Almost There: Rachel Weisz in "The Deep Blue Sea”

In honor of Rachel Weisz's 50th birthday this weekend, we’re revisiting The Deep Blue Sea with a bonus entry in the "Almost There" series. Here's Cláudio Alves...

To portray depression compellingly is a great challenge for any actor.  The danger in in authentic internalization is becoming a dull and an uninteresting subject for the camera, an unsolvable cipher. On the other hand, attempts at creating entertainment out of a depressed person is a good way to fall into the perilous pit of superficiality. Mental health issues are thus transformed into walls that block the audience's emotional investment or colorful quirks with no relation to reality. It's a difficult tight rope but some great thespians can walk it. More importantly, some can do it and make it look easy. 

Such is the case of Rachel Weisz who came close to a nomination for Best Actress in 2012 thanks to her virtuoso work in Terence Davies' sad song of love and postwar despondency, The Deep Blue Sea…

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Happy Birthday Herzog

by Jason Adams

Film director Werner Herzog is marking three quarters of a century on this planet today - a planet that he has probably explored the weirdness hidden away at every single obscure corner of. We should cherish him while we have him, people - even if some of his more recent efforts have been iffier than most. Go see every damn one, reviews be damned.

Funnily enough last night I was reading a review of the Twin Peaks finale (no spoilers here, don't worry!) that called that series mastermind David Lynch "American pop culture's answer to Werner Herzog," and I got to thinking about these two directors in relation to each other. Besides Herzog and Lynch easily making my list of Top Five Greatest Living Film-makers I don't usually think about them in relation to each other, but it's not an invalid point.

So here, for Werner's birthday, let's latch him onto the zeitgeist's momentarily hottest art-house auteur, and list three similarities, with one glaring dissimilarity...

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Happy Birthday, Sandra Bullock!

Robert Balkovich here! I'd like to take a moment today to wish a happy solar return to the Queen of Rom Coms, Grand Dame of '90s Action Movies Marketed Toward Women, Empress of Perfect Foils for Melissa McCarthy: the one and only Sandra Bullock. In an effort to encourage everyone to take their own personal journey and reflect on what Sandra Bullock means to them, after the jump I'm going to share some of my favorite moments that I've spent with Sandra.

Join me, won't you?

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Happy Birthday, Isabelle Huppert!

by Daniel Crooke

Known most recently from her starring role as "Visiting European Dignitary Whose Queenliness Clearly Outshines Her Present Yankee Company" from the taut, twisty thriller Angels in Awards Season in America, lauded subversive, all-around transgressor, and actressexual heartthrob Isabelle Huppert celebrates her 64th birthday today by doing what we all hope to be doing at sixty-four years of age: still absolutely slaying the game.

Now that she's wrapped up months of feigning surprise on stage while gleefully clutching golden trinkets she has never not deserved, Madame Huppert is back to work...

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Happy Birthday Grace Jones

Kieran, here wishing the happiest of birthdays to one of our most talented, specific, peculiar and mysterious pop culture icons--the great Grace Jones.

There are countless pop music mainstays today who owe a great debt to the trails blazed by Grace Jones and many have gone to great pains to cite her as a predecessor. Her signature, striking style, her unique music, her fascinating, inimitable look are incredibly influential. Make no mistake--a lot of your favs (and I take nothing away from them by saying this for it's the best artist that borrow from other artists) can be traced back to Grace Jones.

Jones has made forrays into film here and there, though she's arguably most known for her appearances in Boomerang where her character brashly declared...

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