Search results for

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. In this segment: German jazz artist Marty Grosz plays the music of Fats Waller. Rebroadcast from June 26, 1987.

Mike White is the Hollywood screenwriter behind hit films including The School of Rock, The Good Girl and Chuck & Buck. Now he has directed Year of the Dog, a "not very funny" comedy about a woman grieving for her lost pet; it stars Peter Sarsgaard and Saturday Night Live veteran Molly Shannon.

When the Khmer Rouge carried out the genocide of nearly 2 million Cambodians in the late 1970s, it also nearly obliterated Cambodia's arts and culture. Kong Nay, one of the last living masters of the Cambodian guitar, is trying to keep those traditions alive.

Actress Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) makes her directorial debut with Away from Her, a new movie based on a short story by Alice Munro; it stars Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's.

Jindabyne is a movie in which friends on a fishing trip find a body, but choose not to report it. It's an Australian film based on a short story by Raymond Carver.

The star of Friends and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is featured in the new film Numb; he plays a screenwriter plagued by feelings of anxiety, detachment and panic. The story is based on an autobiographical script by Harris Goldberg (Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo), who also made his directing debut with the film.

Children of Men, the breathtaking Alfonso Cuaron film based on P.D. James' dystopian-futurist novel, has just come out on DVD. Critic-at-large John Powers takes a look at one of 2006's most talked-about movies.

Critic-at-large John Powers reflects on what he thinks is the single greatest movie ever made about the city of Los Angeles — Killer of Sheep, an independent film made in the late '70s by Charles Burnett. It's on the Library of Congress' National Film Registry; it will be showing in selected theaters in the next few months, and it comes out on DVD this September.

We're hearing from Pulitzer Prize winners on today's show. Yesterday the Pulitzer for music was awarded to the 77-year-old jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, for his live album Sound Grammar. It was cited for its "elastic and bracing" music. When Coleman came along in the 1950s, his detractors said his rough and wayward jazz was too crazy to stand the test of time. The Pulitzer is the most recent proof of how wrong they were. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead had this review last year when the CD was released.

French filmmaker Alain Resnais is best known for his nonlinear art films — but 20 years ago he began adapting plays; his latest picture, Private Fears in Public Places, is based on a 2004 dark comedy by the British writer Alan Ayckbourn.