Matthew

Matthew P. Manoukian , a captain in the U.S. Marines, came from a family committed to public service and the law. Both his parents are judges - his father, Socrates Peter Manoukian, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, and his mother, Patricia Bamattre-Manoukian, a state appellate court justice. His uncle, William Bamattre, was the fire chief of Los Angeles for 11 years. Manoukian grew up in Los Altos Hills in Northern California with a keen sense of history and how America has provided a safe harbor for refugees.

Actor Matthew Modine and his wife, Cari, have bought a home on a walkstreet in Venice for $2.45 million. Built in 2003 and designed for entertaining, the contemporary house features an open floor plan, heated polished concrete floors and sliding glass doors that open to a courtyard garden with a fireplace. Including the master suite, which takes up the entire second floor, there are two bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms and about 2,000 square feet of living space. A bridge from the main house leads to the second bedroom above the three-car garage.

"The Last Fall" is a modest, well-performed drama that asks, "What happens when a professional football player can no longer play football?" If, like the film's Kyle Bishop (a solid Lance Gross), he's a young, less-sought-after athlete short on savings, direction or career options, the situation can prove particularly crushing. But as they say, you can go home again, which is what Kyle, an undrafted free agent, does after being cut from his most recent team. Kyle's return to L.A., however, is a mixed bag: His divorced mother (Vanessa Bell Calloway)

Still a relatively new presence in the Los Angeles art scene, Matthew Marks Gallery is already expanding the footprint of its West Hollywood space. The gallery said it is opening a new building -- and a space for visitor parking -- just a few steps away from the one it opened in January.  The gallery's newest building, located at 7818 Santa Monica Blvd., is just around the corner from the one at 1062 N. Orange Grove Ave. (The buildings aren't physically connected.) It said the new space is expected to open Nov. 1 for the gallery's exhibition devoted to Jasper Johns.

Fifteen years after John Denver's death in a plane crash, ATO Records announced Wednesday that it was preparing a tribute album to the late singer-songwriter best known for gentle folk-pop hits such as " Rocky Mountain High " and " Take Me Home, Country Roads . " "The Music Is You: A Tribute to John Denver," due out in February, will include contributions by a bevy of respectful rootsy-indie types, including Lucinda Williams, Brandi Carlile,...

Susan Carpenter has shared her enthusiasm for YA and children's books with Times readers here and in her column Not Just For Kids. She is moving on; this will be her last Jacket Copy post. It starts with a young Anakin Skywalker speeding toward readers in 3-D and ends with an older Anakin as a fallen Jedi, cloaked in black, light saber blazing with a built-in LED. It's all part of the pop-off-the-page action in “Star Wars: A Galactic Pop-Up Adventure,” Orchard Books/Scholastic written and designed by paper engineer Matthew Reinhart.

"Fat Kid Rules the World," an adaptation of K.L. Going's young adult novel and the directorial debut of actor Matthew Lillard, is endearingly uneven. Just as the title promises, the story revolves around Troy (Jacob Wysocki), an overweight teenager who feels like an outcast due to his size but finds acceptance, both with himself and with others, when he starts drumming in a punk rock band. Still best known for his roles in "Scream" and the live-action "Scooby-Doo" movies despite his having moved on to the occasional mature part like his turn in "The Descendants," Lillard infuses the film with a rowdy energy, but it often feels unmanned, like no one is quite in charge.

Cogent, convincing, determinedly non-ideological, "Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare" tells us that everything we think we know about that incendiary topic might be wrong. And it offers us a way out of the morass. And a morass it certainly is. We spend huge amounts of money on healthcare - a staggering $2.7 trillion in 2011 with no reductions in sight - and do not have as much to show for it as we should. We spend $8,000 per capita on healthcare while the rest of the developed world spends $3,000, but our population is not nearly as healthy.

Director Lee Daniels has a habit of falling madly in love with characters nobody else wants, out of an underclass littered with sociopaths, psychopaths and their victims. He has done it again in the sweat-soaked noir of "The Paperboy. " It's the Florida Everglades of the 1960s, and there is nothing friendly about this place, including the backcountry alligator skinner on death row, the chippy who's fallen for him, or the journalists intent on saving him. An exceptional cast led by Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron and John Cusack gives these tawdry miscreants a scuzzy, sexy, sad reality that is as unerring as it is unnerving.

Matthew Stafford's playing status is up in the air for the Detroit Lions' game Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings. That's all we know about the Lions' starting quarterback  following Coach Jim Schwartz's meeting with the press Monday -- which is basically what we already knew before Schwartz's comments. “I don't have any comment on how anything went with him,” Schwartz said of Stafford, who was scheduled to have an MRI after straining a muscle in his right leg during the Lions' 44-41 loss to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday.