When HBO announced this would be the final season of Deadwood, rabid fans of the show let out a collective %@#&! HBO acquiesced and promised an extra mini-season to wrap up David Milch's profane Western drama. A die hard fan himself, Kurt Andersen talks ...

In recent years, Kevin Bacon acted in some of the best -- and darkest -- American films; from Clint Eastwood's Mystic River to The Woodsman, where Bacon played a pedophile. Bacon talks with Kurt Andersen about why he wanted to direct Loverboy, which stars ...

Studio 360's Leital Molad finds Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal irresistibly charming, no matter what kind of taboos his characters are breaking. She talked with Bernal about his breakthrough performance in Y Tu Mama Tambien and his new film The King.

Christianity as we know it is coming to an end: Sony Pictures' adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code is being released this week. With the help of novelist Anne Rice, Kurt Andersen tries to decode the controversy.

Comic book artist Dan Clowes and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff have brought their endearing misanthropy twice to the big screen-first in 2001 with Ghost World and now with the new film Art School Confidential. Zwigoff and Clowes curb their enthusiasm with Kurt ...

When Curly gouges Larry in the eye, we laugh—or at least some of us do. Richard Paul has been writing and performing comedy for 25 years, and he applied himself to one of the great mysteries of the universe: are The Three Stooges funny?

In movies, the sounds of punching and smashing are created by someone sitting in a room with a microphone and a bunch of props - just like in the days of radio drama. Foley artist Sue Zizza explains how to make a fight sound really good, or ...

Caveh Zahedi's films are auto-biographical, to say the least. His new film I Am a Sex Addict follows his previous indie films I Was Possessed by God and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Producer Jonathan Mitchell thinks we can learn something from watching ...

In some ways, the career of film composer Hugo Friedhofer was a typical Hollywood story. He was a brilliant musician who created some of the most memorable scores -- like the soundtrack to The Best Years Of Our Lives -- but never got the fame he deserved. WNYC's

Director Nicole Holofcener and actress Catherine Keener are friends and frequent collaborators. They explain to Kurt Andersen how their daily lives become fodder for their films Lovely and Amazing and Friends With Money.

They feed off our blood, they live forever, and they don't pay taxes. Peter Crimmins explains why no stake to the heart can kill off the public's thirst for the fashionably undead.

Kurt Andersen surveys the strange history of vampires in pop culture.

In a new reality TV show called Black.White., two families --one black and one white -- are put under heavy make-up and set out into the world to experience life with a different skin color. The verdict on racism in America ends up being a shade of grey -- much ...

If there were a competition to create a Broadway musical based on the least likely source material, Grey Gardens might be the winner. The show is adapted from the 1975 documentary that followed the reclusive aunt and cousin of Jackie O. Christine Ebersole, the star of Grey ...

A documentary in theaters tells the story of the South's victory over the Union in the Civil War. Most of CSA: The Confederate States of America is obviously faked, but filmmaker Kevin Willmott didn't re-write American history as a joke. He set out to reveal a disturbing ...

More than 20 years ago, the German film director Wim Wenders made a big splash in America with Paris, Texas. Wenders' new film Don't Come Knocking shares a lot with Paris, Texas -- the Western geography, similar themes and another collaboration with Sam Shepard. Wenders talks about ...

Stanley Kubrick set out to make a serious drama about an accidental nuclear war, and ended up making the blackest comedy ever, Dr. Strangelove. Studio 360's Arun Rath explains how the bizarre, over-the-top parody of Dr. Strangelove was actually closer to reality than any of us would ...

The movie Crash, by writer-director Paul Haggis, is one of the big contenders for Best Picture at this weekend's Academy Awards. Crash follows a diverse group of strangers in Los Angeles who literally and figuratively crash into one another, altering their lives forever. That premise will sound ...

There's a conspiracy at the heart of every political thriller—from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to Oscar contenders Munich and Syriana. In the mid-1970s, the best filmmakers in America put the turmoil of that era into dark, paranoid movies about forces beyond our control. Studio 360's Derek John spoke ...

Jonathan Demme is best known for directing big Hollywood movies like Silence of the Lambs, but he also made a side career out of concert films and music videos. His latest film is an intimate portrait of the veteran rocker Neil Young.