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As a child of the video age, there is a collection of films that have been ingrained in my memory for having watched them over and over again. LA BAMBA, the story of Ritchie Valens, is one of those films. Before I knew that I was watching something special, I responded to this musical biopic’s portrayal of the supporting characters in the life of the central star. No other film that deals with the rise of famous people deals so honestly with how fame affects those in the star’s life that stay anonymous folk.

Before Ritchie Valens rose to fame, he was migrant worker Ritchie Valenzuela (Lou Diamond Phillips, YOUNG GUNS). A young man obsessed with rock ‘n roll, he never goes anywhere without his secondhand guitar. One day his leather jacket-wearing brother Bob (Esai Morales, FAST FOOD NATION) rides into camp on his motorcycle. He’s made enough money to move his hardworking mother Connie (Rosanna DeSoto, STAND AND DELIVER) and his three younger siblings to Los Angeles. He’s so cool he sweeps Ritchie’s crush Rosie (Elizabeth Pena, LONE STAR) off her feet and onto the back of his bike on his way down the road too. In L.A., Ritchie joins a local band where he is relegated to the background, but moves himself to the front and center via his passion. Along the way, he charms the white daughter of a car dealer named Donna (Danielle von Zerneck, LIVING IN OBLIVION), a later inspiration for a song when her dad doesn’t like her hanging with a homie. Ritchie also attracts the attention of smalltime record producer Bob Keene (Joe Pantoliano, THE MATRIX), who creates Ritchie Valens, a teenager who quickly has three hit singles and tours with rock icons like Buddy Holly.

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Mike Leigh is a film director who comes from a theatre background. He usually doesn’t work from a script to start, but improvises each scene with his actors and then writes down what they discover. However, with its period detail and well observed look at its real life characters, TOPSY-TURVY may be Leigh most scripted work for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Working with many of the same actors he always works with, Leigh, with great wit, has crafted a captivating tale about the creation process and its personalities.

Composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner, GREY ZONE) and writer W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent, IRIS) have reach stardom on the international stage, but have hit a slump. Their latest opera PRINCESS IDA is derivative of their other work, and Sullivan, who is suffering from kidney disease, doesn’t have the passion to work on the same old trifle anymore. The cynical and disagreeable Gilbert has written another play with magic potions and Sullivan can’t score it. Then after visiting an exhibit of Japanese culture, Gilbert has a revelation and pens the story for the opera THE MIKADO.

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Before there was Paris Hilton, there was socialite Edie Sedgwick. However, instead of hanging out with the likes of Nicole Richie, Sedgwick gained stardom as the muse of Andy Warhol, and in this movie a Bob Dylan-like “Musician.” Sedgwick was well educated, but naïve, used up and quickly discarded from the culture that made her the premiere “it” girl of her generation.

Sienna Miller (CASANOVA) plays Sedgwick as a beauty who to Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce, MEMENTO) represented the rich party glamour that he equally adored and despised. Along with her tagalong friend Chuck Wein (Jimmy Fallon, FEVER PITCH), she basked in the limelight, appearing as the central figure in Warhol’s art and especially his avant guard films. She quickly became one of the hottest models in the world. This drew the attention of the famous “musician” in the film, played by Hayden Christensen (STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH). The folksy singer with his message-filled tunes was in strict contrast to the pop culture emotional void that surrounded Warhol. Along with her lavish spending and eventual decline into drugs, her life spins out of control.

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Before I heard of this film, I must admit I knew very little about Edith Piaf, one of the most beloved French singers in history. I had heard her work, which is featured many films, but I knew nothing of her dramatic life. Olivier Dahan’s biopic does what all great biopics should do — get inside who the person was and share with us what they did that made them special. As I finished watching this film, I was transformed from a Piaf novice into a Piaf fan.

Edith Piaf, played as an adult by Marion Cotillard (LOVE ME IF YOU DARE), in her 47 years on Earth lived the lives of 10 people. Raised in poverty with her fledging singer mother, she was taken by her father, on leave from WWI, to live with her grandmother, a madam at a brothel. There she fell under the loving care of a prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner, FRANTIC). When Edith falls ill and almost goes blind, Titine takes her to the shrine of Saint Therese to pray. When the war is over, Edith’s father takes her from the only stable home she has known to travel with him in the circus. Later, her father strikes out on his own, but finds that his solo contortionist act is less of a draw then the powerful vocal skills of his young daughter.

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Director Lasse Hallstrom is a filmmaker that I look forward to seeing new work from, because he made two of my favorite films, MY LIFE AS A DOG and WHAT’S EATING GILBERT GRAPE?, and I’m a great admirer of his ONCE AROUND. Though flawed, his best film since GRAPE was THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, which was released back in 1999. He’s been making safe films ever since. Now with the release of THE HOAX, he has something meatier to deal with that delivers.

The film is based on the true story of Clifford Irving (Richard Gere, CHICAGO), a struggling writer who sells a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes to publisher McGraw-Hill. In weaving his deception, Irving enlists his friend Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina, FRIDA) to serve as his researcher. Irving fakes handwritten notes from Hughes that fool experts. Along with Suskind, they listen to congressional testimony to get down the reclusive millionaire’s speech patterns. The more money that begins changing hands, the more scrutiny Irving comes under, which makes his story more and more outlandish. When he says Hughes wants $1 million for the book, he gets it. Soon his painter wife Edith (Marcia Gay Harden, POLLACK) gets wrapped up in the scam.

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Some consider Daniel Johnston a genius. Director/writer Jeff Feuerzeig has created a film about the troubled musician and painter that believes so too. Johnston was a typical artistic teen, who made films, drew in notebooks and wrote songs. When he reached college, he started developing the first signs of manic depression, which would define the rest of his life.

Johnston believed at an early age that he was destined to become famous. In college, he became obsessed with a pretty girl named Laurie Allen. However, she was already dating a mortician student, who she would later marry. Two decades later, Johnston still writes songs about her today. Once his parents believed graduating from college was an impossible task for him, Johnston bounced from relative to relative, where he continued to write music. One day, Johnston ran away and joined the carnival. A bizarre incident would leave him stranded in Austin, where he quickly inserted himself into the local music scene. When MTV came to town, he inserted himself on the air too. He was on the rise, but his mental illness just knocked him down time and time again.

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“No, I’m Spartacus!” I’ve been saying that for a week now after seeing this sword and sandal classic. It’s only one of the iconic moments in this film about Roman slavery. Directed by Stanley Kubrick in a very uncharacteristic “Hollywood” style, this lavish production paved the way for modern epics like BRAVEHEART and GLADIATOR.

Spartacus (Kirk Douglas, THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS) has been a slave all his life, working rock quarries. Then he is purchased by shyster slave trader Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov, LOGAN’S RUN), who plans to train him to be a gladiator. After being assigned a slave girl named Varinia (Jean Simmons, ELMER GANTRY), Spartacus screams that he isn’t an animal as this owners watch him fumble with the first woman he’s ever been close to. Spartacus’ tenderness toward Varinia makes her fall in love with him. As the gladiators train, Roman senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier, MARATHON MAN) comes with his protégé Marcus Glabrus (John Dall, ROPE) and two women to watch two pairs of gladiators fight to the death. Spartacus is chosen, and following a series of events, ends in Spartacus leading a slave revolt. Meanwhile, senior senator Sempronius Gracchus (Charles Laughton, MUTINY OF THE BOUNTY) tries to hold the senate together in the face of Crassus’ maneuvers to use the uprising to gain more power. Spartacus’ continued victories lead Crassus’ own slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis, SOME LIKE IT HOT) to flee his master and join the rebellion.

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If Academy members don’t forget this summer release come voting time, star Don Cheadle should have himself his second Oscar nomination. As the original shock jock Petey Greene, he is the electric force that brings this biopic alive and helps raise it above the typical “true life story.” He is helped along by great supporting work from DIRTY PRETTY THINGS’ Chiwetel Ejiofor and HUSTLE & FLOW’s Taraji P. Henson.

Greene is working as a prison DJ when he meets rising radio exec Dewey Hughes (Ejiofor), who is begrudgingly visiting his brother Milo (Mike Epps, SOMETHING NEW). Upon his release from prison, Greene, with his afroed girlfriend Vernell Watson (Henson) in tow, comes to see Dewey, who is very embarrassed when his boss E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen, APOCALYPSE NOW) sees the flamboyant miscreant. But Petey’s protest outside the studio starts to wear Dewey down and he eventually gives Greene a chance to liven up their morning show. At first it doesn’t seem to work out, but soon Petey becomes a sensation and Dewey pushes him into stand-up then TV even if Petey doesn’t want it.

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Will Smith gives the best performance of his career in a drama that reminds us that there’s always someone who has it rougher than we do. But in the end, smarts and hard work can accomplish anything. As Smith said while promoting the film, the true-life story of Chris Gardner is what the American Dream is built on.

Smith plays Gardner, a salesman who used his family’s life savings to buy bone density scanners. However, Gardner’s dreams of making it big in the bone density scanner business don’t pan out as he expected. His wife Linda (Thandie Newton, CRASH), who has to work long hours just to put food on the table, looks at Chris’ latest business venture as just another one of his pie in the sky schemes. As the trailer tells us, she leaves him with their young son Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, TV’s ALL OF US) right as he’s trying to become a stockbroker intern. The film goes on to chronicle the many hardships that Gardner must endure as he tries to raise his son alone while competing for a single shot at getting hired as a stockbroker.

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Albert and David Maysles, who directed the poignant Rolling Stones documentary GIMME SHELTER, were asked to make a documentary about the two Bouvier sisters, Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwell. While in the process of experimenting with the idea, they discovered the Bouvier’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and cousin Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, who were living in a dilapidated mansion in East Hampton, New York. Vastly more interesting the socialite Bouviers, the Maysles brothers found two fascinating eccentrics that live life uniquely.

Along with directors Ellen Hoyde and Muffie Meyer, the Maysles brothers virtually moved into the crumbling mansion, which has holes in the walls, no running water and raccoons living throughout house. In the opening of the film, we see newspaper reports of the Beales fighting with the local government and neighbors over health code violations and the unkempt look of their property, which sits in the middle of other beautiful estates. The filmmakers just watch as the two women tell the tales about their lives and feelings — often bickering about every detail. It’s amazing to see photos of them when they were younger and lived life closer to the norm.

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