Pat Dowell

Lewis, whose comedic duo with Dean Martin launched him to the peak of showbiz, starred and directed in dozens of films. He was perhaps just as famous for his charity work fighting muscular dystrophy.

Godard, who has been making films for more than half a century, shared the 2014 Jury Prize at Cannes for his 3-D film, Goodbye To Language. He likes 3-D, he says, because "there aren't any rules."

The film The Act of Killing is the most talked about movie of the year. It's a film that is both fiction and nonfiction. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer talked to the old men in charge of the death squads in Indonesia in the 1960s that killed somewhere between 500,000 to 2 million civilians in the name of thwarting communism.

The legendary experimental filmmaker's work is the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. VanDerBeek merged collage-style filmmaking with new technology throughout his career.

No One Knows About Persian Cats tells the story of Iranian musicians trying to put together a band in a country where heavy metal, rock and hip-hop are illegal. The film won two prizes at last year's Cannes International Film Festival, and opens in this week in the U.S.

The Boston-based composer is remembered, 100 years after his birth, for a string of three-minute pops-concert classics such as "Sleigh Ride," "The Typewriter" and "The Syncopated Clock."

Volker Schlondorff is an Academy Award-winning German filmmaker who has focused on many aspects of German culture and history, but vowed never to make a movie about concentration camps -- until now. The Ninth Day tells the story of a priest who is torn between what is best for the church and his people.

Productions Peter Pan have reflected changing social attitudes toward children over the years. The result is that until recently, Peter, the boy who wouldn't grow up, was played by a woman. NPR's Pat Dowell explores the history of the character.

The Trilogy, the latest project from French actor-director Lucas Belvaux, consists of three films with distinct plots populated by the same cast of characters. The project has already won France's top critics prize. Each film -- a crime drama, a romantic farce and a forlorn love story -- will open sequentially in U.S. theaters over the course of three weeks. Pat Dowell reports.

In 1831, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Va., that killed more than 50 white people. An independent film debuting on PBS examines The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron's controversial 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Turner's alleged jailhouse statements and other versions of Turner's story. Pat Dowell reports.