• Ben Kingsley and Roman Polanski worked hard on stripping the character of Fagin from its usual effeminate airs, in their new adaptation of Oliver Twist: "We've lived long enough to know that certain things should be done for certain reasons. Without analyzing it. Which would be embarrassing, you know?"
  • No one has ever made a great movie out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, but now that David Fincher is giving The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a shot, Steve Chagollan takes a look at some past attempts.
  • "I suppose I grew up wishing I was an American Jew for the comedy and the one-liners." Ricky Gervais discusses his new series, which co-stars Kate Winslet as an "actress who does a Holocaust movie because, as she explains, it's a surefire way to finally win an Oscar."
  • "You can readily imagine the happy night when IFC veterans of the festival circuit came up with phony indie film titles, including "Love Vigilantes," "The Meaning of Velocity" and "The Unreasonable Truth of Butterflies." You can hear them sending up, among themselves, the feeble or pompous types who turn up in knit caps at the festivals: the distributors and sponsors and actors and, of course, filmmakers. It must have been fun for them." Virginia Heffernan looks at IFC's new indie film scene mocumentary, The Festival.