John Gielgud

Mr. Skin may have applauded Marisa Tomei's topless turn in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," but the film also yielded one of the least appealing shows of skin thanks to the untoned buttocks of a costar. Papermag's Cinemaniac, aka Dennis Dermody,...

TO become a mega-movie star these days, a man must don the tights. With a few notable exceptions like Leonardo DiCaprio, who had the good fortune to be in the highest-grossing movie of all time (that would be "Titanic"), almost every $20-million man has...

Thursday, when Heath Ledger's family landed at LAX airport to begin their march to the podium to pick up his inevitable supporting-actor Oscar for "The Dark Knight" this Sunday, a reporter asked Ledger's dad if Heath's daughter Matilda will get the...

More than 40 years after a dazzling first run that earned a dozen Academy Award nominations, "Becket" is back on the big screen and just in time to cast a fascinating light on this year's Oscar race. A fluke of scheduling fate has made a newly restored...

Spring is impossibly verdant in Raleigh, so lush it's steamy. The path to the door of Reynolds Price's house in the woods is scattered with beechnuts. Tree frogs babble, the screen door slams, somewhere in the pond outside the kitchen an old snapping...

Friday May 15, 1998      Sheer fun in animation, it seems, died with Howard Ashman, the immensely gifted lyricist whose clever wordplay and anything-for-a-laugh rhyming made "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast" and parts of "Aladdin" so...

Friday December 24, 1999      "Titus" is more travesty than tragedy, a dynamic film from Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" directed with unflagging energy by Julie Taymor, who brought "The Lion King" to Broadway with much acclaim. But Taymor, who also won...

For a short fellow, Dudley Moore had a great gift for making it big. Over a career than spanned more than 40 years, Moore managed to arrive, with a splash, several times -- as an ensemble comedian, as half of one of the wickedest comic duos ever to come...

Ronald Harwood has been a part of the British theater for more than 50 years, so he has the inevitable story involving a foot, a mouth and John Gielgud. "I had just finished writing `The Dresser,'" the 69-year-old Harwood says down the telephone from...

Friday September 27, 1996      We all know about the survival of the fittest, but how about the propaganda of the species? By the end of "The Leopard Son"--the Discovery Channel's first theatrical release and a first-rate nature film--there's no...

Friday October 25, 1996      Stars are the spoiled children of the movie business. We vote for them for president, give them Academy Awards for directing, applaud their every mood and move. Our reward, as far as Al Pacino is concerned, is films like...

Friday November 22, 1996      It's a rainy night and a man is walking in the downpour, soaked through and talking much too fast. He's one of the legion of the mentally unstable--erratic, intriguing, even frightening--that city dwellers instinctively...