Valentina Cervi

"THE FIRST time I was here I was 16 years old," says Italian actress Valentina Cervi, back now in Los Angeles to promote the Spike Lee war movie, "Miracle at St. Anna." "It was very late at night. I was living on the hill. I walked out of the house and I saw these millions of lights that were put in a, how do you say, it seemed like an architect's thing, very geometrical, very perfect."

"THE FIRST time I was here I was 16 years old," says Italian actress Valentina Cervi, back now in Los Angeles to promote the Spike Lee war movie, "Miracle at St. Anna." "It was very late at night. I was living on the hill. I walked out of the house and I saw these millions of lights that were put in a, how do you say, it seemed like an architect's thing, very geometrical, very perfect."

No Renaissance maiden ever got sprung from a convent faster than Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as Western civilization's first major female painter. The way French filmmaker Agnes Merlet tells it in her overheated "Artemisia," the 17-year-old girl somehow manages to find a mirror big enough in which to pose for a nude self-portrait. Bam!

Agents said he was strange. Others considered him weird. The one thing everyone agreed on was that he was brilliant. Cool and classy, the TNT biopic "James Dean" (8 p.m., 10 p.m. and midnight Sunday) offers a persuasive portrait of the gifted young rebel who died at 24.

An important story indifferently told, Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna" shows what happens when a film's execution does not measure up to its ideas. The notion behind "St. Anna" is to create an epic World War II drama celebrating the largely forgotten exploits of African American infantrymen known as Buffalo Soldiers and to explore the complex dynamics of fighting for freedom in what was essentially a segregated Army.

If there's a formula for the success of “True Blood,” it might lie in the alchemical properties of blood, sex and magic. But for his final turn as show runner, series creator Alan Ball has mentioned that he plans to emphasize religion and politics. Those subjects are hardly new to Bon Temps, but in Sunday's episode, “Authority Always Wins,” we begin to learn the details concerning the central conceit of the season. There is, it seems, a vampire bible, an original testament that describes how Lilith, Adam's “first wife,” was made in the image of God: a vampire.

Mike Figgis is the first to admit the unveiling of his latest movie at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001 was a disaster. "Hotel," his experimental, improvisational movie shot on digital video was scheduled to screen Sept. 11. But the premiere was canceled due to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.