Film

The lives of writers drive two films opening this week: The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, dramatizes a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, meanwhile, examines who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Critic David Edelstein says both films show how hard it is to write about writers.

This fiscal thriller, starring Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto and Demi Moore, is set during one day in 2008, as a group of brokers try to prevent their firm from going belly up. David Edelstein says that given the headlines, the film's timing couldn't be better. (Recommended)

Pedro Almodovar's film The Skin I Live In reunites him with actor Antonio Banderas, who first came to international attention as an obsessive lover in the director's 1987 film Law of Desire. This time, Banderas plays a scientist driven to replace his dead wife with a carbon-based copy.

An idealistic campaign press secretary (Ryan Gosling) finds himself in the middle of a scandal that could threaten his candidate's chances of becoming president.

It's been more than 30 years since the rugged film star's death, yet he still looms large in the national psyche. Critic John Powers was surprised to find that the indomitable American fighting man was actually a hard-earned act of self-invention.

In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon dreams of an apocalyptic storm, and builds a backyard bunker for his family to survive. Critic David Edelstein says the film is terrific.

Screenwriter Will Reiser coped with his cancer diagnosis by thinking up ideas for cancer comedy movies with his best friend, actor Seth Rogen. Rogen and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt now star in a film based on Reiser's life. Both Gordon-Levitt and Reiser join Fresh Air for a conversation about the film.

Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager who used analytics and statistics to stay competitive against other teams with much larger payrolls. Critic David Edelstein says the film, based on the 2003 Michael Lewis book, is "entertaining as a sports-underdog story."

The veteran actor has played a Nazi-hunter, a vampire, a cowboy hitchhiker and the outlaw Jesse James. In his latest film, Brad Pitt plays the manager of baseball's Oakland A's. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross why the part interested him and what it's like to live life in the public eye.

Roger Ebert tackles lowbrow and highbrow topics alike in his memoir; critic John Powers says the chronicle is sunny and hopeful — just like Ebert himself.

Drive is what Driver does, and driven is how audiences will feel after a screening of Nicholas Winding Refn's brutally moving thriller, which stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston and Albert Brooks. (Recommended)

Vera Farmiga makes her directorial debut with Higher Ground, which centers on a woman who joins and then flees a fundamentalist religious order. Film critic David Edelstein says the movie is "complicated and unresolved in the best possible way."

In 1983, critic John Powers panned the Pacino film, saying it was trashy and shallow. But he recently watched the film again, and says that in retrospect, he can see how the film burned its way into the national psyche.

Raoul Ruiz's 4 1/2 hour Portuguese/French melodrama -- a puppet theater of the upper class -- won't be everybody's cup of tea. But critic David Edelstein says the film's haunting mix of distance and intimacy makes the hours fly by.

Emma Stone and Viola Davis star in the film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel about a white woman who sets out to tell the story of black domestic servants in 1960s Mississippi. Critic David Edelstein says that both Stone and Davis pull off stunning performances.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers weren't the only famous Hollywood musical team of the 1930s. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy also starred in a series of operettas. But classical music critic lloyd Schwartz says the couples achieved their success in quite opposite ways.

You might not recognize actor Andy Serkis, but you've probably seen his characters on-screen. Searches is Hollywood's go-to actor for computer-generated roles. His movies include Lord of the Rings, King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Ameena Matthews is a former gang member who now works to stop retaliatory gang violence in some of Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods. She is one of the subjects of a new documentary called The Interrupters.

The sci-fi Western Cowboys & Aliens and the low-budget British film Attack the Block both open this weekend. Critic David Edelstein says both movies bring people together from different walks of life — but only one is really worth seeing.

The Irish actor plays a cynical, small-town cop who is thrust out of his comfort zone in the black comedy The Guard. "I've met men like [my character] quite a lot," Gleeson says. "People who are underused a little bit and have terribly sharp wit, but pretend to be a little bit stupid."