After a bad crash, Molly Bloom went from competitive skier to high-stakes poker game runner. "I was looking for this thing that would make me feel validated," she says. " ... And I sort of found it."
Peele says that his turn as the director of a horror/thriller film comes from a "deeper place in my soul" than his previous comic work. Originally broadcast March 15, 2017.
Voting for Academy Awards nominations begins Friday, and the Golden Globes are Sunday. Rachel Martin talks to Kim Masters, editor-at-large at The Hollywood Reporter and host of KCRW's The Business.
Actor John Cho joins Linda Holmes to talk about the questions he continues to grapple with as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood, and his small, thoughtful, not-quite-a-rom-com Columbus.
When Jennifer Brea was just 28 years old, a routine infection brought her down for five years. Her new film, Unrest, documents her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Miranda says he doesn't feel the need to duplicate the success of Hamilton. "If you think in terms of topping, you're in the wrong business," he says. Originally broadcast Jan. 3, 2017.
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his new film, Phantom Thread. The film is about a fastidious British dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day Lewis, whose life becomes upended when he finds a new muse, who begins to challenge him.
Paul Thomas Anderson's film about a London dressmaker in the 1950s is "a rare combination of audacity and precision, impeccably tailored yet full of mystery and magic," says critic Scott Tobias.
Smith is a police officer paired with an orc (Joel Edgerton) in this fantasy-inflected buddy-cop movie that's "lazy but not boring" and "perfectly, stubbornly mediocre."
Jonathan Olshefski spent 10 years filming Christopher Rainey and his family, who run a recording studio in a working-class African-American section of North Philadelphia. Then their daughter was shot.
Franco's new film is a behind-the-scenes take on the making of the 2003 cult classic The Room. "It was made for $6 million," he says. "It looks like it was made for about $60."
After announcing that he is a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, actor Bambadjan Bamba is working to place pressure on Hollywood to act in favor of saving DACA.
A new children's film The Star tells the Christmas nativity story through the eyes of the animals involved. NPR's Michel Martin talks to producer DeVon Franklin.
Brilliant but socially awkward, criminal defense attorney Roman J. Israel (Denzel Washington) must re-enter the job market after his law firm goes under in the new film Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Laurie Metcalf plays a mom to the titular character in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig's new film about growing up in Sacramento. Metcalf tells NPR's Scott Simon about working on the film.
Comedian Hari Kondabolu's new documentary, The Problem with Apu, unearths an essential truth about Hollywood: "Success justifies everything." Even racism.
"I don't know any woman who has a simple relationship with their mother or with their daughter," Gerwig says. Her new film tells the story of a teenager preparing to leave home for the first time.
Mudbound follows two families — one white and one black — just before, during and after World War II. Rees says her experiences growing up in Nashville, Tenn., in the 1980s informed her new film.
My Friend Dahmer,based on the best-selling graphic novel by John Backderf, tells a story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's high school years and the kids who knew him, including Backderf.
Actor Kenneth Branagh has been Henry the Fifth, Iago in Othello, Victor Frankenstein, and now he's taken on another famous literary character, Agatha Christie's meticulous master detective, Hercule Poirot. Branagh both stars and directs the latest version of Murder on the Orient Express and talks with NPR's Kelly McEvers about the project.
Director Richard Linklater's latest film, Last Flag Flying, tells the story of three Vietnam veterans who reunite after decades apart to help bury one of their sons. LANGUAGE ADVISORY: The phrase "fucked up" is bleeped approximately one minute into this story.
Two male farmhands in Yorkshire find each other in this "full-throttle, grand love story and ... coming-of-age parable" from first-time writer-director Francis Lee.