Ismailos, a first-time filmmaker, delves deep into conversation with iconic directors Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, and John Sayles. Premiering at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, Great Directors received an extended standing ovation.

It’s a liberating experience sitting down with Roger Nygard to chat about his new documentary, The Nature of Existence. Them possibilities for discussion are literally endless. The man who brought us Trekkies and Trekkies 2 spent four years traveling the world interviewing over 100 subjects, including guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, string theory physicist Leonard Susskind, science fiction author Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), Roman Archbishop Domenico D’Ambrosio, outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Ultimate Christian Wrestler Rob Adonis, director Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), Stonehenge Druid King Arthur Pendragon, and scores of others who tackled Nygard’s 85 questions, which included: “What is our purpose?” “Is there a God?” “Can religion and science coexist?” “Is masturbation a sin?” On an existential road trip across the U.S. and through England, India, Israel, China, and beyond, the filmmaker offers a journey that’s at once moving and hilarious in its profundity. With an impossibly broad topic to cover, we turn the tables and ask Nygard for the answers.

Something magical happens when you hear cabaret prodigy Maude Maggart sing for the first time. You are pleasantly swept back to the days when names like Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland ruled the airwaves and, realizing that you are listening to a singer of that same caliber, you are overcome with an urgent compulsion to tell everyone you know about her.

For the members of Needtobreathe, overnight sensations after ten years together and three releases, the band is enjoying its most successful year to date. Hailing from Seneca, South Carolina, the band’s music has been featured in several films and TV shows including P.S. I Love You, “The Hills” and “Newport Harbor,” as well as Employee of the Month, When in Rome, and “Cougar Town,” but perhaps the biggest achievement has been transitioning from being a band in a van onto a tour bus.

Paul Iacono is en route to an excellent kind of infamy. With MTV’sm headlong leap into scripted television, the 21-year-old thespian has found himself playing the title role on “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” officially the raunchiest high-school sitcom on the air. “It’s a story of the underdog,” Iacono offers. “A story of this little loser kid in high school who otherwise would have gone unnoticed, but nature has given him this gift and he’s going to use it. He’s mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it anymore.” The gift Iacono is referring to is RJ’s healthy endowment, which when inadvertently and fatefully exposed to the entire school during a basketball game, leads the dumbfounded coach (Marlon Young) to declare, “He’s a goddamn Buick Regal!” It was Iacono’s first pilot season when he was handed the script, and he hit paydirt. “I went in on Wednesday and by Friday I had the role,” he humbly relates.

Aussie siblings Angus and Julia Stone don’t seem to meet any stereotypes of people from down under. Raised in Newport on the northern beaches of Sydney, Julia, who recently sat down with Venice over tea during a three-night, sold out stand, likes to go with the flow.

The Berlin Wall fell nearly 21 years ago, and millions celebrated around the world. Hindsight reveals that the end of the Cold War was also the start of an era where the detonation of a nuclear weapon could come from any number of sources. With her documentary Countdown to Zero, filmmaker Lucy Walker has created a film which (and I say this with no hyperbole) should be mandatory viewing for everyone on the planet, although prepare to be chilled by the experience. Through considerable research and interviews with some of the more powerful world figures of the past few decades (including Tony Blair, Pervez Musharraf, President Jimmy Carter, and Mikhail Gorbachev), Walker makes the case that nuclear proliferation has become so out of control that the death of millions by a nuclear device, whether via a nation-state or a terrorist organization, is an inevitability unless major changes are undertaken immediately.

Back in 2002, amidst the fresh wounds and confusion post 9/11, professional football player Pat Tillman stunned the nation when he gave up his career and lofty guaranteed contract tom join the Army and become a Ranger, instantly becoming a symbol of patriotic fervor and unflinching duty.