Refusing to be daunted by icon Margaret Laurence, Kari Skogland brought a Canadian classic novel to the big screen and kept it relevant for a contemporary audience.

LOS ANGELES—You would think that a 23-year-old actor might be somewhat concerned about getting typecast after playing a cartoonlike character in a huge special-effects movie. However, Emile Hirsch doesn’t see it that way. Hirsch, who came to the film Speed Racer from an acclaimed performance as a doomed adventurer in last year’s Into the Wild, says that he thinks things have changed in the past few years and that today’s actors have some advantages over counterparts from other eras.

It’s been exactly 20 years since Errol Morris made a name for himself with The Thin Blue Line, which served notice to the film world that documentaries could be stylish, confrontational, and highly interpretive. The use of dramatic reenactments, intense close-ups, animated graphics, dark humour, and hypnotic music scores—à la Philip Glass—have since become commonplace elements. (And, yes, Michael Moore, I am looking at you.)

NEW YORK CITY—Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow would seem like an odd couple to take on lead roles in a big summer film. Both are better known for appearing in films that have budgets about equal to the size of the salaries they probably earned for costarring in Iron Man, in which Downey plays the title character and alter ego Tony Stark and Paltrow plays Stark’s supportive assistant, Pepper Potts. (The film, directed by Jon Favreau, is currently playing at Vancouver theatres.)

He’s cut off a cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs, buried Uma Thurman alive in Kill Bill, and even kissed Susan Sarandon without flinching in Thelma & Louise, but this time Michael Madsen swears things are different with his new film, Vice. “Sure…I’ve fired some weapons in my life, yeah,” he tells the Georgia Straight on a film-set phone.

An unlikely movie star with a troubled past, Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. is not just up, he’s so damn heroic.

For all his reputation as a worldly wise media titan—one of the few we have in this country, at least in the Hollywood sense—Robert Lantos has taken on film projects that are generally more connected with his heart than with his head. As a founder of Alliance Communications, when it was a picture-making outfit, and as the producer of features by Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Patricia Rozema, he helped shepherd in a period of unprecedented creativity in the Canadian film scene.

LOS ANGELES—When it comes to being a Hollywood screwup, timing is everything, according to Christina Ricci. The actor, who was a child star thanks to two Addams Family movies, says that she doesn’t look down on young actors who become deer in the camera lights. The 28-year-old says—in the Long Beach Convention Centre to publicize her latest film, Speed Racer, during the Toyota Long Beach Grand Prix—that had she been born a few years later, she, too, would be fodder for the tabloids.

Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, a cool-headed analysis of the systematic use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, won this year’s Oscar for best documentary. It’s not like the writer-director expects his movie, which opens here on Friday (April 4), to force the Bush gang to stop killing people overnight, but he’s still pretty fired up about it.

Lindsay Nahmiache says the inaugural edition of a new annual movie event contains films “made by regular people”. As programming director of the Projecting Change Film Festival (May 8 to 11 at the Ridge Theatre), Nahmiache has also arranged speakers to discuss each movie.

Before becoming Knowledge Network’s president and CEO last year, Rudy Buttignol had to decide to move from Toronto to either Montreal or Vancouver. “For me,” Buttignol says by phone from Toronto during a business trip, “Vancouver was far more interesting because I see that it’s a picture of the future of Canada, that the immigration from Asia-Pacific is fundamentally changing both British Columbia and Canada.”

Two local filmmakers discover not only compassion but freedom in the city's alleys and byways in Bevel Up and Carts of Darkness.

It’s a cliché that most actors in Hollywood (and elsewhere) would really rather be directors. In fact, few witness more closely the heartbreak of trying to get movies made than do working actors. That may explain why more of them don’t actually move to the other side of the camera.

As a sort of follow-up to his older sister Deepa Mehta’s Water—which looked at the plight of widows in India circa 1938—Dilip Mehta’s documentary The Forgotten Woman aims to put real faces on widows similar to those depicted in that Oscar-nominated Canadian film.

The only thing that bugs writer-director Thomas McCarthy about his new movie, The Visitor, is that some people don’t quite get it. Actually, scratch that thought. He isn’t really mad when people throw stones at this small tale about lives changed by chance encounters, because he thinks his critics might still be interested in furthering the discussion he wanted to start in the first place.