Places & Travel

She stars in the new film Wonderland. Set in 1980s Hollywood, it's about a mysterious mass murder that took place on Wonderland Avenue. Porn star John Holmes was involved somehow, but the crime was never solved. Kudrow plays Holmes' wife in the film. Kudrow is best known for her role on the popular NBC sitcom Friends, now in its 10th season. She also appeared in the films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Analyze This.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews The Station Agent, an independent film written and directed by Tom McCarthy.

Steinfels is a former senior religion correspondent for The New York Times. He now writes the Beliefs column for the paper. Steinfels is the author of the new book, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

A talk with foreign correspondent Elizabeth Rubin. Rubin writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. She has reported from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq.

Milhollin is director the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a non-profit research group in Washington, D.C. that has been tracking the spread of weapons of mass destruction since 1986. He will talk about who has nuclear weapons, who is developing them, who has intelligence about them and who poses the biggest threat. Milhollin is also professor Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin Law School. His op-ed pieces about nuclear weapons have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Mystic River, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood, based on the book by Dennis Lehane.

She stars in the new film Casa de Los Babys, by director John Sayles. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her starring role in the film Secretary. Her other films include Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

His new semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude, tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. His other books include Girl in Landscape and Amnesia Moon.

His films include Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People and Wonderland. His new film, In This World, follows the arduous 4,000-mile journey of two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to Britain. The film was shot in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. The two actors were "discovered" in Peshawar, Pakistan. Fifteen-year-old actor Jamal Udin Torabi has since applied for asylum in Britain. The interview continues into the second half of the show.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle.

Filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new feature is Party Monster, starring Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin. It's about a murder that took place in the drug-saturated New York City club scene in the early 1990s. Michael Alig, a party promoter, was convicted of killing a young drug dealer known as Angel. This is Culkin's first film in nine years. He plays Michael Alig. Green plays author/celebutante James St. James. Barbato and Bailey also collaborated on a 1999 documentary of the same name and on the same topic.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan considers Lucky Girls (Ecco), the debut short story collection by Nell Freudenberger.

Jack Devine was stationed in Chile during the coup as part of the agency's Chile task force. He is now a crisis management consultant in New York with the firm The Arkin Group.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project. He led the campaign to declassify official documents of the secret history of the United States government support for the Pinochet dictatorship. That information has now been collected in the new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The book chronicles 20 years of policy in Chile from 1970 to 1990.

Maureen Corrigan reviews Breaking Her Fall by Stephen Goodwin.

In the 1990s he covered Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo for Reuters. Three of his colleagues were killed by a mob in Somolia during a rebellion against the presence of U.S. forces, and he witnessed the atrocities in Rwanda. Hartley grew up in Africa, the son of a British colonial officer. After the death of his father, Hartley found in a chest his father had given him the diaries of his father's best friend who had died mysteriously 50 years earlier. Hartley set out to find out what happened.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Jacqueline Winspear's debut novel, Maisie Dobbs.

His new feature film, The Magdalene Sisters, is based on the real-life laundries run by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order in Ireland near the end of the 19th century. Girls considered wayward or unruly were sent there as punishment for their sins and forced to do labor under sweat-shop conditions. The last of the laundries was shut down in 1996. Mullan's film follows the lives of four young women and takes place from 1964 to 1969. Before writing and directing, Mullan was best known for his acting and starred in The Big Man, Riff-Raff, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

Her new film is Whale Rider, a re-telling of Maori legend in which a young girl challenges 1,000 years of tradition to fulfill her destiny — and win her grandfather's respect. The Maoris are the native people of New Zealand. Whale Rider won the Audience awards at the Sundance, Toronto and Rotterdam Film Festivals. Caro's previous film was Memory and Desire.