphin Heads, becomes the unlikely answer to a local politician's problems when she steps in to nanny his children.

Arts

Going 'Mental' And Enjoying The Ride

2:39pm April 09, 2013

by David Edelstein

P.J. Hogan's new movie is madder than madcap, a zany, nonconformist boundary-pusher whose offbeat manner makes for a rich and grounded film. Toni Collette plays the part of a modern-day Maria von Trapp as if she has nothing to lose — and Anthony LaPaglia shows his true Aussie accent.

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