Film

A father (George Clooney) struggles to reassess his past and navigate his future after his wife is gravely injured in a water-skiing accident. Critic David Edelstein says the film blends broad comedy with the sting of tragedy.

Woody Allen is the subject of a new two-part, four-hour special on the PBS series American Masters. TV critic David Bianculli says the documentary is "a smart, sometimes serious study of a smart, sometimes serious filmmaker."

Director Alexander Payne finds comedy in the crises of his flawed protagonists: a struggling writer in Sideways, a retired widower in About Schmidt and now a family man who must reassess his life in The Descendants.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote some of their best songs for movies -- one of which, 1937's A Damsel in Distress, has just been issued by Warner Archives. Critic Lloyd Schwartz says it may be the oddest of the Gershwin brothers' films.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg as sisters who undergo a psychological transformation as disaster approaches. Critic David Edelstein says the film is a sublime fusion of form and content with a truly Wagnerian climax. (Recommended)

The actress stars in Lars von Trier's new psychological drama Melancholia, about depression and the end of the world. She talks about making the film and about working with Von Trier, whose controversial remarks about Hitler got him kicked out of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

In Drake Doremus' drama Like Crazy, a young couple is forced to separate when one of them violates the terms of her student visa. Movie critic David Edelstein says the movie is painful and compelling -- and reminds him of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise.

The British character actor shot to international stardom after playing an aging rocker in the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually. In his latest project, the BBC drama Page Eight, Nighy plays a British intelligence officer who discovers a state secret.

The lives of writers drive two films opening this week: The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, dramatizes a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, meanwhile, examines who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Critic David Edelstein says both films show how hard it is to write about writers.

This fiscal thriller, starring Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto and Demi Moore, is set during one day in 2008, as a group of brokers try to prevent their firm from going belly up. David Edelstein says that given the headlines, the film's timing couldn't be better. (Recommended)

Pedro Almodovar's film The Skin I Live In reunites him with actor Antonio Banderas, who first came to international attention as an obsessive lover in the director's 1987 film Law of Desire. This time, Banderas plays a scientist driven to replace his dead wife with a carbon-based copy.

It's been more than 30 years since the rugged film star's death, yet he still looms large in the national psyche. Critic John Powers was surprised to find that the indomitable American fighting man was actually a hard-earned act of self-invention.

An idealistic campaign press secretary (Ryan Gosling) finds himself in the middle of a scandal that could threaten his candidate's chances of becoming president.

In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon dreams of an apocalyptic storm, and builds a backyard bunker for his family to survive. Critic David Edelstein says the film is terrific.

Screenwriter Will Reiser coped with his cancer diagnosis by thinking up ideas for cancer comedy movies with his best friend, actor Seth Rogen. Rogen and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt now star in a film based on Reiser's life. Both Gordon-Levitt and Reiser join Fresh Air for a conversation about the film.

Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager who used analytics and statistics to stay competitive against other teams with much larger payrolls. Critic David Edelstein says the film, based on the 2003 Michael Lewis book, is "entertaining as a sports-underdog story."

The veteran actor has played a Nazi-hunter, a vampire, a cowboy hitchhiker and the outlaw Jesse James. In his latest film, Brad Pitt plays the manager of baseball's Oakland A's. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross why the part interested him and what it's like to live life in the public eye.

Roger Ebert tackles lowbrow and highbrow topics alike in his memoir; critic John Powers says the chronicle is sunny and hopeful — just like Ebert himself.

Drive is what Driver does, and driven is how audiences will feel after a screening of Nicholas Winding Refn's brutally moving thriller, which stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston and Albert Brooks. (Recommended)

Vera Farmiga makes her directorial debut with Higher Ground, which centers on a woman who joins and then flees a fundamentalist religious order. Film critic David Edelstein says the movie is "complicated and unresolved in the best possible way."