Shohreh Aghdashloo may have the sexiest movie voice since Lauren Bacall and Elizabeth Ashley: deep, insinuating, with what she refers to as a Persian accent that’s heavy on the purr.

But as she sits down for tea at New York’s Regency Hotel, she has serious matters on her mind: “The Stoning of Soraya M,” for which she recently won a Satellite Award. The Iranian-born actress, 57, who fled her native land in 1979, is in New York to talk up the film for year-end awards consideration. (More…)

When actress Bryce Dallas Howard casually mentions both her father and her son in a phone interview, it takes a minute to make the leap to – Ron Howard is a grandfather? Opie is .. Gramps?

But that’s just part of the reality for Howard, 28, who stars in “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” which opens today (12.30.09) in limited release. The film, which also stars Chris Evans, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret, is the feature directing debut of actress Jodie Markell – and has a script that’s an unproduced screenplay by the late Tennessee Williams. (More…)

The timing couldn’t have been eerier, Colin Firth recalls.

It was Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, and Firth was filming a scene for Tom Ford’s film, “A Single Man,” in which his character, a gay college professor in 1962, has a phone conversation about his late lover’s death in a car accident. The lover’s family, he is told, will not allow him at the funeral because they refuse to acknowledge that the dead man was, in fact, gay.

“And that was the day that Proposition 8 passed in California,” Firth says, sitting in a lobby bar of Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel. “And I thought, ‘Maybe we are still in 1962.’” (More…)

Writer Walter Kirn tells a story about the way weapons of mass communication such as the Blackberry have made an impact on intimacy issues:

He’s lying in bed with his girlfriend, post-whatever, and she takes out her Blackberry and starts checking her messages. Not to be left out, Kirn takes out his Blackberry and peruses his own incoming email. And then he turns to her triumphantly and says, rather than feeling rejected by her devotion to her device, he feels triumphant.

“My messages are better than yours,” he says. “George Clooney just agreed to star in the movie of my book.” (More…)

He’s got a pair of IFP Spirit Award nominations under his belt – and is guaranteed to be a player in the coming awards season.

But screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher knows that not everyone is enamored of “Precious,” the film whose screenplay he adapted from the novel “Push” by Sapphire. Even before it opened, he was steadying himself for criticisms of a film that was also winning some of the most glowing reviews of the year. (More…)