Love worked with Isay at the Atlanta office of his StoryCorps project. In the organization’s new book, All There Is: Love Stories From StoryCorps, everyday people narrate their personal experiences with love.

“One theme that keeps coming up is that no one should ever, ever give up hope on love,” Isay tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “It seems like it’s not in the cards for people, and then it just sneaks up behind you and there it is.”

In one interview, 93-year-old Paul Wilson tells his daughter, Marty Smith, how he met her mother. “One day I was waiting in the lobby for the elevator, the door slid aside, and there she stood: the prettiest girl I had ever seen,” Wilson recalls.

His future wife was the elevator operator. The first few times he took her lift, he couldn’t muster the courage to say much more than his floor number and “thank you.” But he didn’t even have to say that much — she remembered his floor.

“Thank goodness she broke the ice!” Wilson says. “She said, ‘Do you know where you can get some good chop suey?’ How about that for an opening line? I said, ‘Sure. The cafe across the street is a Chinese cafe. They serve chop suey.’”

Wilson got the hint and promptly asked her out. “We had chop suey and we got acquainted,” he says. “We got married right there in my mother’s living room and we had a 63-year honeymoon.”

Wilson’s wife has since died, but he takes comfort in reflecting on their long, happy marriage. “We were real lovers, and every day is a memorial for her,” he says.

People often tell Isay that these stories make them cry. But he insists that most of them aren’t sad, they’re just real. “You’re hearing something authentic,” he says. “You’re hearing people speak from a place of honesty and generosity. Nobody’s looking for 15 minutes of fame. Nobody’s looking for anything but to kind of express their love to another human being in this booth and talk about what’s meaningful in their life.”

In one heartbreakingly real story, Granvilette Kestenbaum, 63, reminisces about the husband she loved and lost.

“He fell on me at a party,” she tells her friend Darlene Griggs. “I thought he was the goofiest guy I’d ever met in my life. He had a shirt that was so rumpled and a pair of shoes, one of which had many rubber bands wrapped around it because the sole was coming apart.”

At first, Kestenbaum didn’t know what to make of his offbeat sense of humor. “Some weeks later, he called me. He said, ‘Hello this is Howie.’ And I said, ‘Howie who?’ He said, ‘Fine thank you, how are you?’ And I just thought, ‘I can’t walk around with this guy.’”

But his quirky personality quickly grew on her. They got married a year after meeting each other, and they stayed together for 31 years. “He started asking me maybe six weeks before 9/11, ‘Do you love me, honey?’” Kenstenbaum says. “I said, ‘You will always have my deep and abiding love.’ And I don’t know why I said that. I’m glad I did.”

Kestenbaum’s husband died in the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “We were supposed to grow old together,” she says. “We were looking forward to it. He’s always going to be 56 in my mind. I’m going to be an old shriveled up mass, but he will be 56.”

Kestenbaum doesn’t think she’ll ever come to terms with his death. “There is no closure when you lose a loved one,” she insists. “I don’t care how you lost him. Your heart is always open. That’s never going to change. And I miss him like hell.”

After sifting through thousands of variations on the theme, Isay says he’s learned a few things about love. Perhaps the best advice he’s come across came from an 85-year-old man who described a drive he took with his wife shortly after returning from service in World War II.

Along the road in Philadelphia, he spotted a sign that spelled out “Things to Always Say to Your Loved One” in order to sustain a happy marriage: “You look great. Can I help? Let’s eat out. I’m sorry, and I love you.”

The man took those rules to heart, Isay says. Those simple statements “guided their marriage for 53 years, two months and five days. That pretty much sums it up.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

We’ve invited Elling to answer three questions about other artists nominated for the Grammys. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Which is not to say I didn’t have a good time with Denzel and company’s slick, state-of-the-art engineering. Safe House is fashioned to suit Washington’s most successful persona: the bad guy who’s so cool that he inspires you even as he poses a threat to the social order. He plays Tobin Frost, a CIA agent who wrote the book on modern interrogations before becoming the company’s most notorious traitor. Now, he has no allegiances and no relationships outside of work — he only takes pleasure in old and expensive wine.

As the movie opens, Frost is selling especially incendiary intelligence in South Africa when he’s set upon by unknown assassins — who are expert enough to scare him into taking refuge at the nearby American Embassy, where at least he knows he won’t be killed. Promptly arrested, he’s transported to a safe house managed by frustrated junior agent Matt Weston, played by Ryan Reynolds. As Weston watches more senior agents interrogate Frost, the safe house is breached, and with gunfire coming closer, he finds himself alone with the soft-talking traitor, who tells Weston that he must protect him.

After everyone else is shot down, Weston escapes with Frost in handcuffs, not sure where he’s going but committed to prove himself by keeping the infamous ex-agent in custody. Amid all the car chases and bullet dodging, Frost works to psych Weston out, in part by planting doubts about his relationships with his superiors and even his French doctor girlfriend.

By the middle of Safe House, I predicted every twist to come but was goggle-eyed anyway. Director Daniel Espinosa is a Swede who has studied state-of-the-art Euro thrillers by Luc Besson, and above all the Bourne pictures. Safe House is color-coordinated down to the glossy, tutti-frutti storage units in one of the chase scenes. It’s full of jump-cuts and fights in which the careening, hand-held camera goes tight on the blows and counter-blows and glass-and furniture-smashing. The stunt work is superb, but the movie is focused more on jolts than the actors’ athleticism.

Steven Soderbergh, on the other hand, made Haywire as a vehicle for Gina Carano, a mixed-martial-arts champion given to single-minded pummelings. And as one of the few major directors who work as their own cinematographers — under the name “Peter Andrews” — he’s unusually sensitive to where the camera is in relation to the actors. Here, he explicitly goes against action fashion by keeping a respectful distance, allowing us to ogle his leading lady from stem to stern.

She’s something to see. As an espionage agent betrayed by forces unknown, Carano doesn’t move like an actor but an athlete — someone trained to channel emotion rather than exhibit it, to conserve energy rather than expend it. The fights are staged and shot so that we can almost but not quite calculate her next move along with her. She’s always faster — and meaner — than we expect, ever ready to swivel, kick out a limb and squeeze a windpipe shut between rock-hard thighs.

Soderbergh tends to have one thesis idea per film and stick with it, sometimes to a fault. In Haywire, he’s so wedded to that objective camera that parts of the film seem under-energized, making me wish for just one or two high-octane close-ups to put a nice brutal button on a fight. I prefer what Brad Bird does in 2011′s best action film, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, cunningly alternating long shots to establish the bodies in the space with head-snapping close-ups. But I applaud Soderbergh for reminding us that action — like dance, like gymnastics — can be savored from afar instead of so close it makes us motion-sick. Who goes to movies to be sick? [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

After that, we use the recent dust-up over Watchmen to talk about remakes and reboots and why certain characters are incredibly controversial to redo, while other characters can be reimagined over and over again without any particular fuss. I posit an age range during which you fall in love with things and never want them to be touched, I break the news to Stephen that they’re remaking something he couldn’t believe hadn’t been remade already, and there are cow puns and cow metaphors. YOU GUYS. There are. And Stephen speaks the words, “I’m flattened by your genius.” (Not mine, of course.)

We end, as always, with what’s making us happy this week, featuring my breaking of a bad habit, Glen’s discovery of a great bad movie, and an extremely welcome visit from one of the great guest voices that you have doubtless enjoyed in the past, featuring a book announcement that will make a lot of you very, very happy based on requests you’ve made to us before.

Leave us your comments on the Super Bowl, Madonna, reimagined characters, and whatever else strikes your fancy. Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Glen, Trey, Mike, and hey! Stephen’s mother. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

“I grew up there from age 5 to 19,” Gurira says. “I’m back there every year, but I feel like there are things that I had to dig out through this process of creating this play.”

Gurira says The Convert started out as a kind of melding of what she calls her “neo-colonial education” with colonial history — George Bernard Shaw meeting her great-grandparents’ generation.

“I was thinking one day, and I was like, I want to make a play that’s sort of … an adaptation of Pygmalion, about Zimbabwe, because I just feel like there are so many parallel themes,” Gurira says. “That’s really where it was born from, and then it just took its own route.”

In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins takes a poor flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and teaches her to speak the king’s English. In The Convert, Jekesai, a young woman from the Shona people, runs away from an arranged marriage and is taken under the wing of a black Catholic missionary named Chilford.

Gurira uses her own family history in the play — her great-great aunt became a nun, fleeing a forced betrothal. Director Emily Mann says this was a common occurrence in Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was once called) in the late 19th century, when the play is set.

“There were many, many women who ran to the church — some of them became nuns, some of them became teachers — basically so that they could be free,” Mann says. “Women were often fleeing being sold off … or being given away, without their own permission, to be … as in this play, the 10th wife of an old man.”

Jekesai — or Ester, as she’s christened by her protectors — adapts quickly to her new situation.

“She’s learned a whole new language,” says Pascale Armand, who plays Jekesai. “She’s learned about a whole new religion, which she has put complete and utter faith in … [put] her life into this new way of thinking and new way of believing.”

Leading her in this transformation is Chilford, who has renounced his own family and traditions. While his deepest desire is to become a priest, few black Africans were ordained in those days.

Gurira says that while Chilford is a decent and well-meaning man, “he’s a casualty, one could say, of the issue of colonization, in the sense that he really drinks all the Kool-Aid — like every last drop of it — and really [embraces], hook, line and sinker, the idea that a Christian God is very intertwined with the white man.”

That gap between doctrine and reality, black and white, twists the characters like pretzels. For instance, Chilford reacts furiously when Ester corrects a white priest in church, but Armand says the village girl, who’s encountering colonial prejudice for the first time, doesn’t understand why she has to defer.

“I have no understanding of racism,” says Armand, speaking for her character. “This is my first introduction to that term, to that ideology that I now have to deal with and be subservient to.”

While white characters are discussed onstage, The Convert is told entirely from the black viewpoint. In an early draft of the play, Gurira says, she attempted to write a scene with Chilford’s white mentor.

“I actually tried, I tried, I tried to put him on the stage, and I was like, ‘No! It’s gonna be an absolute caricature, I’m not gonna be able!’ And it didn’t make sense. It just didn’t make sense,” Gurira says.

As The Convert unfolds over three highly intense hours, tensions in the society erupt. In the second act, the audience learns that Chilford’s mentor has been killed. Soon it becomes clear that, unlike Shaw’s Pygmalion, this is a tragedy. Blood will be spilled, lives will be ruined.

“You begin to understand, from the colonized, what colonialism really is,” says Emily Mann. “Because Danai’s too smart to make it ‘one person’s right and one person’s wrong,’ or black and white in any way — she’s so interested in gray areas. She’s so interested in how messy human beings really are.”

Even though The Convert is set in the late 19th century, Gurira thinks it has relevance to the problems of contemporary Zimbabwe.

“What dynamics of our traditions do we retain? And what are we retaining only because we got colonized?” Gurira asks. “There was this huge gap that happened, in terms of how we were taken over, and we were not able to evolve in our way, in our own time.”

Gurira says The Convert is the first in a series of plays she hopes to write about Zimbabwe. She wants to look at life during colonial times throughout the 20th century, and she’s been interviewing people — including her parents, who grew up during the 1950s — whenever she returns home.

“It’s kind of frightening to think of how much there is to write about,” Gurira says. “It’ll take my whole lifetime and probably a couple more to really get into all of these stories and all of the experiences of what is now Zimbabwe. It’s such a fascinating navigation and fusion of cultures and experiences and voices.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

If George Lucas had never created that annoying, slapstick-prone CGI character in The Phantom Menace, history would be different. No amount of “meesa so sorry” can make up for this abomination. And to add insult to injury, Lucas is sending a 3D Jar Jar Binks into theaters on February 10th.

When The Phantom Menace first came out in 1999, Jar Jar became the focus of fan hatred and ridicule. Jar Jar was meant to be comic relief for the kiddies, but he came to symbolize what fans saw as Lucas’ flawed creative judgment. One fan was so incensed he re-cut the movie to minimize Jar Jar’s presence. He then distributed VHS and DVD copies this “improved” version for free to other fans. It came to be known as “The Phantom Edit,” and it gave Star Wars geek Jamie Benning his first taste of fan filmmaking.

“I think when ‘The Phantom Edit’ first came out of The Phantom Menace,’ I think a lot of people realized that the ability for people to do this kind of thing had arrived,” says Benning.

In 2006, Benning joined an online group petitioning Lucas to release the Star Wars trilogy in its original form. You know, the one where Han Solo — not bounty hunter Greedo — shot first. Lucas ignored their pleas.

So Benning, a professional editor in sports television and full-time Star Wars nerd, took matters into his own hands and created a fan film.

Benning’s films are unofficial documentaries. He uses footage from the original movies without permission from Lucas. Benning follows the flow of the original films but expands them with things like alternate takes and interviews from commentary tracks. For example, Benning edits audio from a Star Wars radio drama over footage of deleted scenes while on-screen text explains that the grainy black and white images come from what’s known as the “Lost Cut.”

“When I made Star Wars Begins,” Benning recalls, “and put that on YouTube, that seemed to touch a chord with people. I think people had become disillusioned with the Star Wars franchise as being spread too thin.”

Benning’s self-described “filmumentaries” are addictive. Once you start watching you can’t turn them off — they overload your senses with trivia and behind the scenes information.

“Jamie Benning’s ‘Star Wars’ documentaries are like DVD extras squared or even cubed,” says Francine Stock, presenter of BBC 4′s The Film Programme, and author of the book In Glorious Technicolor. “They’re amateur in the true sense of being made by someone who really loves his subject.”

But Benning’s films are professional in terms of the craft. Images may be grainy, but the editing reveals meticulous skill and a geek’s dedication to assembling every bit of information in the most enlightening way. Scott Weinberg, film critic for Fearnet, Twitch, and Movies.com, says the fan docs remind people why they fell in love with Lucas’ films in the first place and provide a total geek fix. “Oh heck yeah. It’s impressive,” Weinberg exudes, “and it’s just a testament to fandom, to ‘this is the way we would like our supplement material.’ I think it speaks to a lack of satisfaction with the DVD industry.”

Benning repurposes copyrighted material, but Weinberg doesn’t see a problem with that. It’s no different than someone making a mix tape and sharing it with friends. “This is a love letter,” he insists, “It’s not someone repurposing a film to make a quick dollar. That’s not what it’s about. I think it speaks to a passion and a skill that he’s willing to do it for the love of it. You could call it a movie fan remix. A commentary remix — video, audio, textual commentary.”

Benning spends close to a year on each documentary. He makes no money on any of the films, because copyright issues prevent him from distributing the films theatrically or on DVD. But Francine Stock says making these films isn’t a hobby for Benning, it’s a calling. “They are more of a compulsion,” she says. “And they stand or fall on their energy and style.”

Weinberg thinks the DVD industry should be hiring Benning to create bonus features that fans would genuinely embrace. Fans have already shown their love for Benning’s films by sending the filmmaker more than 10,000 appreciative e-mails. In addition, his trilogy got more than 3 million views on YouTube. But just recently, the site requested he remove the films. Benning has now uploaded them to Vimeo. The new site reports that Star Wars Begins has already received hits from such diverse locations as occupied Palestine and Vatican City.

Fan films like Benning’s place studios in a quandary. Legally, they feel an obligation to defend their copyright, but from a promotions perspective, they see how fan films generate and maintain interest in their products in ways that no amount of money can buy. Benning’s latest fan doc is called Raiding the Lost Ark. It focuses on the first Lucas-produced, Steven Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones film.

“The new Raider documentary is the same blend of admiration, affection and a degree of appraisal,” says Stock, “But it is more sophisticated in its use of material.” This time around, Benning has created original elements like interviews with actors and technicians who worked on the film, as well as animated reconstructions of scenes that were never shot. Raiding the Lost Ark debuted February 6 on Vimeo and sounds like it will serve up another slice of geek heaven. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The director’s frequent collaborations with Denzel Washington are guilty-pleasure entertainments — particularly the dark exploitation-lite of 2004′s Man on Fire — but they’re mostly built on a familiar template. Washington’s always playing a cool-under-pressure character who’s asked to go above and beyond with life and death on the line, and the camera’s always following the action with grainy photography and claustrophobically jittery close-ups. It’s not a difficult manual to decipher — and with Safe House, Swedish director Daniel Espinosa follows the Scott-Washington playbook with a tedious fidelity.

As in Man on Fire, Washington plays a former CIA operative who’s long since left the agency. But instead of the bitter drunk of that film, Safe House’s Tobin Frost is a man still in top form, both physically and in his ability to psychologically manipulate those around him. Espinosa puts his skills on display in a lengthy opening action sequence in which he is pursued around Cape Town, South Africa, by a team of mercenaries.

Frost, who’s been making his living off the grid as a spy-for-hire since going AWOL from the CIA, has just scored a trove of documents detailing intelligence secrets and government scandals from around the world when the chase begins; the director choreographs the sequence to neatly introduce Frost’s skills, then caps it by quite literally introducing the character: He ducks into the American consulate, announcing that “My name is Tobin Frost.”

The CIA pulls him out of the consulate, taking him for questioning to a safe house watched over by Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a young field agent paying his dues in this dull assignment and hoping for bigger and better things. The opportunity to prove his mettle arrives with the extraction team and their fugitive, who has been brought here for some “enhanced interrogation.”

He’s so cool under pressure (Frosty, get it?) that he lectures the team on the insufficient thread count of the towels they’re about to use to waterboard him. Weston, acting as audience proxy, is appropriately horrified at the torture he’s witnessing, but it’s cut short when the safe house turns out to be not so safe. He and Frost escape and head out on the lam together.

Espinosa is perfectly capable, and the action packs plenty of excitement, even if the direction lacks the visual innovation that might provide unexpected jolts. Washington and Reynolds are excellent together, in much the same vein as Washington and Ethan Hawke in Training Day or Washington and Chris Pine in Unstoppable (the latter another Scott-Washington picture). Sensing the pattern?

He’s done the wise mentor to the hot-headed but ambitious youth thing before, but Washington’s magnetic intensity and unassailably cool air have always set him apart from most other action stars, and he’s as impossible to dislike here as ever. Reynolds, meanwhile, makes this one of those periodic performances that reminds us he’s capable of being an excellent actor; if only he’d quit making such awful role choices.

But their performances can’t save Safe House from its boilerplate-thriller bones. There’s plenty of inexplicably poor decision-making on the part of the characters just to move the plot forward. And the worst is writer David Guggenheim’s insistence on a cheap bait-and-switch so blatantly obvious that the second half of the film becomes a tedious wait for a plot twist everyone will have seen coming half an hour out.

In telegraphing every move, and by painting so rigorously by the numbers, the film takes no risks at all. Which I suppose makes Safe House true to its title — but safety doesn’t exactly put the thrills in a thriller. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Not much is known about Leopold Socha, a sewage worker and petty thief who protected a small group of Jews hidden in the pipes beneath the then-Polish city of Lvov, while aboveground the occupying Nazis methodically gutted the Jewish ghetto.

In Darkness, a visceral new addition to the burgeoning subgenre of Holocaust dramas from Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland, frames Socha as a minor Oskar Schindler, a war profiteer for whom virtue came to be its own reward.

Craftily played by Robert Wieckiewicz, whose snapping eyes and cratered features seem made to suggest multiple motives, Socha keeps the bedraggled band of Jews fed and watered — for a handsome fee — while he ducks and feints through a forest of perils that include German retribution, the festering resentment of fellow Poles and Ukrainians — whose casual anti-Semitism needs little encouragement from the Third Reich — and the wavering trust of the refugees themselves.

Holland and her gifted cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska extract a hideous beauty from the rat-infested, underground hell that is the Jews’ home for 14 months; In Darkness is a horror movie of sorts, which may seem vulgar or sacrilegious to those who believe the Holocaust should be off-limits to all but the most reverent documentary representation.

Yet it’s hard to imagine a genre more suitable to its terrible subject. Like Andresz Wajda (Kanal) and Roman Polanski (The Pianist), Holland — whose other World War II movies are Angry Harvest and the Oscar-nominated Europa, Europa — uses horror, action and suspense to uncover inconvenient truths. Here, courage and heroism are defined as much by ruthless cunning, dumb luck and the ability to screen out others’ pain as by any heroic derring-do.

Suffering, far from ennobling its victims, can bring out the worst in many, while in a few rare cases it brings out hitherto undiscovered strengths. As the film tells it, Socha, like Schindler, is one such compromised hero, in whom fear, greed and compassion duke it out until one overcomes the others.

Holland is properly unsparing about the casual sadism of the German military, but she resolutely sidesteps the sentimental oppressor-victim division that distorts so much pop-Holocaust narrative today. The Jews below ground include some valiant souls, but their numbers also include a couple of adulterers, one con man, and two cowards bent on saving their own skins at the expense of their fellows’. That, as illustrious survivors like Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim have repeatedly testified, is simple reality.

Yet, perhaps because she has worked in and around Hollywood, Holland slathers on the melodrama. David F. Shamoon’s nervously expository screenplay (“That’s just politics — the Jews are just like us”) is the movie’s weakest link. And though it’s true that the lives of fugitives can be read as nothing but event, a daily obstacle race against the unspeakable, life below the streets of Lvov turns into an incessant soap opera of illicit sex, romance and pest control, topped off by the birth of an illegitimate child in a scene that ought to have been snipped along with the umbilical cord.

The elephant in the room of any discussion of Poland and the Jews is that country’s less-than-glorious record of betrayal and collaboration with the Nazis. Holland, who is half-Jewish and whose mother was active in the Polish Resistance, doesn’t shrink from that legacy. But in telling the story of one man who risked a great deal to save a small number of his fellow Poles who happened to be Jewish, she may be holding out the possibility of conciliation, if not of closure. No wonder In Darkness was chosen as Poland’s Academy Awards entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Still, Holland is far from dewy-eyed about the persistence of the human capacity for evil, even after Auschwitz. After Socha’s death in circumstances that suggest he was a man with a powerful savior gene, we’re told in a coda that he became one of 6,000 Poles honored as Righteous Gentiles by the State of Israel. At his funeral, another Pole insisted that Socha’s death was “God’s punishment for saving Jews.” To which a final coda adds, “As if we needed God to punish each other.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Based on a scenario by longtime Tarr collaborator Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Turin Horse begins by recounting an anecdote to explain its title: While walking in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche saw a cab driver thrashing his horse, and threw himself between the animal and the whip. The philosopher then collapsed and spent the rest of his life in quiet dementia, mostly in the care of his mother and sister.

What follows might be the story of the Turin cabman, his daughter — or maybe granddaughter — and the recalcitrant horse. But Tarr offers no confirmation that it is. The austere black-and-white images neither attempt to suggest Italy nor give a strong indication of the actual location, Hungary. The action, or lack of it, occurs in a rustic existential wasteland.

Aside from a strong and increasing wind, The Turin Horse could be set in the same empty spot as Waiting for Godot. Like Beckett’s play, Tarr’s film is about the daily lives of two isolated people, occasionally interrupted by visitors. One difference is that, where Beckett’s characters are locked in their routines, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi) and his unnamed heir (Erika Bok) are being blown out of theirs. The duo’s harsh world is getting harsher.

It’s not just the wind, underlined by Mihaly Vig’s minimalist score. The horse is acting strange, and the well is going dry. At times, it even seems that the sun has gone out. As in Tarr’s more elaborately plotted 2000 masterpiece, Werckmeister Harmonies, a great disaster looms off-screen.

The two peasants’ visitors bring alarming messages, though they’re vague. An acquaintance arrives to buy some liquor, and warns that greedy humanity is doomed. Later, some gypsies pass though, and the man drives them off, although perhaps too late. They give the granddaughter a book that Tarr has described as a Nietzschean “anti-Bible.”

The bleakness is unrelenting — yet that’s probably not why The Turin Horse has prompted so many audience walkouts. The film is structured as the events of six days, and each chapter promises to repeat the same obsessive depiction of simple acts: fetching water, chopping wood, eating potatoes and helping Ohlsdorfer, who has a lame arm, get dressed and undressed. The movie oppresses less through gloom than with repetition.

And yet there’s enormous variation within the tight confines of this parable, in large part because of the compositions and cinematography. Tarr and his veteran cameraman, Fred Kelemen, employ long hand-held camera takes. (There are only about 30, averaging roughly eight minutes each.) The film was shot in and around a farmhouse, built for the production, that is essentially one large room and an attached stable. The way the characters (including the horse) move through this space creates a sense of intimacy and completeness.

These qualities are what make the film as compelling as it is forbidding. The Turin Horse is an absolute vision, masterly and enveloping in a way that less personal, more conventional movies are not. The film doesn’t seduce; it commands.

Tarr is only 56, and probably will have plenty of years in which to reconsider his decision to stop directing films. But if this proves to be his last movie, it’s an apt ending. The Turin Horse leaves neither its characters nor its maker with an apparent escape route. (Recommended) [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Clooney didn’t start out as famous as he is now. He did quite a bit of episodic television — including roles on both The Facts Of Life and a comedy that was, believe it or not, called E/R before, at 33, he was cast as Dr. Doug Ross on the drama ER. His television stardom took him first to film roles in straightforward entertainment like Batman And Robin, One Fine Day (a romantic comedy with Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Peacemaker (an action film with Nicole Kidman), and then to three films in the space of a couple of years whose screenplays were nominated for Oscars: Out Of Sight, Three Kings, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? He was later nominated for both directing and co-writing 2005′s Good Night, And Good Luck, and for his performances in Syriana (for which he won in the supporting category), Michael Clayton, and Up In The Air.

Clooney says that taking the role he did in The Descendants — one a bit more rumpled and at loose ends than audiences typically see from him — came down to the screenplay and the fact that director Alexander Payne, known for films like Election and Sideways, “really hadn’t made a bad film, and I wanted to work with him.” In places, including a scene where Clooney’s character dashes in distress from his home and runs down the street in flip-flops, there’s a chance of looking silly — of “clowning it too much,” as Siegel puts it. Again, Clooney says, it’s about who you’re working with. “It would be hard if you didn’t trust the director,” he says. “There’s a very big difference between doing that for Alexander Payne and doing it for someone that you don’t trust. Because the product that you’re selling out there is you.”

And what Clooney is selling is changing somewhat. Asked about comments he’s made that he’s moving away from certain kinds of roles, he starts with a gentle poke at his superhero past: “I’m not going to do any more films in rubber suits, I’ve decided.” But he isn’t joking: “Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart,” he says. “There’s a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can’t do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier. You have to constantly be looking forward.” That means better scripts, he says, and also directing and writing — “something you can do well into your old age.”

What George Clooney also deals with and will deal with for many years is fame. Asked what his level of recognizability feels like, he points out how constant the attention to his every move has gotten to be. “I’ll ride my motorcycle into the Swiss Alps to the top of a mountain to a tiny little bistro that we accidentally find, and by the time I’ve had coffee and a croissant, there’s 40 people outside because of cell cameras.” For him, the presence of cameras in the hands of every observer doesn’t just mean too much attention and too much recording; it means the loss of the ability to experience things directly.

“I’ve walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people,” he says, “and you’ll reach out to shake their hand and they’ve got a camera in their hand. And they don’t even get their hand out, because they’re recording the whole time. And you can tell people that you recorded Brad Pitt, but it would be very hard for you to say you actually met him, because you were watching it all through your phone. I think that’s too bad, because I think people are experiencing less and recording more.” And it’s a problem everywhere: “The trick is to get them not to do it when you go to the bathroom.”

Clooney may be very famous, but he’s clearly not been without his setbacks — including Batman & Robin — which, Siegel notes, keeps coming up. “Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.” He explains that it was a new-ish thing to be offered a role as large as Batman at that point in his career. He says he learned that as an actor, he would be held responsible not only for his own acting, but also for the entire film and how good it was — and that’s what led him to those films with the Oscar-nominated scripts.

And, undoubtedly, helped lead him to start writing Oscar-nominated scripts himself. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]