By Sean Axmaker

"Chris Cooper made his film debut in John Sayles's Matewan," writes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview with the actor. "In the 20 years since, his career has been defined by a remarkable wealth and variety of interesting characters and intense performances in films as diverse as Lone Star, American Beauty, Seabiscuit and Capote. He won an Oscar for Adaptation and his unsettling incarnation of CIA traitor Robert Hanssen in Breach was mesmerizing. He takes another rare leading role in Ira Sachs' Married Life, an unusual genre mix that combines period style and a story of adultery and one man's plot to murder his wife with a comedy of manners approach and a serious conversation about love and desire and marriage and relationships. I had the opportunity to talk to Mr Cooper about Married Life, married life, and a career playing such a diverse and memorable set of characters."

In the Parallax View, Sean talks with Sachs as well.

By Vadim Rizov

Exactly a year ago now, New York's IFC Center was running a series called The New Talkies: Generation DIY and, writing in the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth suggested a possible taxonomic distinction: "If Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs are movies about the kinds of people who would watch movies like Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs, [Kentucker Audley's] Team Picture, [Frank V Ross's] Quietly On By and, particularly, Hohokam, are about the kinds of people who consume the kind of culture that Bujalski and Swanberg's films feel like a reaction against.... Audley and Ross are at least as interested as their peers in the social dynamics of leisure, but in Hohokam and Team Picture, work life is as carefully drawn as recreation.... Team Picture is possibly the lowest-budgeted film on the New Talkies schedule, but at times Audley's long shots approach the painterly beauty of pastoral landscapes."

Now Team Picture is the latest exquisite release from Benten Films and Vadim Rizov talks with Audley about the feature and the two shorts that accompany it on the DVD.

By Sean Axmaker

"When Juno exploded into the pop culture in 2007, it catapulted a young actress named Olivia Thirlby from the indie world's best kept secret into an overnight success," notes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview. "Her performances in the ensemble drama Snow Angels and the coming-of-age dramedy The Wackness are enlivened by the same spunk and warm glow that made Juno crackle, but the dimensions are shaded in ways that dramatically differentiate these characters from the happy-go-lucky Leah. What's interesting is that both of these films were shot before Juno had been released. Which means that this young actress landed each role without any name recognition or public track record, but merely by the force of her auditions."

By Michael Guillen

The Counterfeiters, winner of the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category, is based on true events: the Nazis planned to destabilize the American and British economies by flooding the markets with fake dollars and pounds. And they enlisted prisoners in concentration camps to counterfeit the bills. This presents a dark dilemma to the prisoners: cooperate and survive - or sabotage the project and possibly pay with their lives.

"I don't think there is the right way to behave in a situation like that," director Stefan Ruzowitzky tells Michael Guillen. "This is something I learned from doing research and reading a lot of autobiographies. They all agree that it was so difficult in the camps to do the right thing and, if you wanted to do the right thing, often it led to catastrophe and disaster because the whole system was so perverted."

The Counterfeiters is now out on DVD.