Film

Emmy Award winner Brian Cox will be appearing on the HBO series Deadwood this season. Cox has been in more than 100 films and TV shows over the past 40 years.

The Lake House, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black, are very different films with very different stars. But both provide good old escapist entertainment.

Our film critic reviews A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman's film adaptation of Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio show.

John Lasseter, chief creative executive of Pixar, Inc, talks about the animation company's new feature film, Cars. Lasseter is a founding member of Pixar and served as director and animator of the feature films Toy Story, its sequel and A Bug's Life.

In a new documentary, soldiers on the front lines in Iraq capture their own footage of the experience of war. The War Tapes, directed by Deborah Scranton, opens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend.

The film follows three men: Sgt. Steve Pink, Sgt. Zack Bazzi and Spc. Mike Moriarty, members of the National Guard who arrived in Iraq in March 2004.

Critic at large John Powers has just returned from the Cannes film festival. The top prize winner at Cannes was director Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film about the Irish rebellion against British rule and the country's subsequent civil war.

For 17 years, former Vice President Al Gore has been on the forefront of warning against global warming. But in his new documentary, The Inconvenient Truth, he says that he "failed to get the message out." He's now getting the message out with his documentary and new book of the same name. The Washington Post calls the book "downright chilling." The documentary has been critically acclaimed.

The new documentary Baghdad ER goes inside the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq, the Army's premier medical facility in Iraq. Shot over two months in 2005, the film tells the stories of the hospital's doctors and wounded soldiers. The film debuted on HBO last week. Filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill discuss their project with Terry Gross.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Army of Shadows, the French film made in 1969 by Jean-Pierre Melville about the French Resistance. It's being released in the U.S. for the first time.

One of the most acclaimed films of the 1970s was Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson. On a new DVD release, home viewers can now see it in the original wide screen and with six additional minutes not shown in the American theatrical release. It's a personal favorite of critic John Powers, who says that it's not an easy film, but a good one.

Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code is second only to the Harry Potter series as the best-selling novel of all time. It has inspired a whole slew of writing on Biblical puzzles, the life of Mary Magdalene, and some debunking of Brown's premise.

Now comes the long-anticipated film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou. Our film critic says that the real story about this mega-budget movie is that it's an embarrassing nonevent.

Our film critic reviews Down in the Valley, the new film by writer/director David Jacobson, starring Edward Norton, David Morse, and Bruce Dern.

Director and choreographer Busby Berkeley was noted for Hollywood musicals featuring lots of scantily clad show girls filmed from overhead in intricate kaleidoscopic patterns. After seeing some of these films again in a new DVD collection, our critic notices a connection between Berkeley and the avant-garde artists of an earlier generation.

Our film critic reviews Mission: Impossible III, starring Tom Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Four films by French director Louis Malle, who died in 1995, have been released on DVD by Criterion. They include Elevator to the Gallows, his first feature, and a new boxed set with Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe, Lucien and Au Revoir Les Enfants. Our critic at large says that watching these films years after their release made him see Malle in a different way.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews United 93, the dramatized version of events on the plane that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after being hijacked Sept. 11. Learning that other planes had been flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, passengers fought back for control of the plane.

Jeff Goldblum recently returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pa., to star alongside his new girlfriend in a two-week run of The Music Man. Directors Chris Bradley and Kyle LaBrache filmed Goldblum's escape from celebrity, resulting in a genre-bending documentary with appearances by Ed Begley, Jr., Illeana Douglas and Moby. Goldblum talks about Pittsburgh, which he produced.

Director Paul Weitz's new film, American Dreamz, satirizes American Idol and stars Dennis Quaid as a dimwitted U.S. president who goes on the show in an effort to save his falling approval ratings. Weitz's other films include American Pie and About a Boy.

Filmmaker Liz Mermin's new documentary, The Beauty Academy of Kabul, is about a group of American hairdressers who open a beauty school in Afghanistan to teach local women how to cut hair and apply make-up, thus making them financially independent.

Catherine Keener recently won a second Oscar nomination for her performance in Capote and appeared in the popular comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Now, she stars in Friends with Money, her third collaboration with writer-director Nicole Holofcener.