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Actor and director Albert Brooks trolls for laughs in Asia and the Middle East in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Playing a version of himself, Brooks is recruited by the U.S. government to help foster a deeper understanding of the region. A comedy tour ensues.

A Good Woman is based on Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan. But unlike Wilde's play, which is based in Victorian England, the film is set in Italy decades later. Critic Kenneth Turan is worried the story can't survive such a drastic change of scene.

Record executive Simon Cowell is a judge on the talent show American Idol, which begins a new season this month. The hour-long show is a spin-off of one Cowell helped create in Britain, Pop Idol.

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner co-wrote the screenplay for the new Stephen Spielberg film Munich. Kushner won a Pulitzer for his 1993-1994 play Angels in America, which was performed in two parts and set in New York in the mid-1980s in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

A new film production of the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House will make its debut on PBS Sunday night. Gillian Anderson, of X-Files fame, plays Lady Honoria Dedlock. She tells Scott Simon about her role.

The idea that priests, like all men, are not perfect might seem like a tame one. But NBC's effort to translate the premise into a TV series has brought protests that the show is anti-Christian. Jack Kenny is the creator and executive producer of The Book of Daniel.

Actor Kevin Bacon was first recognized in the 1982 film Diner. Since then, he's starred in more than 50 films. His most recent is The Woodsman, which is now out on DVD. He's also inspired the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players try to link another actor with Bacon in as few steps as possible. We rebroadcast an interview from Jan. 18, 2005.

Steven Spielberg directs Tom Cruise in an adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds. The movie has all the qualities of a summer thrill-ride, with a rush of surprises and special effects.

In the new film Cronicas, a Miami reporter travels to a small Ecuadorian village to cover a series of brutal murders and get the biggest story of his career. He's tracking a possible serial killer dubbed the Monster of Babahoyo.

Teller, the usually silent half of the magician duo Penn and Teller, reviews the book, The Glorious Deception, by Jim Steinmeyer. It's a biography of the magician known to audiences as Chung Ling Soo, who Teller says was a genuine enigma.