Tom Hanks

Oscar-nominated actor Michael Clarke Duncan, the star of Frank Darabont's prison tale "The Green Mile," has died. He was 54. The Chicago native rose to fame playing a hulking death row inmate with a special psychic gift in the 1999 film, adapted from the novel by Stephen King. The role, which cast him opposite Tom Hanks, earned him Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Standing 6-foot-5 and weighing roughly 315 pounds, Duncan parlayed his considerable size into a career as a Hollywood security guard, working for the likes of Will Smith and the rapper Notorious B.I.G.

'Open the door. Let my people go!" bellows director Ron Howard. As the heavy metal door to Stage 34 at Universal Studios is pried open, the cast and crew of Howard's latest production, "Apollo 13," unleash the kind of applause and unrestrained cheering one would more expect from prisoners sprung free after years of captivity. "Here comes the sun!" "Off with the jackets." "Turn the heat on!" "Yeah! We're going back to movie-making!"

Teen-agers who like to see the underdog come out on top like this movie, some crying and sniffing along with the adults in this poignant role for Tom Hanks. "I thought it was cool to see a guy who supposedly is sub-ordinary become extraordinary," said Peter Goff, 13. "Everybody thought lesser of him, but he became better than them."

- George C. Wolfe is flummoxed. He's describing the gestation of "Lucky Guy," the Nora Ephron play he is directing with Tom Hanks playing an ambitious and cocky New York newspaper reporter. It began, he says, with Ephron asking him: "What's more fun than hanging out with the boys in the bar?" It ended, nine months later, with a phone call from her agent saying she had died. "I didn't even know that Nora was sick until the actual day she died," he says, sitting in a Midtown Manhattan coffee shop on a rainy spring afternoon.

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is a handsomely polished, thoughtfully wrapped Hollywood production about the national tragedy of 9/11 that seems to have forever redefined words like unthinkable, unforgivable, catastrophic. It has also redefined our expectations of filmmakers who try to examine the still aching wound — and perhaps explains why most films about 9/11 haven't resonated with audiences. Mindful of that, director Stephen Daldry has taken great care in looking at it through the eyes of a precocious New York City boy in a film filled with both sentiment and substance.

Director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and New Zealand director Jane Campion's "The Piano," both widely lauded by film critics, led the 51st annual Golden Globe Awards nominations announced Wednesday. Each film is nominated in six categories.

With a debut that coincided neatly with last week's U.S.-Russia space station docking, "Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks, far outdistanced the field and will contribute to what might be record three- and five-day weekend box-office grosses. "Pocahontas" and "Batman Forever" held off futuristic newcomers "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie" and "Judge Dredd" for second and third place.

In the summer of 1964, when Beatlemania was sweeping America, four young musicians from Erie, Pa., called the Wonders had their brief fling with fame, crashing the Top 10 with a hit song called "That Thing You Do!" Or at least that's the way the story goes in Tom Hanks' new film--also titled "That Thing You Do!"--which marks the two-time Oscar winner's debut as a writer-director as well as co-composer of several mock-'60s songs that populate the film.

I miss Tom Hanks. Not the one you can find in theaters everywhere now in "Angels & Demons," a film on its way to something close to blockbuster status in no small part due to Hanks as a Harvard symbologist on the trail of a Vatican killer. And I don't begrudge him "Angels & Demons" either, with a payday rumored from $30 million to $50 million. Whether it's funding some of his other creative dreams or just putting another wing on the house really is beside the point.

It's a long way from Woody. In an upcoming animated series called "Electric City," Tom Hanks plays Cleveland Carr, a former police officer charged with maintaining order in a murky metropolis, where secret police and murder lurk beneath the veneer of a peaceful society. The series, conceived by Hanks and co-produced by his production company Playtone and Indian media company Reliance Entertainment, will debut this summer — not in a theater or on a TV screen, but on the giant Internet portal Yahoo.