Let's say you want to take an early-summer break from the weekly onslaught of action pictures and want to trade up in quality to an art-house film. Which actors would attract you? Surely Michael Fassbender, a smoldering sensation in Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds and Jane Eyre and a true MENSA heartthrob. Perhaps James McAvoy, the winsome Scot who played the nave doctor to Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and Keira Knightley's ...

As police investigate the motive behind the latest suicide bombing in Indonesia, the country is once again facing the specter of another wave of attacks by extremists. While recent bombings have targeted individuals rather than large groups, the trend has some analysts worried that the current threat could be harder to stamp out. "This is part of a pattern of do-it-yourself jihad," explains Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert at the International Crisis Group. "It falls under the ...

Like a dried-apple doll's, Carmela's 99-year-old wrinkled smile was sweet but a little spooky. She had come to the hospital from home, with two daughters in their 70s, her little old medical doctor of 30 years, Dr. Jones , most of her teeth and one badly broken hip. They're not too impressed with high-functioning centegenarians in my hospital anymore; we get quite a few these days. But Carmela stood out. She was a little deaf and a ...

You wanted to believe her. She made you believe. She was good like that. Marion Jones, TIME cover girl, winner of five medals — three gold — at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and now an admitted steroid user, sat in a sweltering press tent at the 2004 U.S. Olympic Track and Field trials in Sacramento, and put on an Oscar-worthy show. All week during those trials, she had refused to acknowledge the press, and thus her fans, that ...

Danny Scott of Lutcher, Louisiana, said he's thrilled about the new vehicle he purchased through the Cash for Clunkers program, but watch how you talk about his baby, the 1991 Ford F-150 he had to give up. "I told them [the salespeople] don't call it a clunker," Scott said of the maroon and red truck he had for almost 20 years. Yes, it had 422,000 miles on it, but it still ran like a champ, Scott said. "When it was ...

"This is ground control to Major Tom," sang David Bowie about a fictional astronaut lost in orbit in 1969. Now, 40 years later Bowie's son Duncan Jones has released his own space oddity. Jones' debut feature "Moon" is a thoughtful, stylish sci-fi thriller set in the near future amid the monochromatic wastelands of Earth's closest satellite. It is a contemplative character-driven piece of filmmaking that is particularly smart and accomplished because Jones has managed to create the film's ...

South Africa snatched a 2-0 series victory against the British and Irish Lions after winning a thrilling second Test 28-25 in Pretoria on Saturday. Replacement Morne Steyn kicked the winning penalty from near the halfway line at the high-altitude at Loftus Versfeld Stadium to give the world champions an unlikely come-from-behind victory. The tourists had come out all guns blazing after Springboks flanker Schalk Burger was sin-binned for a nasty eye-gouge in the opening minute, and led 16-8 at the ...

The tragedy of Michael Jackson's death at age 50, reportedly from cardiac arrest, pales in comparison to the tragedy of his life. To understand all that Jackson had and lost requires wiping away three decades of plastic surgeries that deformed him, erratic behavior that made his name synonymous with the warping powers of fame, and a 2005 trial for sexually abusing a child that, even though he was spared of any finding of wrongdoing, made him a pariah to ...

The number of Obama Administration figures losing power to Dennis Ross is growing longer by the day, but one addition to the list is particularly surprising: General James Jones. Obama picked the 6'4" former Marine to be his National Security Adviser last November after meeting him only a handful of times. And while Obama is happy with his strategic military advice, the President seeks more guidance on the "political and diplomatic" front than he's getting from Jones, two senior ...