There's a reservedness about actor Vik Sahay. Chalk it up to his Canadian roots, or to the impeccable geek M.O. he cultivated in "Chuck," the highly successful NBC series which ran from September 2007 until this past January. Sahay's studiousness is like that of a theatre actor's, and yet he's perfectly at home doing movie and TV work. With a role in Universal’s "American Reunion," a leading part in William Brent Bell’s "WER"

Writer/director Franklin Martin first met Kevin Laue, the one-handed Division I college basketball player who recently graduated from Manhattan College, in August 2006, while completing editing on his debut film, the Hurricane Katrina documentary “Walking on Dead Fish.” A former Hofstra University basketball player and Tennessee State University coach, Martin was dazzled by the prowess, grace and heart of the 6’9 athlete, then

For her third feature film “Nobody Walks” (opening October 19), thirty year-old writer/director Ry Russo-Young reached an enviable amount of career milestones. It was her first time working with a relatively mainstream cast (John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Dylan McDermott and Justin Kirk, among others). It was her first screenwriting collaboration with Lena Dunham, creator of the hit HBO series “Girls,” who happens to be a

Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre,” released in 1981, documented a two-hour conversation between the courtly, garrulous actor-stage director Andre Gregory and the diminutive, nasally defiant actor-playwright Wallace Shawn. If you were one of the many dazzled by it, you will undoubtedly want “Before and After Dinner,” the new documentary on Andre Gregory conceived and directed by his wife, Cindy Kleine, to see the

Taking a real police case--it was also the subject of a novel called "Deadly Confession" (2006) by Romanian writer Tatiana Niculescu Bran--and fictionalizing it for the big screen, Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu took his new film "După dealuri" ("Beyond the hills" in Romanian) to Cannes and walked away with two wins (Mungiu previously earned the festival's top honor, the Palme D'Or): best screenplay, and his leads

Great films are the product of the collaborative process. And while screenwriters may not get asked the most questions during the daily press conferences at Cannes as wordsmiths and dramatists they are responsible for the surprising comeback, the wit, the meme, and the devastating third act that make a film come alive. A screenplay is the most sought-after piece of writing nowadays--one element of a script gets overlooked and a film

Babygirl is Irish filmmaker Macdara Vallely’s alternatively wistful and funny tale of a sixteen year-old wise-beyond-her-years Bronx girl named Lena (Yainis Ynoa) who defiantly protects her mother (Rosa Arredondo). A lonely single mom, Lucy is easily swayed by flattery, which repeatedly links her to unworthy male suitors. When an oily, mustachioed youngster named Victor (Flaco Navaja) flirts openly with both Lena and Lucy on a

A cursory glance at the entertainment news cycle will quickly reveal that we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift as far as how movies are consumed; Facebook, soon to be a publicly-traded company, could in the next few years become the main player in online movie streaming (but the road ahead is fraught with peril). But aren't more people going to the movies? Or less? It's hard to say, the middle-of-the-week at

With today's dried-up loan markets and lack of funding for the arts, financing all of their film's budget through credit-cards, endless bartender shifts and selling internal organs is the norm for independent filmmakers. What you don't hear about often is someone shedding his identity to dodge debt collectors. New York-based David Spaltro suffered through this for two years, ever since wrapping his first, largely autobiographical film

Though John Landis’s name may not be as instantly recognizable as those of George Lucas or Martin Scorsese, his contributions to quintessential American cinema are just as popular and venerable as those of his better-known (or perhaps just better-marketed) colleagues. The director of such classics—a very worn-out term that actually applies here—as “Animal House” (1978), “The Blues Brothers” (1980), and “An American Werewolf