Michael Shannon has a knack for playing unsettling characters, the kind of parts that are a tad uncomfortable to watch. After a string of theatrical roles, he introduced himself to audiences as an eerily unhinged soldier in William Friedkin’s paranoid thriller Bug, opposite Ashley Judd. His big break came in 2008’s Revolutionary Road. Sitting at a dining table across from Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, he stole the show. His performance as the mentally disturbed truth-teller John Givens earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Now, Shannon takes on the role of Kim Folley, the eccentric, kinda creepy band manager of an all-girl rock group in Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning. We sat down with Shannon to talk about the burden of playing a real person, his upcoming HBO show Boardwalk Empire, his love of all things music.

It was hard not to feel terribly excited for Greta Gerwig when I found her in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, waiting to be interviewed. Most actors have jumped through the press junket hoop to the point of inconvenience, but besides a tiny junket for the super low-budget comedy Baghead, this is her first. "I'm just excited I get room service," she says, only half-kidding. She's doing the media rounds for the new Noah Baumbach film Greenberg, her first "Hollywood" film. It's impossible to write about (or interview) Gerwig without touching on her movie origins. Since her onscreen debut in Joe Swanberg's LOL, she has collaborated with friends on movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends, becoming the de facto queen of the movement dubbed mumblecore, that brand of DIY filmmaking about twenty-somethings stumbling through a post-collegiate world. But now, in Greenberg, Greta Gerwig is a love interest to a hypercritical, grouchy, man-child, played by Ben Stiller, and she's absolutely terrific. Her life is about to change, and speaking to her, you get the feeling that she knows it.

Celebrating 25 years at The Village Voice this month, literary icon Michael Musto had more than enough material for his most recent book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back. His latest work is a follow-up to his hilarious and scathing offerings Downtown-V285 and Manhattan on the Rocks. Between his columns at The Voice and Ocean Drive, writing for Out Magazine, and the Sundance Channel blog SUNfiltered, his books and his appearances around town (he always arrives on his bicycle), Musto has become something of a celebrity in his own right.

It’s raining when Julianne Moore steps out of her limousine onto the red carpet at the 67th annual Golden Globe Awards. She stops to flirt with the photographers clamoring for her attention. Her publicist holds an umbrella over her blisteringly red hair, which is pulled back tightly to reveal a pair of wrecking ball-size emerald earrings that complement her shoulder-baring gunmetal Balenciaga gown. It’s been a very busy week for the 49-year-old actress, nominated this year for her supporting role in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. Over the past four days, Moore has been brushed and glossed for the AFI Awards, the BAFTA/LA Awards Season Tea Party, the Critics’ Choice Awards and the T Magazine Golden Globe Awards cocktail party. She also appeared on The Jay Leno Show, where she shared stories about her 12-year-old son Caleb’s budding interest in the opposite sex. “You must work at Subway, because you’re giving me a foot-long,” says Moore, excerpting with mock disgust his most pubescent pick-up line. Leno and the crowd erupt with laughter, in a scene straight from an old episode of Kids Say the Darndest Things.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black man who had just returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam, was killed in the town of Oxford, North Carolina. Two white men, Robert and Larry Teel, were charged with the murder. Timothy Tyson, a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, who was 10 years old and living in Oxford at the time, published an account of the event in a 2004 memoir, Blood Done Sign My Name, which is now a sloppy movie of the same title, directed by Jeb Stuart. What we may salvage from the film is the performance of 30-year-old actor Nate Parker, who with his poise and simmering indignation rises above the atmosphere around him, playing Ben Chavis, a teacher in Oxford at the time who became the de-facto leader of the town’s black movement. We may never know what exactly occurred that night, but it is clear that the killing, the trial and the subsequent acquittal of the Teels galvanized the civil rights movement in Oxford.

The mind of Jean-Paul Jeunet is a factory of ideas. His films burst with visual flare, often at an overwhelming pace. In his darkly whimsical fairy tales, from the surreal dystopia of Delicatessen and the disturbing extravaganza of City of Lost Children to the captivating big-heartedness of Amélie, Jeunet has proved himself a true visionary. On a drizzly February afternoon at the Soho Hotel in London, Jeunet could barely contain himself when we mentioned the abundance of rats in the surrounding area. "And not just the ones with whiskers," he snickered. The dark underbelly of life at street level, and often the level below street level, is once again the focus of Jeunet’s lens with his new film Micmacs, about a recovering gunshot victim who is adopted by a motley crew of secondhand arms dealers to seek revenge on the corporation who put a stray bullet in his head many years ago. We spoke to the filmmaker about his representations of Paris, why he turned down Harry Potter and his struggle with bringing Life of Pi to the big screen.

Before Drake became best friends forever with every famous rapper on the planet, k-os was Canada's best-known emcee. For nearly ten years and across four studio albums, the dreadlocked troubadour carried Canadian hip-hop on his shoulders (with some help from Kardinal Ofishall). But to call his musical style merely hip-hop would be doing it an injustice. K-os sings, he plays acoustic guitar and he doesn't rap about bitches and bling. He borrows more from acts like A Tribe Called Quest and Wyclef Jean than from street rappers. In Canada, he runs with bands like Metric and Broken Social Scene. His bold new album Yes! features a song called "I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman" which samples the theme from The OC. On opening track "Zambony" he raps "I am not indie rock/I am West Indies hip-hop." But that's not quite true. K-os' schizophrenic sound defies music journalists' penchant for categorizing, and it's why he's stayed relevant for so long. Here he is talking about why Obama makes it okay for rappers to wear pink shirts, and passing the torch to Drake.

To watch Friday Night Lights is to behold a geyser bursting with acting talent. The series about a Texan town obsessed with its high school football team is a rotating door of previously unknown actors building their cases for lasting careers in Hollywood. After three seasons as the pious Jason Street—the star quarterback for the Dillon Panthers who is paralyzed in pilot episode—Scott Porter showed the kind of restraint and elicited the kind of pathos unfathomable for an actor whose only prior acting experience came in musicals. But since FNL's writers treat their characters with dignity by sending them off properly when their arc is complete, Porter is now out on his own, fighting for roles in big movies and lending his services to little ones. The Good Guy is a little one, a glossy New York fairytale that sees Porter as a slick and ambitious broker who romances Alexis Bledel, and may or may not be the movie's titular character. Here the actor talks about his new film, his hopes to one day don superhero tights, and why Speed Racer didn't quite click.

We've been on the Adam Scott bandwagon for a while now, from his days as a rubber-cocked husband on HBO's Tell Me You Love Me, to his gloriously douchey turn as Will Ferrell's brother in Step Brothers. Now we're pleased to have the Independent Spirit Awards aboard with us, since they plucked his performance in a little-known movie called The Vicious Kind and stuck it in a category with award season titans like Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth. Bravo! In The Vicious Kind, Scott puts on a seething show as a deeply disturbed blue collar dude who's infatuated with his younger brother's girlfriend (Brittany Snow). Yes, Tell Me You Love Me was as depressing as TV gets, but this role is still a departure for an actor who's flaunted serious comedic chops in things like Knocked Up, Eastbound and Down, all over Funny or Die and most recently in Starz' catering comedy Party Down. When Scott rang us up to chat about his movie, we covered a wide range of topics, like his director's non-existent pubic hair, his upcoming bloodbath Piranha 3-D and the plot points of Ice Cube's next movie. The highly edited transcription, after the jump.

With two hit plays in two of London’s hottest theaters, Alexi Kaye Campbell is a new golden voice in British theater. He has a tremendous gift for creating charmingly flawed, accessible characters written with heart, humor and boundless empathy. His first play, The Pride, was on at The Royal Court Theater Upstairs in November 2008, and won him the Critic’s Circle Prize for Most Promising Playwright, and the John Whiting award for Best New Play. Soon after, New York City came calling, and The Pride has now opened at the MCC Theatre where it runs until March. Directed by Tony Award winner Joe Mantello, and starring the boyish, British charmers Ben Wishaw, Hugh Dancy, The Pride features a torrid, trans-generational love triangle. We had the chance to speak to Alexi from his home in London, where he lives with partner Dominic Cooke and cat Wilbur.