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Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones they made in between.

Today, we dive into the career of the stunning and stunningly talented Penélope Cruz. The indelible actress broke on to the scene in 1992 with Jamón Jamón, followed a few years later by her first collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar in Live Flesh. Soon enough, Cruz was in Hollywood pictures like Blow and The Hi-Lo Country.

Our B-Sides include: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Chromophobia, Twice Born, and this year’s The 355. Joining us today is returning guest Katharine Clark Gray of Uncompromised Creative. Gray is a writer for the Wait What network, and was part of the team recently awarded two Webby Awards for the episode “President Barack Obama: When the moment chooses you, part 1.”

We discuss the early,...

Welcome to The B-Side, a new podcast from The Film Stage where we explore movies starring established stars that flopped at the box office, have been forgotten by time, or remain hidden gems. These aren’t the films that made them famous or kept them famous. These are the other ones. So strap in and listen close as we dive into the big swings and big misses from some of biggest names in the business. In the latest episode, Dan Mecca invites Katharine Clark Gray of Uncompromised Creative and Conor O’Donnell on to discuss the B-Sides of Charlize Theron’s career.

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The Film Stage is supported by Mubi, a curated online cinema streaming a selection of exceptional independent, classic, and award-winning films from around the world.

Among the cacophonous election coverage and myriad issues sweeping our country, the gargantuan cost of higher education emerges as a (still) rising concern. With the annals of cinema relatively bereft of material on the subject, few narrative films have touched on it so pointedly or deftly as The Paper Store, directed by Nicholas Gray.

Co-written by Katharine Clark Gray – based on her play 516 (five-sixteen) – we are thrust into the hands of narrator Annalee (Stef Dawson), a college dropout who, after successfully running a paper forgery operation, is enlisted by Sigurd (a very game Penn Badgley) to forge his entire course-load for an undergrad-level cinema class while he works on his thesis. What follows, against Annalee’s better judgment, is a relationship between the two. She divulges as much to Sigurd’s professor Marty Kane (Richard Kind) in a forged paper at the opening. As he reads her words, delivered with...