Film

A young orphan stumbles on a mystery while living in a Paris train station.

The filmmakers behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall have teamed up to create a new Muppet movie. "We set out to make a Muppet movie that harkened back to the late-'70s [and] early-'80s Muppets that we grew up with," says Jason Segel.

If you've seen the trailers-- or the cover of Entertainment Weekly -- you know the new romantic comedy is selling sex along with the laughs. But the "state-of-the-art zeitgeist sex comedy" also manages to deliver some strong satirical undertones.

At this year's Toronto International Film Festival, the director of Apocalypse Now and the iconic Godfather films shared memories and anecdotes with a sold-out crowd.

Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione go hunting for horcruxes in the first installment of the Harry Potter finale. "Wait, horcruxes?" you ask -- and you won't be the only one.

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.

In 1936, George VI reluctantly ascended to the British throne after his older brother abdicated. Tom Hooper's new film, The King's Speech, tells the true story of George VI's stammer and his relationship with an unconventional speech therapist who helped him speak.

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.

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.

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.

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.