The actor is a cast of one in All Is Lost, about a man adrift alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Fresh Air critic David Edelstein says Redford and director J.C. Chandor have pulled off the ultimate fusion of actor and character. (Recommended)
AIDY BRYANT is a cast member on 'Saturday Night Live' and star of the new comedy series 'Shrill' based on Lindy West's book about identifying as fat and feminist.
The unsolved Zodiac murder cases of the late sixties and seventies became the inspiration for the modern serial-killer movie genre. There's a new thriller about the crimes: Zodiac. Director David Fincher's film stars Jake Gyllenhall, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.
Novelist Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, Something Happened and No Laughing Matter, his 1985 account of being stricken with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a neurological disease in which the peripheral nervous system is attacked. Within two weeks of the first symptoms, Heller could hardly breathe or swallow. It took him two years to relearn his basic motor functions. Heller's best known work is still his first, Catch 22, a satire of the military bureaucracy and the madness of war.
The new novelist's book, The Casual Brutality, deals with a man from Trinidad who moves to Canada -- a narrative inspired by Bissoondath's own life. The writer is descended from Indian immigrants, and is the nephew of fellow author V.S. Naipaul.
David Fajgenbaum was diagnosed with Castleman disease as a medical student. In Chasing My Cure, he recounts crowd-sourcing his own treatment with a global network of doctors, scientists and patients.
Amy Rigby was a sheltered Catholic teen from the Pittsburgh suburbs when she moved to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design and fell in love with the '70s punk scene.
Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."
As part of the first cast of Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd helped bring the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers to life.
He went on to star in a number of films, including Trading Places and Grosse Pointe Blank. He also received an Academy Award nomination for his role in Driving Miss Daisy.
We talk with Aykroyd about his two latest projects: the book Elwood's Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends and Stars, and the upcoming movie Christmas with the Kranks.
In addition to solving a case each week, Tommy features ongoing story lines involving the police chief's interactions with colleagues and family members. The scripts aren't fantastic — but Falco is.
Father Anthony De Conciliis, a Catholic priest, was inaugurated president of Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans on Aug. 26, 2005. He spent two days and a night in the Superdome after the hurricane.
Actress Zelda Rubenstein. After being cast as one of the little people in the film "Under the Rainbow," she played the clairvoyant in "Poltergeist." She now stars in the new horror film "Anguish."
A failing marriage and a catastrophic earthquake take center stage in Safran Foer's new novel. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Here I Am a profound work about the claims of history, identity and family.
Comedian Nora Dunn. Dunn was a cast member of Saturday Night Live for 6 years, and portrayed such roles as the vapid talk show host Pat Stevens, the lounge singing Sweeney Sisters, and French sex kitten Babette. She was also at the center of controversy when she refused to appear on SNL when Andrew Dice Clay was the guest host. Dunn has written a new book, in the personas of her characters, called "Nobody's Rib." (It's published by Harper Perennial).
