Mother (movie)

When Walter Hill was flipping through the first 40 pages of the science fiction/horror script that became "Alien," he considered it turgid, a snooze. "I thought it was just terrible," said Hill, who co-wrote and co-produced the movie with his partner,...

Hideko Takamine, a child star in Japan in the 1930s who became one of her country's leading screen actresses during the post- World War II era, in which she played a variety of contemporary women who captured the tenor of the times, has died. She was 86....

Monica Johnson, a film and television writer best known for her screenwriting partnership with writer-director Albert Brooks on "Modern Romance," "Lost in America" and other comedies starring Brooks, has died. She was 64. Johnson, a Palm Springs...

AFTER more than 30 years, actor, filmmaker and writer Albert Brooks is returning to the small screen. When Showtime's "Weeds" premieres its fourth season on June 16, Brooks will play acerbic gambler Len Botwin, the father-in-law of pot-selling mom...

"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" is a terrible title. It's a lead weight, an albatross, a ... well, anything you can think of that doesn't convey lightness or wit. But it's pretty much the only thing in Albert Brooks' new film that isn't funny....

Josh Radnor is about to shoot a crucial scene in the season finale of "How I Met Your Mother," but what's on his mind is whether Madonna appearing at the annual Coachella music festival will be weird. It's early March, the next-to-last day of filming...

A few days ago, Joan Lefkow was walking down a Chicago street flanked by federal marshals when a panhandler walked up to her and said, "God bless you, Judge Lefkow."     It has been nine months since U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's name and...

In "The Ring Two," Naomi Watts plays Rachel Keller, hard-boiled journalist, single mother of an eerily self-possessed child, and the woman partially responsible for unleashing a deadly, replicating media virus on the unsuspecting Pacific Northwest in "The...

More than 30 minutes into "Alien," Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic, the creature that gives the film its title has not yet had a close-up. In fact, it has not been glimpsed at all. The fact that audiences are pinned to their seats and clutching...

Of all the monsters to go bump in the endless night of the movies, few have been as wonderfully frightening as the creature from "Alien." Designed by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger and first unleashed by director Ridley Scott in 1979, the extraterrestrial...

Robert Schwentke's sleek, chilling "Tattoo" lets us know from its opening shot of a young woman running naked along dark Berlin streets, blood streaming down her back, that we're in for strong stuff. The film is an engrossing and original police...

Friday August 27, 1999      Who hasn't wondered where today's ideas for movies could possibly have come from. Or why some writers seem to flourish while others, equally talented, get bogged down in the slough of despond. Albert Brooks lets you in on a...