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November 9, 2012 The actor portrays Abraham Lincoln in the new movie Lincoln; he tells NPR's Melissa Block about one challenge the role posed — figuring out what the 16th president might have sounded like.

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November 9, 2012 Director Sam Mendes won critical acclaim and an Oscar for his first feature film, American Beauty. Now, he is taking on one of the most iconic cinematic franchises in the new James Bond film, Skyfall. He speaks with Renee Montagne about the experience.

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November 3, 2012 Rapper-turned-director RZA could watch Sergio Leone's western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a million times. "It's funny, this movie is to me an American classic, even though it's an Italian film," he says.

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November 3, 2012 Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man invented a new kind of crime fiction. It was hard-boiled, but also light-hearted; funny, with a hint of homicide. Now, for the first time, the stories of After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man have been published as novellas.

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October 28, 2012 The Walking Dead executive producer Glen Mazzara could watch Ridley Scott's Alien a million times. "I think it taps into those childish fears that we have," he says.

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October 28, 2012 Reilly voices a video-game character in the new animated film Wreck-It Ralph. Sick of playing the bad guy onscreen, his character escapes from his video game to explore other gaming worlds and what it means to be the "hero."

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October 27, 2012 Lemon Andersen discovered poetry while serving time at Rikers Island. The new documentary Lemon tells his story from public housing to the stage.

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October 22, 2012 In January, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win Sundance's best directing award for her second feature-length film, Middle of Nowhere. It's about a young woman who puts her life and dreams of going to medical school on hold while her husband is in prison.

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October 20, 2012 Actress Susan Sarandon could watch John Ford's classic film The Grapes of Wrath a million times. "Something about this film resonated in a way that made its mark somewhere in my imagination and my soul," she says.

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October 20, 2012 Sidney Rittenberg is one of only a few American citizens to have joined the Chinese Communist Party. Though he was imprisoned for 16 of his 35 years in China, he still regards Chairman Mao as both hero and criminal.

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October 20, 2012 The HBO film The Girl sets out to shed light on the complicated behind-the-scenes relationship between actress Tippi Hedren and director Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of The Birds in 1963. As Elizabeth Blair explains, Hitchcock's obsession with Hedren is the stuff of a Hollywood thriller.

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October 15, 2012 Actor John Hawkes has played plenty of unusual characters, but the physical demands of his latest role required ingenuity and pain management. He speaks with All Things Considered about the difficulty of playing a character who is paralyzed from the neck down.

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October 15, 2012 Best known for being the man behind Madea, Perry is now starring in the action thriller Alex Cross. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that his Madea character is a cross between his mom, his aunt and Eddie Murphy.

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October 13, 2012 When Nashville creator Callie Khouri saw Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd for the first time, she was "jaw-droppingly shocked at how current it was."

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